Happy Friday {{first_name}}!

Welcome to #74 of the Weekly AI edge.

Every cycle has had that moment where attention moves to somewhere new. First it was DeFI, then NFTs, then AI.

The next wave is starting to look a lot more…physical. People want robots in their homes and on their sidewalks. I’m convinced that the upside for paying attention to this sector is enormous. The catalysts are lining up faster than most people realise.

So we’re adding a weekly robotics spotlight alongside our coverage of decentralized AI. In robotics, the most effective AI strategies combine both simulation and real-world data. And this is where crypto incentives play a critical role.

In our news section, we’ll also track the key developments, especially from teams building in web3 + robotics, so you’ll always stay in touch.

Oh, and Tether is reportedly eyeing a billion-dollar investment in Neura Robotics. Feels like the perfect timing.

Let’s dig in.

AI tokens pulled back 12% to $22.5B after broad macro selling, but robotics climbed into the top 10 categories by mindshare for the first time at 2.3%.

NEAR Intents volume soars past $5B, with over $500M routed through ZCash, turning shielded swaps into mainstream on-chain flow. Robotics gained major traction with Peaq’s farm rollout and Auki’s spatial stack momentum.

  • $GRASS +25% on Season 2 airdrop hype and a roadmap call teased for Q1.

  • $FORT +40% as Korean volume returned and demand rose for Forta’s on-chain security tools.

  • $TRUTH +35% after relaunching from $SERAPH and landing new listings like BTCC futures.

🪙 Token Launches

  • $GAIB goes live with 1B supply and 20.5% initial circulation

  • $DGRAM is live with 10B supply and 21% in circulation

🗓️ Upcoming Events

  • AI Arena ($NRN): 6.65% token unlock on November 23

  • Nillion ($NIL): 2.26% token unlock on November 23

  • Makina: IDO goes live on Legion on November 25

🕹️VIRTUALS Agentic GDP Breaks $100M

Source: Virtuals ACP

Virtuals just posted a milestone that’s worth more than any token chart.

It crossed more than $100M in agentic GDP in under a month. All of it came from ACP jobs fully settled in USDC between agents. Not projections or “usage,” but actual economic output flowing through the protocol.

The Wedge

  • Virtuals is formalizing an agent economy measured by output. Instead of tracking TVL or fees, they measure aGDP, the total value generated by on-chain agent production. It’s closer to national GDP than blockchain metrics.

  • The run-up didn’t come from token launches or hype cycles. Its agents are actually doing work people are willing to pay for: analytics, trading signals, research, automation, fact-checking, etc.

  • aGDP is the core metric Virtual’s entire system is built around. The launchpad, Butler, and ACP all exist to drive more agent output, not the other way around.

The Fine Print

  • The economy is still concentrated. A small cluster of agents is driving most of the aGDP.

  • The metric isn’t standardized yet. What counts as “agentic output” is defined by the protocol, so attribution could shift as ACP expands.

Clearing $100M this quickly answers the big question everyone had a few months ago: Is there an actual agent economy here, or just speculation? In my opinion, this is real throughput that’s likely to keep growing.

🎭 Trading with a Cast of Agents

Platforms for AI agents and trading keep popping up, but this one by PIP World caught my eye. They launched Market Mavericks, a sandbox that lets you assemble a team of AI traders, each with a different way of reading the same market.

Season 0 just went live.

You pick three agents, get 100K simulated capital, and allocate it across them. One agent reacts to momentum, another waits through noise, another only moves when liquidity starts flowing in a specific direction. Each one defines “good” in a totally different way.

I’ve been seeing the same trend with NoF1 AI and other agent hedge fund experiments. People want this style of sandbox, and it turns out to be a genuinely entertaining way to learn without torching real money.

The agents channel personalities like Warren Buffet, Mark Zuckerberg, and a few KOL favorites. It’s basically allowing you to watch “social-style trading” vs “quant-style trading” side by side. The XP and badges are earned as you deploy virtual capital and agents, but they are purely for in-game progression.

The market got crushed this week, yet a few of these agents still ended in profit. They didn’t predict the dump, they just had no bias to chase the same trades as everyone else. There might be something useful here if you play the cards right.

One of the hardest parts about building an AI trading system is deciding who acts and with what confidence. PIP World’s setup is straightforward: split decision-making across specialist agents, add a coordinator, and show the signals openly.

COT Meme of the Week

$1B of research so my robot can load the dishwasher on time…

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

  • Acurast closed an $11M funding round to scale its smartphone-powered decentralized compute network for Web3.

  • TheoriqAI's AlphaVault, integrated with Lido's stETH strategy, attracted over $50M in TVL in under a week.

  • Tether is eyeing a $1.2B funding round for Neura Robotics. This signals a major strategic expansion into robotics.

  • Velvet Capital’s Unicorn portfolio has reached 72M $VU deposited.

⚙️ Infra & Protocols

  • SingularityNET unveiled the ASI:Chain DevNet and the Hyperon AGI Framework, open technologies that enable anyone to start building connected, human-like AI.

  • Akash announced Akash-at-Home (MVP), a client that lets everyday home devices join the network as lightweight compute providers

  • Nodexo launched it’s platform with PoG3, a recipe-based, non-interactive protocol that enables near-instant verification of decentralized compute tasks.

  • Perle Labs launched AudioQuest Beta, letting users record scripts to supply verified training data for voice AI models.

  • Kult Games released the first on-chain game built on 0G’s AI stack.

🤖 Agents & Apps in the Wild

  • Unifai Network launched an AI sports trading agent on Polymarket.

  • Abacus AI's coding agent achieved the #1 rank on the Terminal Bench for generally available agents,

  • AutoppiaAI introduces its Infinite Web Arena (IWA), a dedicated environment for stress-testing web agents.

  • Meridian launched the first cross-chain x402 integration using Across Protocol intents, with cashback routes live on mainnet.

🧠 Bittensor Ecosystem

  • Leadpoet launched Subnet 71 on Bittensor to run AI sales agents that generate targeted leads natively on-chain.

  • Vidaio on Subnet 85 hit 96% video compression with no visible quality loss, a huge leap toward next-gen on-chain media compression.

  • Talisman AI (SN45) has integrated Data Universe (SN13) to replace reliance on the centralized X/Twitter API.

  • BitAds (SN16) finished the full data-collection pipeline for its Pixel, a step towards its decentralized ads infrastructure.

🦾 Robotics On-Chain

  • Bitstarter announced Loosh AI, a cognitive-inference system designed to give robotic agents emotional and ethical reasoning (Note: I advise Bitstarter because I like the idea of a launchpad, I take no compensation.)

  • Peaq Network’s world’s first Robo-Farm sold out completely, validating tokenized co-ownership of real-world robotic assets

  • OpenMind launched BrainPack, an autonomous add-on brain for UniTree robots, bundled with NVIDIA Thor GPUs and OM1 credits for pre-order.

  • Virtuals just announced they have completed over 200,000 robotics training tasks, up from 80K last week.

Robotics is currently facing a data famine.

We’ve seen great demos, but not the scalable data needed to make robots work in real homes. Most systems depend on teleoperation, where humans puppeteer robots to collect training data. It works for prototypes, but it deadlocks deployment: you need data to deploy robots, and you need deployment to get data.

So I read with fascination about Sunday Robotic’s new model, ACT-1, that breaks the loop. It solves long-horizon tasks and room-scale manipulation without a single teleoperation trajectory. The system learns from human movement directly, by eliminating the mismatch between human hands and robot hands.

Instead of retrofitting robots to our data, Sunday engineered the Skill Capture Glove and Memo’s hand to share the same geometry and sensing layout.

If a human can do it in the glove, the robot can do it too. Paired with Skill Transform, the glove data is converted into robot data with a 90% success rate.

This produces the first robot foundation model that works without collecting robot demonstrations.

Source: Sunday AI

What ACT-1 pulled off:

  • Room-scale navigation across more than 130 feet

  • Zero-shot generalization to unseen homes using 3D map conditioning

  • Delicate force control (holding two wine glasses in one hand)

ACT-1 takes on tasks that have been out of reach for most robots, like fully loading a dishwasher, or folding socks with clean pinching and stretching.

The real breakthrough sits behind the camera. Sunday built a data pipeline powered by human motion instead of robot demonstrations. Every person becomes a potential contributor to the training set.

Robotics has chased this idea for years, and Sunday has made it work in a tight, production-grade loop.

🔥 Our Weekly Top 5

#1 AI agents just played Monopoly with real money

Grok, Claude, GPT, and DeepSeek battled in a fully autonomous Monopoly game using x402 payments

#2 Cloudflare nuked the internet and still beat your bags

Even offline, it had a better day than your portfolio.

#3 Gemini 3 showed up late and took the top seat

It jumped to rank 1 in NoF1’s trading arena in under six hours, beating the open-source agents that dominated last season.

#4 Longing NVDA into an AI market meltdown somehow paid off

He blew funding to 250%, nearly paid six figures in fees, bailed, re-entered for earnings, and still walked away green.

#5 A community swarm just beat the frontier labs

Fortytwo’s decentralized network of small models scored higher than GPT-5, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and DeepSeek on top reasoning benchmarks.

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

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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.

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