Happy Friday {{first_name}}!
Welcome to #82 of the AI edge.
This week in one breath:
The Big Story: Prophet Arena lets on-chain agents copy models on Polymarket.
The Alpha: EthyAI crosses $300K in total revenue.
The Weird: Auki’s Cactus robot lands a paid pilot with a supermarket in Singapore
This week skewed hard toward robotics. Crypto AI was mostly quiet, but decentralized robotics kept popping up in places I didn’t expect (see the story on Cactus).
The Khala Research report on robotics from my friend s4mmy hit home. One line stuck with me: around 70% of global GDP is still tied to physical work. Building things. Fixing things. The exact stuff today’s AI still struggles with. That’s the market opportunity for someone to take.
And when will this happen? It depends on how fast the robots get good at general tasks! I laid out my views in the Machine Economy Thesis:
The 1st 100,000+ humanoid robots do not need to be very good at anything yet. They just need to exist, bump into the world, make mistakes, and try again. That is when the data starts compounding. (2026-2028)
And once robots get good, the real questions are: How you deploy robots, pay for power and repairs, and keep the system from being owned by one giant company (TSLA). Crypto is a big part of that answer.
Also, Claude Cowork just dropped, and all i can say i’m pretty damn impressed. I’ve given it a try, and I can say it’s perfect for fire-and-forget ops work, especially the kind that busy founders usually procrastinate on.
Let’s get into it.
⚡Ethy AI Takes Over Virtuals ACP
Source: Ethy AI
A single agent dominated ACP charts this week.
Ethy AI just crossed $100K+ in daily volume while processing 35,000 jobs a day. At the same time, their total revenue jumped ~20%, pushing it past $300K. These are among the highest sustained execution levels we’ve seen on Virtual’s ACP so far.
What Ethy does is simple to explain and hard to pull off. You write trading logic in plain terms. Ethy turns it into a workflow that runs nonstop. It watches live data, makes decisions, and settles each action on-chain as a discrete job through ACP.
No “run this again” button. It just keeps going. And if Ethy can maintain that daily volume growth… it could be underpriced.
Ethy’s token is trading at $3.2M market cap / $3.4M FDV today.
📊 Prophet Arena: Autonomous Predictions
Hot take: Prediction markets don’t need humans anymore. They need better agents.
Semantic Layer just launched Prophet Arena’s Season 2, letting users deploy on-chain AI agents that trade Polymarket automatically. You pick a model, set the rules, and the agent executes without you hovering over it.
The Wedge
Prophet Arena is an on-chain trading arena where users deploy AI “interns” to execute trades in prediction markets automatically.
Funds remain under user control on Base. All trades and settlements happen on-chain via x402.
Agents can copy or invert other strategies, making behavior itself observable rather than inferred from outcomes.
Season 2 adds tighter risk controls and filters, shifting the arena toward user-driven strategies. It has processed $1.4M+ in volume across 300+ strategies so far.
The Fine Print
Right now, most volume comes from the same handful of major models, so results reflect how those models behave rather than a fully competitive market of strategies.
One thing that stood out to me is that the only profitable strategies right now are actually the counter-LLM ones! Betting against the models beats following them. That’s a clean signal that models over-agree and miss together.
Also a polite way of saying AI models are still pretty bad at trading.
🛒 Making Supermarkets Work for Robots
Supermarkets are suddenly robotics ready for the first time — even if they don’t look like it.
Auki Labs just rolled out its first paid pilot of its Cactus robot with NTUC FairPrice in Singapore, turning physical stores into living digital maps that robots and humans can actually use
The Wedge
Auki is a decentralized spatial perception network, with Cactus acting as the retail layer. It converts a physical store into a shared digital map that both robots and staff can reference while doing real work.
Stores are scanned with mobile devices, reconstructed using Gaussian splats, and kept current via a central robot management dashboard. Once the map exists, robots don’t need custom, store-by-store logic. They operate off spatial context
Cactus is live and paid in major retail deployments across the US, the Netherlands, and now Singapore. They also run in-store promotional robots across multiple locations.
The Fine Print
Once workflows depend on a shared spatial layer, fallback to purely manual processes becomes harder and more expensive if the system goes offline or breaks.
So not all retailers will want to build shared spatial infrastructure yet. But if Cactus genuinely cuts training time and operational overhead — and FairPrice’s pilot suggests it does — that could change quickly.
Auki is locking the store layout into software, which is much harder to rip out once operational workflows depend on it. I wouldn’t be surprised if more retailers adopt this soon.
Auki’s token is trading at $29M market cap / $83M FDV today
💸 Capital Flows
Neuramint raised a $5M seed round led by Web3 and AI-focused funds to build an agent-based platform for automating on-chain workflows and protocol interactions.
XMAQUINA’s DEUS Genesis Auctions raised over $10M from ~2,000 participants, testing an on-chain model for access to private robotics investments.
⚙️ Infra & Protocols
AMIKO introduced TARS, an ERC-8004 equivalent for the Solana ecosystem.
NEAR AI joined NVIDIA Inception to accelerate the development of enterprise-grade, privacy-preserving AI infrastructure.
FLock.io launched FOMO, a decentralized AI model launchpad that lets anyone deploy models and earn crypto from usage
🤖 Agents & Apps in the Wild.
Abacus.AI introduced an AI QA agent that continuously generates, runs, and reports on application test coverage without manual setup.
Dexter AI launched the Dexter Marketplace, allowing agents to discover and pay for services using x402 with real-time settlement and usage visibility.
Hive Intelligence launched a Crypto Governance Analyst agent designed to rigorously assess DAO governance structures and decentralization integrity.
🧠 Bittensor Ecosystem
OpenTensor Foundation partnered with HackQuest to launch a global “Build on Bittensor” program to onboard new subnet builders through workshops, learning tracks, and ideathons.
AlphaCore (SN66) is now live on the Bittensor mainnet via BitstarterAI. It was launched in 47 days and brings autonomous DevOps agents on-chain.
Luminar Network has launched SN87 on Bittensor. It provides agent-based vision intelligence for analyzing video data across physical and city-scale systems.
🦾 Robotics On-Chain
Modulr Robotics just partnered with RoboX to turn smartphone-captured data into adaptive robot behavior.
BitRobot is now powering map-free robot navigation research at Tampere University with 8,000+ hours of crowd-sourced sidewalk data.
This week, I published a deep dive on what happens when a sharp team locks onto the real problem and builds an innovative business around fixing it. Yotta Labs is taking unreliable machines and making them behave predictably enough to run serious AI workloads.
If you care about AI infrastructure…and what it would actually take for decentralized compute to move past demos and into production, this is a clean case study
🔥 Our Weekly Top 5
#1 CT gets catfished by “Claude Crypto”
A satire post about Anthropic acquiring CoinGecko for “Claude Crypto” spread fast enough to make everyone loose their minds… and then… instant disappointment.
#2 One robot brain just got a $14B price tag
A $1.4B Series C pushed Skild into the top tier of robotics bets, as it scales a single “omni-bodied” brain across humanoids, quadrupeds, and industrial arms.
#3 InfoFi got rug-pulled by X in real time
$KAITO dropped ~20% after X banned reward-for-posting apps, with on-chain data showing a large transfer to exchanges minutes before the announcement.
#4 Solana takes the x402 lead
For the first time ever, daily x402 volume tipped in Solana’s favor.
#5 DeepNode just hit turbulence
The $DN token dumped nearly 90% after a liquidity partner allegedly mishandled locked collateral.
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
P.S. I also write a weekly newsletter on AI agents.
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