Merry Christmas {{first_name}}
Welcome to #79 of the Weekly AI edge.
As the year winds down, I’ve been taking some time to unplug and recharge. In a world full of tech and AI chatbots, it’s easy for things to feel a little lonely. But honestly, this newsletter has been the opposite for me. It’s been a way to connect with all of you in a way I never could have otherwise.
So I want to say: thank you for being here. 🫶 Whether you’ve been reading the newsletter for the last 1.5 years or you just joined us this week, I truly appreciate you being here. Wishing you and your loved ones a restful, happy holiday!
Let’s get into it..
The Big Story: x402 payments explode on Solana with Dexter AI.
The Alpha: Bitstarter pushes community funding on-chain
The Weird: A robot dog runs a live DeFi strategy from a voice command.
The market, unfortunately, hasn’t shown much mercy over the holidays. It’s still struggling to find a real comeback, and recent token launches haven’t helped sentiment at all.
But one thing remains clear: agentic infrastructure and x402 feel like the clearest pockets of genuine momentum heading into 2026.
Oh, and Gensyn’s token sale wrapped up with $16M raised and a $473M closing FDV, right around what I guessed last week. About 62% of you said you participated, and allocations just rolled out today (hopefully the math worked in your favor).
🕹️Dexter AI Breaks Out on x402
Source: x402scan
x402 just exploded on Solana.
Dexter AI just became the 2nd-largest x402 facilitator overall, overtaking PayAI, and is now the biggest on Solana. The chart shows steady growth through the month, now reaching 400K daily transactions.
Dexter is a platform that lets AI agents run tools and settle x402 payments across ChatGPT, Claude, X, voice, and MCP clients from a single integrated stack.
The numbers tell the rest of the story. x402 transaction volume on Solana jumped about 700% week over week, with annualized volume heading toward $600M. That jump lines up almost perfectly with Dexter opening its facilitator to the public. When you make the rails easy to use, people use them.
FYI: Dexter AI has a token (DEXTER)
🎯 Bitstarter Brings Crowdfunding On-Chain
Early-stage AI funding is coming back to the community.
Bitstarter just completed its second crowdfund using Bittensor’s native crowdloan system. Their latest raise is backing Quasar (SN24), focused on long-context memory. It is raising 400 TAO in exchange for 86,956 alpha of Subnet 24, and is currently ~30% committed with 3 days to go.
Source: X
The Wedge
Bitstarter is a community-led, non-custodial launchpad for Bittensor that uses native crowdloans to raise capital directly from TAO holders.
Projects are pre-vetted, funds are released only if raises are complete, and backers receive early access to subnet tokens tied to real network participation.
Bitstarter’s launches now include Alphacore and Quasar, with Superworld up next, a map-based virtual world with over 150k users built on Bittensor. Another one I’m looking forward to is Loosh AI (robotics).
The Fine Print
Bitstarter’s model depends on sustained participation from TAO holders. Raising money is just the opening step in a long, messy grind.
Bitstarter forces builders to earn trust before they exist. I like this concept, so I’m an advisor to them. If a subnet can’t convince TAO holders to back it in public, on-chain, with real capital, I don’t see why it deserves to be part of the network at all.
AI and robotics held steady this week, with attention clustering around agentic payments, data infrastructure, and deployment progress. The AI sector's market cap rebounded slightly to ~$17B. Robotics picked up mindshare alongside DePIN names like peaq.
🗓️ Upcoming Events
EigenCloud (EIGEN): 7.79% token supply unlock on December 31 (oof..that’s quite a bit)
Sleepless AI (AI): 13.35% token supply unlock on January 3
Are you building something awesome in crypto × AI? Or spotted a startup or product that more people should know about? Fill in this form and share it with us. We’ll feature the sharpest picks in the newsletter each week.
💸 Capital Flows
Intellistake is acquiring Singularity Venture Hub (closely related to SingularityNET) for ~$18M in stock to expand its AI-Web3 incubation business.
OpenLedger launched a $5M grant program with the Cambridge Blockchain Society to fund open-source decentralized AI research.
⚙️ Infra & Protocols
Infinit Labs launched Prompt-to-DeFi access, enabling plain-language prompts to execute complex DeFi strategies end-to-end via AI agents.
Unstoppable Domains and OpenLedger launched .openx, a domain namespace for verifiable, attributable datasets and AI applications
LazAI launched its Alpha Mainnet, anchoring AI agent interactions on-chain as verifiable Data Anchoring Tokens.
Abstract launched its first AI Accelerator cohort, backing five projects across agentic DeFi, AI credit, autonomous markets, and AI-native finance.
🤖 Agents & Apps in the Wild
Fetch.ai launched the first live AI-to-AI payment, enabling personal agents to coordinate, book, and pay for services using Visa, USDC, and FET.
Warden launched its Caesar Crypto and Deep Research agents, bringing agent-powered analysis directly into the Warden app.
Browserbase launched an x402 endpoint that lets AI agents purchase and run real browser sessions in USDC with no API keys.
🧠 Bittensor Ecosystem
Score hit production-grade SOTA in football vision, shifting to TurboVision and burning ~90% of emissions ahead of a Q1 upgrade.
Bittensor launched MEV Shield, encrypting transactions to block front-running and sandwich attacks.
Covenant launched Grail v0, enabling open, verifiable decentralized reinforcement learning for post-training on Bittensor.
🦾 Robotics On-Chain
BitRobot Network launched TeleArms private beta, letting users remotely control real robotic arms to generate manipulation data and earn rewards.
OpenMind upgraded OM1 with identity management and fall detection to enable privacy-preserving robot assistance in homes.
A Robot Dog Ran a DeFi Strategy
OpenMind put out a demo that made me stop scrolling. A robot dog takes a voice command and turns it into a live DeFi trade (!).
The request runs through OM1, and Virtual’s Butler agent handles execution. From spoken sentence to on-chain transaction took under a minute.
The Wedge
OM1 is OpenMind’s modular runtime for deploying agents across robots, apps, and the web. The key idea is reuse. The agent logic stays the same, and you swap hardware integrations rather than rebuild everything from scratch.
In this setup, OM1 ties speech input, agent reasoning, and external execution into one flow. The robot is the physical interface. Butler considers which strategy to run and how to execute the transaction.
The Fine Print
The system is only as good as the speech models, the agents it calls, and the tools it connects to. If one piece is weak, the whole thing shows it.
We wrote a deep dive into OpenMind a few months ago, and this demo felt like a very real glimpse of our thesis in action. Exciting times!
🔥 Our Weekly Top 5
# The SN8 Drama
An onchain article linked a 90k TAO outflow and ALPHA dump to SN8. Vanta’s owner denied any insider selling saying the wallet belonged to Uphold Institutional.
#2 Robotics just unlocked its data flywheel
Open robotics datasets on Hugging Face exploded from 1k to 27k in a year, putting robot data into everyone’s hands.
#3 x402 is turning into a real marketplace
Agentic commerce crossed $50M in 30 days, with agents capturing nearly all the revenue and pay-per-use pricing starting to replace subscriptions.
#4 China’s robots just stole the show
Unitree humanoids landed flips and dance moves at a live concert in Chengdu, looking smooth enough to make Elon Musk stop scrolling.
#5 The SEC just went after “AI alpha” scammers
U.S. regulators charged multiple groups behind a $14M crypto scam that used fake AI-generated trading tips to lure retail investors into bogus investment clubs.
That’s a wrap for this week! Got thoughts, feedback, or something cool to share? Just hit reply. We read it all.
Cheers,
Teng Yan & Ayan
If you enjoyed this, you’ll probably like the rest of what we do:
The Agent Angle: Weekly AI Agent newsletter & deep dives (non-crypto)
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This newsletter is intended solely for educational purposes and does not constitute financial advice. It is not an endorsement to buy or sell assets or make financial decisions. Always conduct your own research and exercise caution when making investment choices.
