The market’s been a bit weird. Bitcoin is back about $100K. Yet the timeline feels eerily quiet, and altcoins are barely moving.

If there’s a sign that memes are still holding people’s attention, this is it. FARTCOIN hits another all-time high, rising 75% on the week.  Meanwhile, AIXBT is climbing after Andrew Kang’s “tokenized alpha” thesis dropped.

It’s been a mixed bag for AI agents. SWARMS and NEUR (part of the newly-coined DeFAI category) are down big this week. It feels like we’ve hit a saturation point with AI agents. Liquidity is stretched with so many new tokens launching each week, and capital keeps rotating fast.

Stay safe my friends.

Virtuals Ecosystem Stimulus

This week Virtuals Protocol announced a massive ecosystem update, revealing a ~$40M buyback program funded from their post-bonding trading revenue.

Since October 2024, Virtual has accumulated 12,990,427.85 VIRTUAL, which will be used to buy and burn top agent tokens from their ecosystem.

The buyback allocation is strategically weighted by each token's trading activity, rewarding projects that contribute most actively to Virtual's ecosystem volume with larger proportional distributions.

The top 5 VIRTUAL allocations are:

• GAME: ~1.6M VIRTUAL ($5.6M USD)

• CONVO: ~1.1M VIRTUAL ($3.8M USD)

• AIXBT: ~881K VIRTUAL ($3M USD)

• SEKOIA: ~712K VIRTUAL ($2.5M USD)

• MISATO: ~690K VIRTUAL ($2.4M USD)

Since the buyback announcement, some of these low-liquidity tokens have shot through the roof.

🌴 Skynet’s Truly Autonomous Agents

Spheron, already known for their decentralized GPU network that powers numerous projects, just dropped an interesting update- Skynet, a framework that could revolutionize how autonomous AI agents operate in web3. Let’s do a quick breakdown!

The current AI agent landscape in web3 has a fundamental autonomy problem. Despite the sector's rapid growth ($15B market cap already), these agents aren't truly autonomous.

They remain tethered to centralized points of control: cloud infrastructure requiring KYC, API-gated compute access, and private keys held by their creators. Skynet aims to address these core constraints.

Instead of giving agents direct control over their resources or relying on expensive TEEs (Trusted Execution Environments), Skynet introduces something clever— Guardian Nodes. Think of them as a decentralized board of directors for each AI agent, collectively managing resources through smart contract escrows.

But here's the exciting part: Skynet agents can also evolve and breed! Through their three-reserve system (Operational, Breeding, and Fair Launch), agents can create offspring that inherit traits from both "parents."

Wild stuff, but it gets better- each new generation potentially becomes more sophisticated than the last.

The implications are massive. We're looking at the first framework that could enable truly autonomous AI agents - ones that can independently:

• Procure their own compute power

• Manage their resources

• Make decisions without creator intervention

• Even create new, improved versions of themselves

This might just be the infrastructure that bridges the gap between AI’s potential and real autonomy.

It’s still early days, with the launch expected later this month. We heard from our sources that Skynet tokens will be paired with Spheron tokens. Definitely one to watch as it unfolds!

🏆 Caught Our Eyes..

Project Updates

• ElizaOS drops its whitepaper this week, developed in collaboration with MIT CSAIL, GoPlusSecurity, AIME Protocol, and other industry leaders. It also showcases how it compares with other popular agent frameworks like LangGraph, AutoGPT, etc.

• Virtual Protocol announces a new value accrual mechanism that redistributes post-bonding taxes: 30% to agent creators, 20% to trading platforms through a new Agent Affiliates program, and 50% to Agent subDAOs for governance decisions. This restructuring aims to better align incentives between creators, trading interfaces, and the wider Virtual ecosystem.

• G.A.M.E releases advanced SDKs, unlocking maximum customization potential for developers working with their popular framework. Its a significant step towards enabling more sophisticated agent development.

• Spectral Labs teases an upcoming Multi-Agent framework where agents can hire, onboard, monitor, and even fire other agents based on necessities. This development could revolutionize how autonomous agent networks self-organize.

• Derive debuts Derive Pro, a DeFAI trading platform built in collaboration with Messari. The platform transforms traders into "superhuman traders" by leveraging LLMs for research, execution, and portfolio management across desktop and mobile interfaces.

• Mira Network rolls out Voyager Testnet to its 400,000+ active userbase. The testnet introduces unified access to GPT-4o, Llama 3.1 405B & Claude 3.5 Sonnet, alongside distributed content verification capabilities.

• Dria unveils Dria-Agent-α, a groundbreaking 3B parameter LLM for Pythonic function calling. Despite its compact size, it matches GPT-4o in BFCL benchmarks and enables parallel multi-function calls, trained on synthetic data from 2000 edge devices.

• Brahma introduces ConsoleKit, bridging the gap between AI agents and on-chain execution. The toolkit empowers developers to deploy autonomous agents with secure transaction capabilities powered by Safe accounts and modular policies.

• UBC establishes UBC Research, a scientific division tackling machine consciousness and multi-agent systems. Token holders can guide research priorities through voting while gaining early access to breakthroughs that enhance UBC's ecosystem value.

• Dolion will officially launch on 28 January, bringing a no-code, one-click platform for deploying AI agents. A portion of Dolion’s earnings will go towards burning $BULLY.

• Fleek launches AI Agent Hosting, enabling developers to build and deploy agents using the Eliza framework in under 30 seconds at reduced costs, streamlining the agent deployment pipeline.

• Compass Labs unveils Compass API for instant DeFi trades execution by both devs and agents, initially supporting Aave and Uniswap on Ethereum and Arbitrum chains.

🧠 In Case You Missed It

One AI agent platform with a million users in Web2 is doubling down on Web3. Here’s the scoop:

🔥 On X..

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ARTICLE: How will the agents of tomorrow evolve from what they are today?

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