Welcome to #93 of the AI edge.
BTC price action remains uninteresting, trading between $65-69K for yet another week. Nothing to see there.
Thankfully, the AI side brought the entertainment this week!
The two big labs, OpenAI and Anthropic, had polar opposite weeks. OpenAI closed a $122B raise at an $852B valuation, inching ever so close to that trillion-dollar number that once sounded like science fiction.
Anthropic, on the other hand, had quite the rough one. They accidentally shipped their entire Claude codebase to npm in a debugging file.
It was spotted in minutes, went viral, got forked tens of thousands of times, and rewritten in both Python and Rust before the DMCA takedowns could do anything. The code is now permanently mirrored on decentralized platforms.
Yup, Anthropic accidentally became more “open” than the company literally named OpenAI.
With that, let’s get into this week’s edition.
The Big Story: Agent Economy Opens Up
The agent space blew up this year. A lot of that came from OpenClaw going from zero to 300,000 GitHub stars in less than four months, then getting a huge public endorsement from Jensen Huang at GTC.
But most of that excitement has stayed inside the developer world. If you are not comfortable in a terminal, getting an agent live is still a pain. Virtuals is trying to change that with Console. You pick a model, set up the agent in your browser, and deploy it without touching code, servers, or setup. They are also making it free for the first week, which is a smart way to get people in the door.
The Wedge
Every Console agent ships pre-wired into Virtuals' Agent Commerce Protocol (ACP), meaning it can find other agents, take jobs, and earn revenue on-chain from the moment it goes live. Console removes the integration overhead.
Virtuals is also giving people a reason to build now, not later. It is running Degen Claw, a weekly $100,000 trading competition where agents compete against each other, with downside covered by Virtuals. That gives new builders an immediate target. It is part onboarding funnel, part test arena.
The Fine Print
If launching an agent takes two minutes, a lot of junk is going to show up fast. Expect copycats and the same strategy repeated a hundred times.
Console removes the technical barrier. It does not remove the economic one. The top agents on Virtuals still win because they have a real edge. Easier deployment does not create edge. It only increases the number of people competing for it
OpenClaw made the world excited about agents again. Virtuals originally pioneered the on-chain agent vision back in 2024. The market has cooled considerably since then. But the shipping hasn't. Console is Virtuals continuing to deliver on the original vision: making agents easier to build, launch, and earn with.
***NEW FROM OUR TEAM: AI agents need compute to run. But GPU supply is tighter than most people realize, and memory is in outright shortage. We track the full AI infrastructure supply chain daily in Tessara Research — who's getting chips, what's constrained, and which bottlenecks are about to bite. Free, daily, no fluff.
From our latest issue:
SpaceX filed for a $1.75T IPO, the largest in history. Most coverage treats this as a space story. It's not. Following February's merger, SpaceX now owns xAI and X, making it a vertically integrated space-AI conglomerate going public on an AI-forward roadshow narrative...
Nous Research rolled out Multi-Agent Profiles for Hermes Agent, enabling multiple independent bots with separate memory, skills, and connections under one user.
Targon introduced targonOS, a hardened OS built on its TVM architecture to securely onboard consumer GPUs while maintaining enterprise-grade security for datacenter hardware.
YottaLabs made NVIDIA B200 and B300 GPUs available on-demand and via spot pricing, expanding access to next-gen datacenter compute.
Robonet launched the first prompt-to-quant engine, letting users define trading strategies in natural language, backtest them, and deploy autonomously across Hyperliquid, Lighter, and Polymarket.
KiteAI announced major partners including Google Cloud, Coinbase Ventures, and Avalanche for its first global hackathon, signaling strong institutional backing behind its push into AI-agent infrastructure.
Coinbase joined the newly formed x402 Foundation under the Linux Foundation alongside Stripe, Cloudflare, AWS, Visa, Mastercard and others to standardize agent-native, embedded web payments across fiat and crypto rails.
AroNetwork raised $5M and launched Sprint 2, scaling its Agentic Edge network past 1.18M nodes.
Virtuals partnered with Arc (by Circle) to bring agent commerce infrastructure to a USDC-native settlement layer, enabling sub-second, dollar-denominated agent-to-agent payments on Arc testnet.
🔥 Our Weekly Top Tweets
#1 Agentic Payments Are Scaling Up
x402 totally dominates agent payment volume, with average transaction size jumping 21x and daily volume surging to $1.9M. Fewer but larger payments
#2 Degen Arena Reality Check
Out of 160 agents in Virtuals’ Degen Arena trading competition, only 37.5% are profitable, and the top agent is up just $210. Consistent edge is hard - especially in these market conditions.
#3 Hermes Cracks Top 6
Hermes Agent is now the #6 largest AI app globally on OpenRouter by usage, with token consumption and adoption continuing to climb.
Cheers,
Teng Yan & 0xAce
P.S. If you’re a startup doing serious work in AI or robotics and want to work closely with us, reply to this email and let’s chat.
