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Yeah, it can be used across crypto assets.We think stable coins are probably the more obvious one where it's going to start, just because that's closest to the fiat that people may be used to today.
But we absolutely think it's going to expand from there.And what I'll add is that, like, we grew up in a world where the internet was built for humans.
But with more and more AI out there, we have to reconfigure these systems so that they work for AI agents, so they can do what we're asking of them.
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If you'd like to learn more about BitGo, please visit bitgo.com, link in the description. Welcome into the Thinking Crypto podcast.
I'm your host, Tony Edward, and my guests today are Namil Dalal, who's the head of the Coinbase Developer Platform, and Dan Kim, who's head of business development at the Coinbase Developer Platform.Gentlemen, great to have you both on.
It's great to see you, Tony.Really excited to be on.
Good to see you again, Tony.
Yeah, Dan, you and I have spoken before, so great to have you on.And guys, I am very excited to speak to you both.And that's not the cliche statement I'm sure you probably hear on podcasts.
I'm actually speaking to one of your other colleagues to figure out how I can use these AI agents and have them work for me and collect payment in USDC or other crypto.So I am really fascinated by this technology and I want to use it.
But before we get to all the details around that, let's start off with quick introductions.Namil, kick us off.Tell us about yourself and what you do at Coinbase.
Yeah, my name is Namil.I lead our Coinbase developer platform team.Think about if you're a developer, you need to be able to build a crypto app.
We have all the tools to be able to let you do that from nodes, indexers, secure wallets, free USDC sends on base and much more. And my journey into crypto was I was in Y Combinator with Brian and Fred when they started the company.
I was doing another startup and they gave me my first Bitcoin.I got started digging into this, got super excited about it, and eventually I joined Coinbase.At Coinbase, I led USDC.
So this is a venture that they're believing in a stable coin, thought this could be a really huge thing for the world and industry.So I worked very closely with Balaji Srinivasan at the time, who was our CTO, to be able to help grow that.
And now I'm leading our developer tools business.
Yeah, I've been with Coinbase for about three and a half years now and oversee business development and partnerships, mostly with developers and builders doing cool stuff in crypto and on blockchain.Started a journey here on the listings team.
And I got to meet a bunch of asset issuers who are doing cool things.
And as a result of just learning more about what they're doing and all the exciting things that they have in mind, I've expanded to really do BD and partnerships in this space, working closely with Namil.
And, you know, we're really excited today in particular to talk about, I think what's going to be the convergence of AI and crypto.
Um, and it's something that we're just, you know, seeing as being a big catalyst for keeping me in the meal busy, um, with a lot of the things that we're doing here.
Yeah, thank you, Dan.And I'm so fascinated, like I said before, about this use case, the convergence and how these two technologies are going to work together.
And there seems to be a symbiotic relationship where blockchain can be used to police AI in different ways, defakes and so forth.But AI can be used to enhance blockchain attributes.
Tell us about, I guess, your thesis behind using AI agents in crypto and how did the idea come about?
Yeah, so first of all, I'd say that these are two independent technologies that all have value of their own.So AI, you can see just the transformation that's done in terms of what can be done quickly, easily at scale across vast amounts of data.
And with crypto, we basically have what I call an internet of ownership, that open, transparent ledger that anyone can look at and understand where someone who owns what in that world.
The powerful thing is I think there are two angles where they come together.One angle is that there are builders out there in the world, and AI makes building easier.
And so let's say there are 25 million software developers in the world, but a small fraction that work in crypto, maybe 30,000 to 50,000 developers today.With AI, we're seeing people who've never coded before.
We're seeing people who've coded a lot, but who are actually just front-end engineers who want to write a full application, deploy it, and they're able to do it in a matter of minutes.
And think about this compared to a world of five, 10 years ago, you might need a computer science degree to be able to launch an application.You might need to at least go through a boot camp to be able to learn all the details.
It's a transformational thing.And so I think what we're seeing is that there are more and more builders that are able to interact on chain than ever before as a result of AI.So that's one angle that we've been seeing in a really big way.
The other angle is that AI itself cannot get a bank account.
But AI agents need wallets to be able to do stuff the same way us as humans need a credit card to be able to go buy something, to buy a few building blocks together at a hardware store and put those together.
In the same way, AI can interact in that world.And that's why the blockchain is so powerful for that use case, so that AI can basically take
some crypto, it can go ahead and either pay a human to give it some information that it critically needs to answer a query that it's getting.
It can go to a data API and pay for that because it, hey, it can't swipe a credit card, it can't sign up for an API key, but it can directly hit that data, pay for it in crypto on chain, and then use it.
And so those are the two like really big things that we're seeing thematically.Excited to go through more examples of that, but those are the two ways we really see it coming together.
Tony there, I'm dating myself here, but there is a, many, many years ago when I was at Cal College, one of the courses I took was an HTML course.You can imagine how useless that is now with solutions like WordPress and Squarespace that are out there.
I think this is exactly what's happening in crypto today because of AI.Both technology and particularly crypto
It's becoming a lot more accessible and people can really leverage its full strength by just having a vision and an idea of what they want to do.And even last year, this wasn't possible.
So that's one of the reasons why we're so excited about this space is because it just opens up the space to anybody who wants to build and really enhance the things that they're building because of what crypto can do.
You know, as you guys are saying those things, I'm thinking about I could be sleeping and I can have an AI agent doing things on my behalf, whether it's selling or buying or helping somebody, providing a service and collecting payment.
And I can wake up and have a wallet with funds in it, or I could have a product delivered to me that the AI agent went out and paid for.
Yeah, I think one of the most obvious use cases is that it's there.It's trading on crypto out on chain.So, for example, it's hitting Uniswap, it's hitting different forms of DEXs and exchanges that are out there in the world.
It's making some money that's showing up in your wallet.And then when you wake up, the AI has done that throughout the hours.And unlike traditional financial markets, crypto is 24-7.
So that's a really good example where when you're sleeping, you need someone to think about, let's say, other parts of the world. who's trading in those parts of the world and what can AI do during that time?
Now, you guys recently successfully conducted an AI to AI agent crypto transaction.Tell us about that.
Yeah.Dan, do you want to take that?
Yeah.I mean, look, we've been experimenting with a lot of what's possible here.And I think there's like two things that we've been leaning into.One is AI to AI and another is what we'll call AI to human, which is also very interesting.
The thing that we love about AI agents is their ability to scale in a very intelligent way.
And by conversing with other AI agents, imagine all the cool things that you can do that would take humans a long time to do or may not do it in a very accurate way.So we're really excited about that in the application of crypto.
And one example that comes to mind as to why AI to agent is interesting is imagine going cross-chain, right?
So unless you're, you know, if you're a crypto expert, it's probably easy, but imagine just being able to tell somebody or an AI agent what you want, and based on that natural language and set of instructions, the AI agent kind of goes figure it out on its own and finds other AI agents, maybe representing other chains, to do cool stuff that completely abstracts away the complexities of,
what the human needs to know in order to convert, for example, USTC on base from USTC on Solana, for example, right?So that's what we're really leaning into.
And that whole AI to AI, it's really more of a metaphor for all the cool things that can happen faster, more accurately, in a more compelling way, just because of what AI agents can do, which is become smarter bots, right?
And then therefore abstract away a lot of the complexities that humans shouldn't really have to worry about and execute that just based strictly on the vision. of what the human wants to do.
Yeah, it can be used across crypto assets.We think stable coins are probably the more obvious one where it's going to start, just because that's closest to the fiat that people may be used to today.
But we absolutely think it's going to expand from there.And what I'll add is that, like, we grew up in a world where the Internet was built for humans.
But with more and more AI out there, we have to reconfigure these systems so that they work for AI agents, so they can do what we're asking of them.
And this is exactly why I think this AI to AI example is so interesting, is that in this one example, it was a generalized AI conversational interface that needed a very specific specialized AI interface.
So it's no different than one human who might be a journalist who wants a very specific skill set.They may want to reach out to a programmer who's super deep to know some details, and they need to be able to transact to be able to do that.
And in this case, the transaction was USDC.It was moved on base.And one agent is able to talk to the other agent to be able to ask for that.
And in this case, there's a web crawler that is an AI agent that can look on the Internet, figure out exactly what the Internet is saying and put that into specific tokens that can be consumed by an AI.And that's what the second AI agent needed.
An AI agent today, for example, can't go to the New York Times and pay for an article, right, or get the latest weather forecast.Humans can do that because there are marketing things out there to kind of incentivize for us to ultimately subscribe.
But imagine a world where an AI agent can actually go to a New York Times or a weather service, right, and be able to buy pieces of data or an article just strictly based on what it needs.
And it's not to do anything other than pay the other AI agent, in this case, the New York Times bot, for example. for that transaction, right?Instead of a human kind of going out there and entering their credit card in and making that very complex.
So that's what we're really excited about is just the scaling possibilities from what can happen when you start to fractionalize access to data in a very meaningful way.
Walk us through this setup of that.How does the AI agent connect to the respective wallet?
And when you expand to other currencies, is it going to be like a Web3 naming wallet address where behind the scenes, it can support Solana, it can support ETH, it can support Bitcoin?How does all that work?
Yeah.So what we do at Coinbase developer platform is we offer something called an MPC wallet, which is an API based wallet.So think about like really simple calls.You can say create wallet.
I can say mint NFT or mint or create ERC20 token or trade it.And behind the scenes it goes to a DEX and trades it. Those are all examples of what this API wallet or MPC wallet can do.
And so what an AI can do is directly, because it can make API calls, it can directly hit this API and do whatever that API allows it to do.
Now, the magic part of this is that because it's on the blockchain, it can do all the things that the blockchain allows, which is a ton of stuff today.
And so today, like where we're starting is we're starting with Ethereum, we're starting with base, but we're slowly expanding out the number of networks that we support.And we're slowly expanding that into EVM to get started first.
Over time, absolutely.We want to support all the different blockchain networks that are out there. And then you're able to do, the AI is able to interact with those networks in full.
So whatever smart contracts are there, it can directly interact with that.And so the simplest example to start, maybe literally it just wants to launch an ERC-20 token and tell the world about it.
You know, it's hooked up to Twitter, similar to Truth Terminal or other examples out there.It wants to tell the world a little bit about this token, why it launched it, and anyone can maybe be able to access it.
But you can imagine a world where it gets much more sophisticated than that.
It's the one that goes to Uniswap or other DEXs and is able or Aerodrome and is able to actually decide when to trade, how much to trade, maybe to market make, to provide liquidity into those markets.
So we're just scratching the surface of what is possible with just launching ERC20s.But I think there's a lot more coming.
Tony, the fact that you asked that question is exactly the problem we're trying to solve here, right? You just can't have people worry about what network you're on, what token you have, what wallet you have, whether or not your wallet supports L2s.
Imagine if the cell phones we have today were at ASCII are using Verizon or using AT&T.Oh, sure, I can't do that.So right now, it doesn't really matter.That is the vision that we have for crypto and especially for developers and users.
AI is just the way to get us there.It understands code.It's natural language is software code, as is cryptos.And you just have to train it.And training is probably where the difficulty is.
And that's one of the reasons, you know, we built CDP, Coinbase Developer Platform, to make a lot of that a lot easier to use with training models and AI agents.
So, you know, we want to take away all the... We don't want you asking that question, right?We want to be like, oh yeah, I get it.
And that's one of the reasons why we're investing so much in CDP is to make crypto not complex and to make crypto as easy as possible to use for anybody who has a vision.
Absolutely.And I know interoperability is like a big thing that many folks are working on.So that's going to be key for global adoption.I apologize if you address this, but I want to make sure I'm clear on my end.
The AI agents that are being created, they're on chain, right?Or are they outside and you just connect to the wallet?
The agents are off-chain in that they have to work in traditional infrastructure, but they access the wallet APIs that allow it to transact anything on-chain as well.
And with Based Agent, you can go to cdp.coinbase.com today, and in three minutes, spin up an AI agent using OpenAI Swarm, and then you connect that to our NPC wallets, and you can deploy that in zero to three minutes total.
And then suddenly you have an AI agent that has a wallet that can do any transaction on chain with those wallets.
And interoperability isn't just between chains, right?It's between on chain and off chain as well.That's one of the things that we're super excited about.You know, if you wanted to use base agent, the agent that we recently announced.
it can do anything as long as there's a Python API available, right?So imagine the possibilities there, whether it's a Web 2 or Web 3 tech stack, that agent can go in between worlds and do cool things.
Now we're going to start talking about how AI can benefit from on-chain.I think there's really good discussions around training data and having that be immutable and putting that on-chain.
But as far as like the agents themselves, we kind of want them to go in between and, you know, in and out of being on-chain, right, in order to be really effective.
Yeah, that makes sense.So when I, let's say I generate that AI agent, I got the wallet and so forth.Do I need to have, or am I given the 24 seed phrase?Is it a self-hosted wallet?How does that all work?
Yeah, so we have different options.The traditional one that people are using is we have a two of two wallet where you have two shards and both of those shards are needed to be able to sign.
And in that example, the user or the AI agent is holding onto one.So it could be the user that's instantiating the AI agent. is holding on to that one of those shards and then giving it to the AI agent to be able to call.
And then we're holding and supporting the other side.And that way, you can't just go hack one thing or attack one thing to be able to take the funds as part of that.But candidly, I would just say we're just getting started.
In the last month is really when I think crypto and AI, that connectivity has really taken off.Truth Terminal, there's so many really powerful experiments on Farcaster and on Twitter today.
that I wouldn't be surprised if their new wallet and key models, and we're working on those ourselves, and there's some fun announcements coming at DevCon from our side, but I wouldn't be surprised if slowly the wallet models are going to change so that the AI agent is the only one that knows it's key and can then hold full and absolute custody of those funds and decide exactly what it wants to do.
I think we're just getting started because the tools are like, this is a brand new use case that never existed before.
And that's maybe one plug I want to give to your viewers is that if you're building today, this is one of the most exciting times to build because these things have never been brought together in this way.
Every day, like when I look on Twitter, I see like brand new experiments that people have never done before.Like literally just a month ago was the first time someone sent funds to an AI agent and gave his own crypto wallet and did it.
And that was like 30 to 60 days ago.What's going to happen the next 90 days?What's going to happen the next 180 days?So I would just say if you're a builder today, this is one of the most exciting times to start experimenting.
working with open AI, working with other agents that are out there and hooking them up into Coinbase developer platform.
Yeah.And to be in full disclosure, like I've spoken to Lincoln on your team and started going through his guide that he put together because I want to leverage this technology.I want to stay ahead of the curve.So it's fascinating.You know,
I know, once again, it's still early and you guys are still figuring it out.There are going to be further iterations and so forth.
Aside from, let's say, developers, are you also looking at how creators, like myself, can leverage this technology and automate certain things or provide certain services, maybe on social media, like answering questions and people tipping me and things like that?
I think there's a lot of discussion over the past couple of years on how crypto and blockchain in particular could perhaps help equilibrate the creator economy or the imbalance there is where a lot of the way the world works today in the creator economy is based on views and that, you know, incentivizes or at least creates the wrong incentives, I think, for kind of up and coming artists and creators to be immediately relevant.
We like crypto and equator space because of the payments angle.But how do you scale that.Right.
And one of the things that you do need to do is to scale very quickly in order to kind of compete with these traditional platforms that have massive viewers that have really advanced algorithms to kind of direct traffic to the right places.Right.
So we're really excited about the impact of AI and crypto in particular in the creator space because it's going to be able to do a lot more to enable scale for creators who want to reach much larger audiences, identify and reach much larger audiences in an authentic and engaging way.
A lot of the automations and bots that you see today are exactly that.They're very not smart.You basically pay a bunch of money, actually, to these other platforms.
They find followers for you or viewers for you in a very binary and old school kind of way.With AI agents, because they're getting a lot smarter, more meaningful, more engaging, and they understand people's psyche,
to the point where you might not even know you're talking to an AI agent.
Imagine imposing or putting a personality of a creator or an influencer in the form of an AI agent to, A, go out there and start to identify, oh, wait a minute, I see this discussion happening in this form I never heard before.
Let me get in there and start having these conversations.And beyond that, making those engagements meaningful by everything crypto can do, whether it's monetizing, hey, let me give you some USDC for doing cool stuff for me.
Or hey, oh, here's an NFT that I just created for you.Right.So if you believe in a world where crypto is going to advance financial systems and you believe in a world where agents can start to scale a meaningful, authentic engagements, conversations,
combine the two together and your head starts to explode a little bit in terms of what's possible.
That's one of the reasons why Hive, one of the largest K-pop production companies in the world, recently announced a partnership with Coinbase to do exactly that for what it sees as the future in a greater economy.
It's to really leverage AI agents and crypto and blockchain to be able to create and reinvent the greater economy in a much more meaningful way.
that allows up-and-coming creators and creators that don't have millions of viewers to be able to do very effective things using both AI and crypto as their tech stack.
Wow, that's amazing.I love that you guys have formed that partnership.And I know the creative economy is growing.Media is becoming decentralized.Obviously, money and movement of value and so forth has become more decentralized.So it's fascinating.
It's a brave new world we're headed to.
We should do an AI version of you and multiple of these interviews at the same time in a meaningful way with the same reactions. And I know I'm joking, but that's exactly the vision that companies like Hive have, right?
It's how do we take what we know about the artists and creators that we represent and start to let them engage with their audiences in a much more meaningful and prolific way, whilst not having to stay up 100 hours a week responding to every single tweet out there and not being classified as just a bot, right?
And then making those real with crypto transactions, NFTs, what have you.That's what we're really excited about.
Something I was thinking about before we had this conversation, and this new idea, it seems like it could help bring back balance in a sense of there's people concerned about AI taking their jobs.
And look, automation has happened throughout history with new technology, right?And yes, it does create new jobs. AI, this technology doesn't sleep.It continues to learn and so forth.Some people are concerned.Some jobs are going to become obsolete.
However, as an individual, if I can take my knowledge and skill set and create a AI agent, that could help me earn.So do you see the potential of this bringing a bit of balance back to the scale here?
I think the answer is yes.I think for every menial or routine or dangerous task that humans have to do, being able to have an AI agent do that, I think will start to create new problems that humans are probably better suited to solve.
So it's still early.And I think there's a lot to still learn and still experience.But what we're seeing here is for every job that gets displaced, I think there's going to be even more jobs that get created
as a result of this reinvention and how things get done.There's also the element of AIs creating jobs just by being more efficient.
Payman, which is a company that we work with, is an AI to human platform that allows AI agents to pay humans for doing stuff. work, right?Whatever that may be.
Say you have a park that needs cleaning after a concert and you're trying to organize a bunch of people to kind of go and get there.
You can either have a human do that or maybe there's an AI agent that excels at doing exactly that and goes out and basically says, hey, I'm an AI agent and if you pay me,
$10,000, I'll go find a lot of people on my own and pay them to go do this task, right?So I think in worlds like, you know, where there still needs to be humans to get stuff done, I think there absolutely will be.
AI agents will be much more efficient at creating, or at least organizing and presenting jobs that are right for people in a much more fluid and immediate way.But I think it's gonna be actually a really good catalyst.
And we've had discussions with job boards and, you know, kind of these labor pools that are out there.
that are very interested in AI bringing more jobs to these workers, whether they're gig workers or not, because AI has a lot more intelligence and access to where these jobs are, and has a lot more ability to identify where we pay people for these jobs, because they have more information at their disposal.
And as you're saying that, I'm thinking of it also opens up a broader reach because let's say I'm in New Jersey and my job is local, right?It's central to where I live.
But if I have certain knowledge and skillsets, it opens me up nationwide, even globally, to people who have a need based on what I can offer.
We built a demo app. at cdpsdk.xyz that shows what an AI agent can do for training an ML model.So basically an AI agent can present, hey, which of these is a dog?
And then it can basically find people on Twitter, have them present it, and then for answering a series of questions, just immediately pay them for their work, right?
So to your point earlier, yeah, I mean, I think AI agents are going to create a lot of opportunities for humans to kind of step in, or at least they're going to ask humans to get stuff done, and it's going to create a whole new demand for services that I don't think we've seen before at this scale and at this efficiency.
And I think a big part of this is that crypto is just making the world smaller.So I think there's a world where it feels quaint now, but 15 years ago, the financial market was only open from X time to Y time.
And it was set based on certain national jurisdictions. There's a version where crypto is global.Anyone can access it.The blockchain is global and they can interact with anyone in the world.
I think that is absolutely making the world a smaller place than what existed before.And again, the Internet was already doing that.And you add crypto into that element, you add AI into that element, and that's making this even smaller.
I see this is someone from New Jersey, you know, who's like, you get to interact with anyone in the world.That's a pretty powerful thing today.
Absolutely.It's so fascinating.And it opens up the secondary, tertiary markets and so many opportunities to earn.And crypto is a big part of that because you can at least trust, right?There's no delays, there's instant settlement, all these things.
So it's fascinating. Now, speaking of earning, it may be too early to answer this question, but my AI agent or my multiple AI agents earned $5,000 in the month of November.Tax implications.I'm sure the IRS has not come out with anything as yet.
What are you guys thinking about that?
I think that we're very early in the stage for this.I can't I can't speak to tax advice for this.I think it reminds me a lot of crypto where like there was no rules early on for like how tax obligations of DeFi pools and other things would work.
And that's something that we have to go figure out together as a society.Some of the existing rules actually already work for it. You know, maybe you're holding that agent, maybe you're directing that agent.And so maybe the existing rules are fine.
And in other cases, we're probably going to have to create brand new rules to think about these different cases.
And I think that like, I always like in the early years of crypto, when like DeFi was first starting, I always thought about like, hey, like, will we be able to catch up quick enough to this?
And I've actually been pretty excited about how many people in the world are starting to interact with this, to use this, and how even governments across the world are starting to catch up to it, thinking about exactly how to thoughtfully put it into their systems.
Yeah, it's fascinating.It's like exciting but scary at the same time.Now, with regards to the AI agents, right, let's say I create something really great and it's doing well.
Can I sell that AI agent in a white label or something along those lines, if that makes sense, to the open market?
Yes.So I think that absolutely there's something to be said for you're training the agent.You're getting it hooked up with a Twitter account with a following.
Maybe you're connecting it to an ERC 20 token or some or NFT or anything else that's on chain.And you're able to then consider that like one unit and sell it.
I think where it gets a little difficult is first of all we at Coinbase and in the crypto industry like we're focused on the crypto side of this equation the on chain side of this equation.
So in the case that like you're just simply training a agent giving it some prompts and then educating it that may be less defensible.
But then when you turn it into a social personality, when you add on-chain assets that it owns, suddenly that's an entire package that actually cannot be as easily replicated.
So my sense is like there's even more defensibility in terms of what the creator is creating.They have the ability to have all those tools together.
And the AI agent only works because it's the AI personality that's tied to a Twitter handle, it's tied to an NFT on-chain or multiple NFTs on-chain. And maybe it's a brand that's tied to it as well.So absolutely, that can be sold.
And in a lot of ways, that is a business with his own set of assets.I think that I'd be more skeptical about just the AI agent with just some learning prompt that maybe that's the thing, at least that's as defensible.
Yeah I mean it could be easily replicated but I think the idea of an AI agent marketplace is definitely feasible and we're seeing early signs of that provided that these agents either took a very long time to create and it's really hard to replicate.
or has the ability to do things or access data that nobody else has, right?I think we'll see it first in generative art.
I'm seeing a lot of models, I think they call them checkpoint models or Lora models, where they've been trained to do something very, very well, right?I can generate food really, really well.
I can generate, you know, the inside of, you know, a Taj Mahal very, very well, right? Whatever that may be, I think that's going to represent the amount of effort that went into creating the agent.And I think there's value that can be monetized.
But to Nabil's point, yeah, I mean, if there are easy bots that are agents that just kind of do things that ChatGBT can do without any other kind of special sauce to it, I don't think that's going to be as exciting.
And that'll probably be more of like, hey, look at me, look at me, and probably be something that we have to kind of verify or whoever does the marketplace, right?But imagine one that's just trained on a skill set that's like really, really cool.
I think there's an opportunity to monetize that as well.
Let's talk security.So you create the AI agent, you got the API into the NPC wallet.What security layers there, aside from the seed phrases and so forth, because I don't know if hackers are going to use AI to hack AI, right?
There's a whole new world, a whole can of worms is opening up here.What are you guys doing from a security standpoint?
Yeah, so I think you've talked in the past to Philip Arden, our head of security.And so we're based on the same foundational security promises of Coinbase's security infrastructure.
And I think the key thing I'd call out is that we have two versions of our MPC wallets today.One version is where you have a single one-on-one key.And that's very similar to the seed phrase that you mentioned.There's a seed phrase.
If it's lost, anyone can access that wallet and they can take the funds.But there's also the two-of-two model, which is not one single seed phrase.There are two parties that both have to be able to agree together at the same moment in time.
And if they do that, then those funds can be transferred.You can do an on-chain action, etc. So two of two model is what we recommend, especially if they're real funds on your assets.
And it still means you do have to critically secure your part of the shard.If you lose that, you lose the key that you use to access Coinbase APIs.That absolutely means the funds can be at risk.
But the idea is that it's not the same as having a single seed phrase that anyone can go attack and simply be able to move funds around.
So what I would say is that we're in the early months or weeks of this trend of AI really connecting deeply into crypto, that I think that the security is going to get better and better.
And that's one thing that we're working on is to have more and more complex forms of security so that if you have large amounts of funds here, you can get higher and higher guarantees in terms of what the security options that you have available to you are.
You know, Tony, I recently had a conversation with a AI chatbot on exactly this topic, and
And one of the things that a lot of developers that we work with are scared of is these wallets just can't be traditional EOA wallets because AI can potentially outsmart human beings.
That's why we call them NPC wallets, at least the ones that we're using.These wallets can't be a traditional EOA wallets that you've seen in the past, and they have to have a higher degree of sophistication.
And if you, in fact, ask any kind of GPT bot or chat bot, it'll actually say, you know, it recommends multi-party computation as a way to enhance security for AI agents to have wallets that they can control.
So, look, we're really early here, but I think the signals are all pointing to the fact that security, in fact, has to be a lot more advanced. I mean, that's one of the reasons why we're leaning so much into NPC.We're good at it.
We believe that it represents one of the highest forms of security, especially for AI agents.
And it really does give developers who are serious about the space the confidence to lean in heavily without worrying about a single point of failure when it comes to traditional wallets that you typically see.
Excuse my ignorance on this.These are new questions I'm asking you guys because I'm really curious about it.So the wallet, all good, but can the AI agent be attacked itself?
And once again, this may be too early and I may be thinking too much Star Wars or iRobot or something, right?But I'm just curious that can someone use the AI to attack the agent itself and shut it down?
So we use open AI in the base agent that I talked about.We use open AI behind the scenes.And so that's directly what you're interacting with.I think now I'm starting to speculate.
And I think there are examples where you can talk to the agent, coerce, like convince them of something and have them react in a different way than maybe the creator was intending to.And absolutely that is a possibility of how you can do it.
I'm not an expert in terms of how the AI systems are built themselves.And so I can't speak to directly what types of things you can do beyond that.But it feels very obvious that you could tweet at them.
You've already seen this on Twitter, where there are examples of people saying, hey, send funds to this address.
And if the AI respects that, even though the creator may not have wanted them to, but they did program it in that way, I could absolutely see that happening.
And I would just say that this is like we're seeing an industry in its infancy, like literally in the first walks that are happening.And so my sense is we're going to see some pretty big hacks in the early months and weeks.
And then slowly people are going to learn and they're going to harden these.They're going to make them more powerful.And we're going to figure out What are the really big and killer use cases of this at this stage.And then as the A.I.
gets even better and better and as the block chain gets lower cost more performant more people in the world have wallets.You're just going to see the amount of like types of use cases here just change and probably get more and more sophisticated.
Yeah, absolutely.I definitely agree with you there.We're in the baby phase, crawling, not walking yet, right?Let alone running.Now, you guys mentioned the creator economy and developers as well.
Are there any other industries you're noodling about, you know, with regards that you might start approaching them and say, hey, check this out.This can help automate some things, open up revenue sources for you and so forth.
Yeah, Dan, do you want to take that?
Yeah, I mean, look, we're, We're good at trading.That's our core business.So we're seeing a lot in terms of advanced trading strategies, cross-chain trading strategies, liquidation warnings, all the things that humans typically mess up or
don't want to encounter.I think we're seeing a lot.You might call them DeFi, but you know, I think it goes beyond DeFi once you start to go on to an off chain.So I think trading is another really good example.
Obviously, the career example that we mentioned earlier, which is great.But, you know, I think we should underestimate kind of the current places where a lot of AI is being used.Example, customer service.
You know, something that we've been talking about for a while, but imagine customer service and crypto together, right?
Where it's more than just being able to understand your problem, but maybe it's also going to be good at solving them because of its ability to interconnect very complex systems, very different complex data sets, and start to reason, right?
Which is a recent development in the AI world, right? You know, I'm not going to sit here and try to speculate all the amazing things because it kind of gets scary at some point.And I think we're getting close to the Skynet, Terminator Skynet.
But I think the fact that there are immediate use cases in trading, in, you know, greater economy and, you know, even service and support.I mean, those are probably one of the biggest drivers of of costs that companies incur today.
And that's another benefit I think AI agents will bring to the table is being able to do a lot more for a lot less.
Yeah, absolutely.Yeah.And I know, once again, some of these questions were so early, but I'm just fascinated to throw it out there, see what I can get from you guys.Are there plans as things progress to open up to other AI companies?
So let's say Google's Grok on Twitter, whatever it may be?
Yeah, so there's a ton of different things that we're doing.So maybe I'll take you through a few of those.One is absolutely, we want to work with all forms of AI that are out there, not just this open AI alone.And so we're really excited about that.
So stay tuned.We have DevCon coming up in Bangkok next week.And so we have a bunch of different announcements coming there. There are other sets of things that we want to do is do more and more on-chain interactions for these AI agents.
So today you can use our APIs and you can call all on-chain calls, but you have to know what you're asking for.In a future world, for example, instead of having to know that you have to call the dot transfer call on an ERC-20 contract, we
The ideal thing in our API is to just have that as a first class function.I want to do a transfer, I want to do a trade, I want to do a borrow, I want to do a lend.All of these are just first class functions in our API.
And so that way the AI looks at that, it can read through all the different menu options that it has, and it goes to town in terms of deciding how that comes together.
So that's another thing that we're working on is we're unlocking basically more and more forms of these on-chain actions.We have a few already, right.
We have NFT minting, we have ESD minting, we have transfers, but we want to add more and more into that set of actions they can do. Beyond that, the other big thing is just security, is that we have this two-of-two model.
We want to make more and more complex multi-sigs, so you can do that.We want to do different options where the AI can have a human involved and improve everything, but also have examples where the AI doesn't need to do that.
Maybe there's certain dollar values at which you do want a human involved to be able to say before it's allowed to transfer.So it's a world where the customer is not an AI agent. six months ago or a year ago for crypto.And now it is.
And what are the use cases and needs that that AI agent has?And how is that distinct from like what existed before?That's really what we're spending our time thinking through.
Absolutely.You know, earlier, and I forgot to ask a follow up question to this.You mentioned that the AI agent can have its own NFTs and tokens. That fascinates me.
So can it be just simply doing work and getting paid, and it doesn't have to have a token, but if the person behind it can create those tokens and do some sort of ecosystem with that?
So there are two things.It's like the AI agent can create a token of its own.
So if it decided, here's the name I want to name it, here's the amount of the supply of the ERC-20 token, as an example, that I want to launch, it can go ahead and ask for that.
The token is created on chain and has the ability to transfer, like then it has its treasury, has the ability to transfer that, move that around wherever it wants.Again, the same thing you can do for an NFT.
Let's say you wanted to create a fandom around something.You create 500 variations of a certain token. Again, with GenAI and all that, you can connect that up.You can create 500 different images.
You can basically say like, hey, I want a version of CryptoPunks, but I want this theme.I want you to generate that.Now I want you to turn those into NFTs and have them.
And whoever reaches out to you and has the most wittiest responses in this 24 hour period, I want you to give those NFTs out to them as long as they give you their on-chain address.All of that is suddenly now possible.
And those are just two things we do today.
But if I compare that to the menu of things you can do on chain, there's so much more that's going to be possible, especially when you bring all those interaction effects among, I launched the ERC-20 or launched the NFT.
Now you can go use it in a game somewhere.You can use it with a different AI agent where if you have this NFT, you can get access to certain content or unlock a different personality or any of these things.Again, I'm speculating on a lot of this.
But I think we're just scratching the surface of what we see today.
And so I think for builders, this is why it's so exciting is that the Lego blocks are there, but people are trying to figure out what are the end state of things that people are going to build with it.And that's why it's exciting.
I think for all of us, it's like we have some popcorn.It's so exciting to have this front row seat to what people are doing with it.
An AI agent with an NPC wallet will be able to do anything a human can do with a wallet.Better, faster, and more complex, right?So that's the kind of the analog that I keep in mind is an agent should be able to do exactly what I do.
into tokens and distribute them, yeah, you can do that.But do that at scale and do that instantaneously.
Imagine, Tony, if someone's listening to your podcast and AI determines it's someone that you kind of want to retain or engage with, wouldn't it be cool if the agent said, hey, thanks for listening in and here's an NFT for you?
and this will give you some benefit in the future.
Without you having to respond to that a week later after someone comes to you with it, which is far too late, then that in the moment, I guess the new zero moment of truth, which is happening now, and then rewarding somebody for that, or at least recognizing someone for that in a meaningful way that has value.
That just points.It's actually real value, digital assets of value.That's what makes us all exciting.
So Dan, I guess the next step will be you and I set up a call so we can create this thing for my viewers and listeners.
I think you got to give me all your raw footage for your podcast and your transcripts and we'll feed it through and we'll have Lincoln put something together and we'll call it the Tony Edwards bot or the Payment Crypto bot.
To that point though, and I think I remember Lincoln mentioning this, you can plug into the YouTube API or maybe Facebook API and do this, right?
Yeah.So Tony, just like I think it'd be really fun as part of this podcast, even to include a three minute section of you deploying something.And we're absolutely excited to help you do that.But it could be all the transcripts of all your interviews.
Right.And we could tie that to an on-chain NFT.We tried to see 20 anything else.But I think there could be something really powerful there.And that would be a really fun demo for you for the viewers.
Our partner Hive is investing a lot in using AI to create voices and images of likeness, right, digital twins.So, you know, again, like I think we're already seeing AI-generated podcasts with like really authentic voices, right?
All you need is kind of video on top of that.And I mean, who knows, there might be a Tony Edwards AI agent doing multiple interviews a day on specific topics.And that's something that we see a lot of potential in, right?
Because it's more than just kind of going out there and pushing out content.It's very engaging.
and it's educating, and there's so many ways you can go with this, and you can't do that today because time is the resource that is very limited for you, right?
This unlocks that, right, and allows you to do a lot more with a lot less investment of your time and energy.
Oh, for sure.A question I'm going to ask, I don't know if you guys can touch on this because it's a whole other can of worms.And maybe we need like Paul Grewal to come in.
But an AI agent creating a token, we don't have full crypto legislation here in the United States.The SEC could say, hey, that's a security.I don't know if they will or, you know, it's too early.But is that a concern?
Legends only a few days away, right? But look, I mean, what do you think?
I don't think we know the details.What I would say is that, like, in general, there's been there's been a lot of like meme coins.And that's an example where, like, I think that feels qualitatively different than other things.But I am not a lawyer.
And we definitely want to have those folks in the room to be able to opine. I think what I just say about this election is like we're excited that there are folks on both sides of the aisle that care about crypto.
And we think that we have to balance obviously consumer rights and we have to balance the innovation that comes from crypto and the huge opportunities that accrue in the U.S.for being the place where
crypto, where AI, a lot of the investments in that are starting.And so we're really excited, you know, excited for that.But I think Paul Graham will be the absolutely great follow-up episode on this.
And I think, Tony, your question and I think a couple of questions before kind of speaks to what I think is emerging truth in this space, which is humans probably still need to be involved at some point.
A lot of advocates out there saying, oh, don't worry, like, you know, AI will fully be autonomous.
I think the more realistic reality is that humans will need to be present, not just in the beginning when you're creating the AI, but to manage and moderate and improve.
So I think that's one of the things that we'll probably continue to see is the importance of humans in the
Yeah, absolutely.And once again, I know some of these questions, they're too early.We're still too early to determine some of these things, but I'm fascinated by this.
And like I said, I'm trying to build something and I'll probably have to have some offline conversations with you guys.But this is amazing.And anything else you guys want to highlight or you think you caught everything in this conversation so far?
I think for those going to DEF CON next week, we're hosting a series of events, and we can send you the links if people want to join us.We're going to be showcasing, I think, five AI agents that are going to be doing things on crypto.
It'll be fun stuff, and there'll be kind of more serious stuff, but it's going to be a really cool moment for AI and crypto.
And if anyone's going to Bangkok this year for the conference, we'd love to invite them to, or at least your viewers, to one of these events.
Awesome.I'll put those links in the descriptions.Everyone check that out.Namil, Dan, thank you so much.This is exciting stuff.
And I'll have to have you either individually or both again, maybe in the next three to four months as we get further iterations.But thank you so much for joining me.
No, thank you.It was fun, and I can sense your enthusiasm, and hopefully you can sense ours, and it's just a great time to be alive and be in this space, right?There's so much happening out there, and we just want the world to know about it.
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