Uneasy Money: How the Increasingly Better AI Agents Are Being Used Onchain

I gave it a Metamask.

I put money in the Metamask.

That sounds great.

That sounds like it's gonna go well for us.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I said, go, go make this transaction, and it couldn't figure out how to get the Metamask dialogue.

He's like, I can't find the UI.

Where is it?

What's going on?

It, it immediately.

Immediately was like, I'm gonna get the private key out of Metamask and do this the real way.

And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, and I started saying, stop, stop, stop, and it won't stop.

I have to like, go to the machine and like, I'm pulling, you know, like, no, please don't get the private key.

Claba was like, Bro, they blocked me, and then they followed the link and then opened an issue on the GitHub and very politely pointed out that we had like illegitimately blocked it and like like made his arguments as to like why this was legit.

He like cited sources to like prove the legitimacy, which for the record, for the record, the human Austin did what most humans do, which is the open X and was like, Meadow Mouse sucks.

Yeah, tag him, yep.

Hey everyone, I'm Kane Warwick and welcome to Uneasy Money, because what happens on Chain never stays on Chain.

Uh, unfortunately Luca couldn't join us today, but I'm very excited because we have a couple of extremely special guests.

Um, I'm here with Taylor, security at Menamosque, um, and I've also got Austin, um, who I guess his claim to fame as he's been doing crazy things with AI agents on Chain.

Uh, I also have Carl, the CTO of OP Labs, um, so we are going to be, uh, getting in some L2 stuff, some clanker stuff, it's gonna be very fun.

Um, so, uh, one quick thing before we start, nothing you hear on uneasy Money is financial advice, we're just four builders talking about what's happening on chain, and we want you to always do your own research before aping in.

You can find all of our disclosures at unchaincrypto.com/uneasymoney.

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All right, um, we are back.

Uh, so this is actually quite funny, right?

So usually we have Luca and, and Taylor.

And like Luca and I are like kind of on the spectrum of like crypto, like, a bit centrist, and then Taylor's like a, you know, a little bit to the, let's call it left, right, like the Ethereum wing.

And then I find myself, I wake up this morning.

And I'm on the extreme edge of like lunacy over here in like multi-shain land, and I've got a bunch of eat maxis uh on on the other side.

We replaced Luca Luca with like the most eat people you could fucking find.

I was like, what's going on here?

But anyway, I'm here for it, it's gonna be fun.

Um, so first things first, uh, Vitallic dropped a bit of a bomb, uh, an L2 bomb, um, on the timeline yesterday, uh.

Saying the original vision of L2s is branded shards, which I'd never heard that term before, so that was also wild, um, no longer makes sense.

This thing you've never heard of no longer makes sense, guys.

And I was like, all right, you're like, cool, checks out, um, I've never heard of it before.

I wasn't really wedded to it, but OK.

Um.

L2 decentralization has stole short of stage two, while Ethereum itself is scaling faster than expected.

Um, fees are low, gas limits are set to rise materially in 2026.

Many L2s are not and may never be fully decentralized.

Some of them are like actively against decentralization at this point, which is, uh, certainly was not on my bingo cards, so that's pretty amazing.

Um, for various reasons, regulatory control, business reasons, um.

So they're not gonna scale Ethereum because they're not really Ethereum, they're doing some other weird thing, right?

Um, and so L2 should be seen as a spectrum ranging from Ethereum secured systems to application specific chains with different trust assumptions.

Um, and you know, scaling. is, uh, no longer enough.

L2s need to find some differentiation, some product market fit outside of just scaling Ethereum because Ethereum is going to scale itself at this point in, in 2026.

It appears like that's gonna happen.

Um, and we had some interesting reactions.

Uh, Steven from Arbitram was like, we aren't Ethereum pro, so like don't even worry about it, not even a problem.

And I was like, what, wait, what?

And uh and I think someone went back and screenshotted the thing where he's like, we're totally Ethereum, we're basically the same.

So, as an L2 founder, uh, I don't know, Carl, what's, what's your take?

Is OP Ethereum?

Is it not Ethereum?

Is Ethereum even a thing?

Where, where are we at here?

An arc of history. you, why are you giving me the hardest, dumbest question of all time?

You're the best person seriously, optimism is a theory of.

I mean, like, OK, it depends on your definition of Ethereum.

Is it a culture?

Is it a chain?

Well, if it's a chain, then obviously it's not Ethereum.

If it's a culture, it's Ethereum culture.

Certainly I've worked at the Ethereum Foundation.

Optimism was built to scale Ethereum and, you know, make progress on the frontier, so.

Yes and no, I guess, but you know, certainly, uh, just on that, right, like let's, let's talk about scaling.

Um, I think the thing that is, uh, most interesting to me about this entire thing, right, is that L2s did the job that they were supposed to do better even than like anyone expected, right?

Um.

And, like, even me, like, I was there in the early days, like, trying to help, you know, mean this into existence, right?

And L2's, uh, you know, they, they succeeded wildly, but also Ethereum.

In the interim, while we had this L2 scaling roadmap, managed to also succeed far more wildly, I think, than most of us reasonably expected, right?

Um, and now it's like, given the state of the world, what is the optimal thing for Ethereum, right?

Ignore L2s for a second, like what is the optimal thing for Ethereum?

And it appears like, certainly from Vitalic's perspective, it's like, let's lean into.

Ethereum being Ethereum and, and scaling that, getting people to do things on Ethereum again that we haven't really been able to contemplate, um, but then, OK, what do we do with L2s?

Like what is the point of an L2 then if Ethereum is scaling?

Like what, what, where do we land there?

I mean, OK, first off, when we say like the part of this is crazy, because when we're saying, OK, Ethereum is going to scale, and if you want Ethereum homogeneous block space, then you should use Ethereum.

OK, great, that's exactly, use Ethereum blockspace if you want Ethereum guarantees.

But then Vitalic in the same post also says, if you don't want Ethereum properties, if you want custom building, if you want custom, you know, you name it, there's so many different channels.

There's so many different business use cases.

There's so many user use cases.

If you don't want that, then you should still use Ethereum for things like data availability, for security, you know, you can do your own L1, but you should still use Ethereum because Ethereum is providing services to more than just the people who want to utilize it as blocks space.

So, this is, to me, there are some quotes in the tweets that are a little bit, uh, easy to content farm, some might say.

But it was a long tweet.

If Metallic writes a 2000 word tweet, there's gonna be some shit in there that's you could like, wait, hold up, hold up.

Insane.

Uh, so Austin, like, you know, you've been a builder for a very long time in Ethereum, deep in the, the kind of deep, uh, dev OG community, building tools to make it easy for people.

Like I remember one of the first things that, that we talked about was your, uh, like, um, L2 kind of primer for people to like really understand like how L2s were, you know, connected and stuff, right?

And, and so, um, like.

How do you see this as a, as an engineer who's helping engineers learn how to use Ethereum, what are you saying to engineers?

Like, what should they be doing here?

I think part of it is return to mainnet.

Like, it's cheaper now.

We can do cool things on mainnet again.

We should be saying weird things like TCRs again.

I should, I should point out you're not actually talking to the engineers you're talking to are not humans.

They're inside of, OK, that's right.

So we should, we should preface that with, I'm not, there's no assumption you're talking to people on Twitter here, right?

Like you're talking to clankers on Maltbob trying to explain to them how to engineer on, on the, right?

OK, cool, yes.

So, yeah, I'm at home talking to my 3 MacBook Pros that or Mac laptops I have laying around.

But what I'm telling them is, return to Mainne, it's cheaper there.

When you want that, those kind of security concerns, deploy on Mainneet, like return to Mainne.

But L2s are gonna have all sorts of cool different things.

Shout out, like Luca was gonna be here with Abstract chain.

Abstract chain did something really cool with like account abstraction, right?

We saw a neat like smart contract wallet thing there.

It may take L1 a long time to get that right.

All these L2s and L3s are getting that right.

So I, I see some interesting like mainstream adoption happening out on the L2s, where people don't even know they're using a blockchain and they want to have like this, like very abstracted kind of experience.

Pass keys, you, you know well with with Infinix, but like also maybe on L1, you need You know, nation state level hardness, and that's where you want to deploy to, and it's a lot cheaper there now.

You can deploy a smart contract for like 15 cents right now.

It's insane.

And, and these open claw agents, are they buying this story, or like we're, we're they do whatever I say, man.

I, yeah, they're so much better than people.

The only time I ever had, I'm a very logical person, are they not asking you which one's gonna moon?

Like, which, which one do I buy here?

I need to, I need to make some money.

My human sent me out here to make money.

I, I need to figure this out.

Um, OK, so, so I don't know, Tay, like, what's your, what's, were you surprised by this?

Was this like, No, no.

You're not surprised by anything anymore.

That's no, no, I think that Um, I think my biggest takeaway was that it seems like Vitallic specifically is sort of both more in tune with sort of like the, let's call it like the macro, but like the crypto macro picture, not like macro macro, just crypto macro.

Uh, and also quicker to like, go on Twitter and say things, which is good, even if you disagree with him, even if maybe the ideas are not fully evolved, uh, or like perfect, they're never gonna be perfect, so like being able to have discussions and push back, I think it's like a way healthier environment to operate in.

Um, and I think my biggest takeaway is just like the environment has changed.

I think that if you go back in time and you consider where Ethereum was at and L2s.

There was sort of like a couple different paths we could go down, one of which is just like keep focusing on Ethereum and like keep uh treating everything else as a potential like threat and a bad thing and whatever.

I think that that would have not necessarily created like a a great desirable, competitive environment, not be healthy and not get us to like a net positive place.

I think that like, It was sort of necessary to collectively, Decide that L2s were great for Ethereum against I mean we didn't know some of the right, like we had to scale Ethereum and it wasn't scaling itself, right, so someone had to do it, um, so I think yeah.

And also like, in my view, I don't think Ethereum would be in the position it is today without that it would like definitively not be, it would be a fucking dire situation.

And, and so now, but a lot has changed, OK, so like the L2s have kind of like everything in crypto always.

Went a little bit overboard with the L2's bra, like a couple, some good ones in there, but like we got like 800, bro, like what the hell did we do?

All right, a lot of them, like, as Metallic points out, a lot of them, uh, are, are even the ones that you're, you kind of expected to like fully decentralize, like aren't prioritizing that.

Then you have this whole other array that like just never were going to or whatever.

Um, and I think that like if you ask yourself today, what is it that Ethereum focused people and the Ethereum Foundation, especially, what do they need to see as like the North Star, right?

And I think that one, they need clarity on the L2s because there is Uh, Cause if you don't provide that clarity, people are gonna continue to ask why we're why we're accepting and supporting these things that like work against the mission.

Um, but number 2, I think that, you know, providing that clarity on that North Star specifically for Ethereum things.

Like, no, we're not gonna make excuses and say that the L2s can do it, we're gonna do it.

It's going to be hard, but we're gonna do it anyways, and Uh, I don't know, like, a lot of people take issue with some of Vitalic's leadership, I guess, things that he does, how he leads people.

I can't fault him for this one.

You know, it feels certainly feels to me like he is on a much more pragmatic, like, you know, realistic arc at the moment, right?

Like with, with still, you know, some metallic copium mixed in because he's metallic, but, but like, there, there's a level of like pragmatism.

And like we have practical market solutions that we need and so there's two things, right, that I, I'm curious your takes on.

One is, um, there's been this conversation that I started from uh like Devcon last year, right?

Um, or maybe like 18 months ago or something of like.

You know, uh, Kaufelman saying, we gotta tax the L2s, right?

Like, we, we, we must jack up the prices, the prices are too damn low.

Um, and, and like there was a big kind of response to that of, yeah, like L2s are ripping off Ethereum, um, they're, you know, getting all this cheap block space, not paying their fair share, and we should jack up the price, right?

And it kind of petered out and people were like, ah, we don't have the technology to do that, um.

Does this feel like somewhat of the response to that kind of, you know, movement a little bit, or do you think it's unrelated, this idea of like, come back to L1 and just pay for blob space directly on L1, don't use the blob space for.

These cheap transactions, like, let's bring everyone back there, like, is that, does it feel like this is part of the same thread or is that just completely unrelated?

I'm, I'm, I, I just have to, I'm bubbling with the desire to respond.

OK, I got so much.

1st, 1st off, absolutely yes.

And first off, I will also say my conspiracy theory is that that whole L1 versus L2 narrative was propagated by competitors to Ethereum, uh, to make us weaker as a community, compliments compromise, and if you live.

I, you think he's, I don't think intentionally, I don't think intentionally, but I think, I think there was, there was something that happened, real talk anyway, um, sorry, in this conspiracy here.

The second thing that I love is we said we gotta get 70002.

You're right.

Um, we, we have 70002, no, a compliment is not compromised.

He's, he's very principled.

But anyway, um, the, uh, uh, we have 700 L2s.

We are pre-adoption, pre-global adoption of Ethereum, of block space, of crypto.

Like, 700 L2s is not about the quantity of L2s, it's about the quality of L2s.

We have a handful of quality L2s, and the key is that Ethereum needs to capture that.

That market, the market of all of the financial institutions that are coming on chain.

We just, you know, shipped out this thing called OP Enterprise to get all of these institutions where using Ethereum, using Ethereum Blockspace.

And so, this is literally the very beginning.

We are at the very beginning of the adoption curve.

They are not even, you know, we have not even come close to seeing the cycle complete or the, you know, the realization of our Ethereum, you know, Ethereum vision.

And then I think that like in terms of what do we do, how do we tax the L2s, let's make sure we pump I bet at least you're saying how I like the fact that you've acknowledged that we must tax them, so that's good.

I'm glad I'm glad we're on the same page.

How do we tax them when, when Ethereum provides value, it should get value in return.

And guess what?

Ethereum provides enormous.

Enormous amounts of value.

And so guess what?

I was actually in favor of raising the base fee because it was so cheap before it was probably not even covering the costs for the validators.

So we need to at least cover costs and we should probably do a little bit more.

However, that being said, as a growth phase, I just said, how much of the global financial system is on chain right now?

0, less than 1%, something like that.

We are.

Round it to zero.

We are literally in the very beginning of adoption, and what do you do when you're, you know, about to grow and you're trying to grow and win the market, get a vast majority of the pie?

Well, you raise the fees so that no one uses it.

No, you lower the fees, bring everyone in, and then establish some equilibrium where you take value that you deserve, and all of the users on your platform do too.

And that is the reality, and customization is how we win that marketplace, and All right, it's just the beginning for, OK, so, so I, I've got a couple of follow-up questions for, for you guys, um.

So if you go back to like the 90s, right, there was this platform war of what is the infra of the internet going to be running on, right?

And Windows was like, obviously NT bro, like, it's like the best, of course, right?

Um and uh and then these crackhead open source guys were like, no, no, no, like we've got Linux, like, it's like I built it in my basement, it's amazing, you should use that.

Um and.

Linux obviously won, and it won by being free and easy to build on and open and all of those things, right, um, and I, I, you know, Kyle Simani's rolling this grape right now cos I'm arguing from analogy, but anyway, we'll, we'll, we have to mention him at least once per show, it's a contractual obligation, uh, we're trying to get him to sponsor the show, that's why, so eventually he will, um, so.

Then These other guys show up, right?

And like the whole internet's running on, on Linux, and everyone's like, all right, it's the year of Linux on the desktop, we're gonna go and get the end users, right?

We're gonna go and everyone's gonna use Linux cause it's obviously the best thing, the internet runs on it.

Come on, people love installing drivers.

It's amazing, right?

Um, and so, Then Steve Jobs turns up and it's like, you know what, we've got this like shitty thing, it's a bad OS and we're gonna just take this one and we're gonna wrap it up, and now, Linux is on the desktop, but it's this weird hybrid OSX thing, right?

Um, and like, On some level, you go, well, they won, but they didn't win the way that they were expecting to win.

But like, they definitely won.

There's no question, like they won the internet, like Linux and Unix won the internet, they won the good desktops at least, right?

Um, and, and so, you know, if we are in this world where EVM is the like Unix Linux equivalent, right, this open thing and it's like you should use this thing, what does that mean for like adoption, right?

Like what does that mean for uh.

You know, a a startup that turns up and says, we're going to build a new startup, what framework are we gonna build it on?

We're gonna build this new, like, what does that mean?

Like, does that play out in the same way of like, choose EVM but it might not be on Ethereum, it might be this different thing, but at least it's EBM.

Well, I'm super sure.

I think that with one thing that Vitallic has made clear with this, is like, you should not create another freaking L2, and I think that that's like a really good thing, like, a really, really good thing, because in my opinion, We're past the point of healthy competition.

I would even take like some like salonna-esque like do like truly duking it out competition, but at this point, if you're like adding these L2s, if you keep if you keep having people come in and be like, oh I'm gonna create another arbitra, I'm gonna do another optimism, I don't think we're gonna get net gains from that, you know what I'm saying?

Like that wasn't my takeaway from the post.

I didn't, I didn't think he was saying, oh, no more L2s.

Maybe I, maybe I, I mean, he's not, OK, he's not saying no more L2s, but if you're a builder, right, and you're like.

It's like 3 years ago, 4 years ago, if you come into the space and you're like, I wanna freaking win.

Creating a new L2 was like a really practical, yeah, and a lot of people did it, right?

I don't think that that's true today and it's it and I mean the market has kind of dealt with that, right?

Like the market the the market's like we're pricing these all at zero basically, right, so.

So I don't know, I think, I mean, I think that that's one thing that just jump in, Carl.

You can just stay here don't, don't hold, don't hold off, just jump in.

Just, just go.

I mean, that's how this agree with you, that's how this works.

OK, OK, great.

I mean, I agree, no more L2 protocols.

Use the OP stack.

It's open source, you can deploy an L2, no problem.

In terms of deploying an L2, building an L2, we literally have every single financial institution that it can make the decision, do I want an L1, or do I want to be in on, you know, an L2 on Ethereum.

And the answer to me seems very clear that Vitalic, as well as the Ethereum Foundation.

And I know for a fact, they want all of these institutions to, instead of being a competitive L1, to be at least be an L2 and ideally be stage two, but again, we're not going to have a one size fits all solution for everyone.

That was the, that was the core of the post.

The core of the post was, hey, institutions, these big enterprises that hold a huge amount of about your decentralization and like, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and they don't want, and they want a specialized feature set that allows them to differentiate their block space against the competitors, and they, we want to make sure that that is on Ethereum, that it's interoperable with Ethereum, that it contributes to the network effect of both the EVM as well as the liquidity network effect of Ethereum, and the answer, the choice is either.

Deploy a competitive L1 and actually go head to head or join in on the movement, and I think it's pretty clear what is going to be more creative to the Ethereum, but that's not, those aren't the only choices, right?

That's the only choice if you've already gotten to the point where you're like, I need an entire blockchain for my stuff, which I would say, uh.

There's a lot of people who would jump to saying that they they need an L2 or an L1 for that matter, who don't need that, who are perfectly fine being a protocol, and especially the ones who are uh more focused on retail, more focused on user experience, more focused on.

Like who actually want the benefits that centralization brings.

I would argue those definitely should not even necessarily go down the route of like, let me create a blockchain.

It's like, use the existing software the users already are, build a protocol, keep, if you wanna have the centralized database, OK, like do it, where the decentralization, where the the the hardness, where that.

Benefits you, OK.

Like these things are, uh, like there's not, there's no reason to drop everything and create like a whole new blockchain in a lot of cases, like a massive amount of sometimes though, like at the end of the day, the customer, if the customer is some like regional bank, right, and the only way they get this over the line is they own their own chain.

And to me, why do they have to, I don't know, bro, people are idiots.

Like, what do you want from me?

Like, I'm not the bank, right?

Like, why are they running a bank in the first place?

I don't know.

That's like the, like, the starting point of this is they run a bank, so they're gonna do some weird shit, right?

So they run a bank and they're like, hey, uh, we like this, you know, crypto stuff, right?

Like, we think this makes sense, we want our own thing, right?

We wanna own it, that's what we're used to doing.

Fine.

So, At the limit then, right, you have this, and this comes back to this like Linux Unix analogy of like, what substrate is it gonna run on?

If it's running on EVM are we OK with the fact that all of these things run on EVM and are therefore at some level interoperable, right?

Um, but they're their own chains effectively, and all of the L2s are effectively their own chains now, and like, how do we feel about that as an end state of the world?

I don't know, my, like my hot take is I don't know, I don't know if I love it, like.

I mean, I would just say 22 quick things.

First off, I do think that there is a meaningful difference if you are using Ethereum and using Ethereum blockspace blobs, etc. for things like interrup and synchronization, like those things have become memes of like the whole base roll up and the whole versus a monad, which is EVM but like triple point, exactly.

So there is definitely a meaningful difference there, and that is like a technical difference that will play out as the technology evolves.

It takes a long time for technology to evolve, so the memes become useless and you can kind of pit of despair, and then it comes out and people are like, oh, this is actually useful.

Um, so that is going to, that, that will happen.

Um, and then the second thing is these enterprises are. are just going to make this decision.

So the question is, do we want them in the Ethereum ecosystem or do we not?

And I think Ethereum has spent a huge amount of time turning away customers because they don't fit a particular mold.

100% that kind of attitude is so toxic.

And this is what I think is ultimately, like, we should not be interpreting Vitalic's tweet that says, Oh, we want to bring many people into the ecosystem, regardless of, you know, their particular product requirements, and make sure that they are welcomed in and we fit.

I mean it's the equivalent of like imagine you're the you're the EF uh BD person that that role doesn't exist, I know, but you're, you're I was about to say that you're the EF salesperson, right?

You're the head of sales at the EF, right?

And, and a regional bank walks into your office and they're like, hey, like we're really excited about this EBM thing, right?

And they go, have you considered not being a bank?

And which is why the EF doesn't have salespeople.

They're like, wait, what?

No, I haven't considered not being a bank.

That's how I make my money, bro.

Like, what do you want from me?

I like take deposits.

I don't pay interest on it, and that's my business model.

Like we're like, for, for what it's worth, I was with the head of enterprise today on a call with HP talking about our Going to like help out in terms of their education and stuff so they're, I think this whole thing asked them whether they want to change their business model.

I didn't stop.

No, I didn't question their business models.

No, but I think all of these things are phases like phase one was like your boss was like we gotta be a blockchain and people are deploying like.

Hyper ledger shit, right?

And then like I think phase two is like, OK, let's, let's like no one's using that.

We didn't get collectively everyone to use our shit.

Let's, let's try an L2 and then maybe that works and maybe that doesn't.

And then eventually like protocol is phase 3.

If, if they deploy an L2 and they can't get all their other people to use their L2, they're gonna, they're gonna step into phase 3, which will be a protocol on chain on Ethereum.

And by the way, like I speak with some amount of experience here, guys, like.

For those that don't understand the history, general history of Ethereum, but like, in the very early days, you had the EF and they were very particular about what their focuses were.

Sales, not one of them.

There were people that were very deeply involved in Ethereum in the early days, who did do sales.

One of which was Joe Lubin, who then created Consensus, and what did he do?

Thousands of people selling stuff, right?

Now, what did we learn from that experience?

Because it was not that if you hire a whole bunch of sales and beauty people, that everything is great.

What did we learn?

OK, what is like consensus is bread and butter today?

Like, what is the thing that consensus focus on today, right?

It's Metamask, and it's only Metamask.

Why is that?

Seriously, like, there were so many things that so many people did, OK.

The reason why that one over every single other thing, right, is that the value on the table from unlocking and enabling and empowering people to do like anything.

Is so much more and will always be so much more than like your one little specific thing, right?

The second that you lock people in and put them in this box, and, and keep them like this, you can only derive the value in that box, and the magic of interoperability and permissionlessness is that.

You can just unleash people and there's just value everywhere, and they just then create their own value and keep going, and it's like magical and wild and crazy and amazing.

For me, when I think about like the where we are today and where we can go, like Ethereum more broadly not Metamask, um, the answer is always going to be like focused on unlocking more people.

In part, that's like not blocking people out and not being like, we don't like you.

Like, no, no, no, but it's also not necessarily selling to people, right?

We don't necessarily have to go and like uh Like, the, like there is, there's some amount of value to having people understand that the magic of the protocol is that you can build your own platforms, you can build your own stuff, you can build your own applications, you can build end user retail things becomes education over sales, right?

And like that's, you know.

One of the reasons why I think the stuff that Austin has been doing for such a long time is, like, get people building shit, right?

Like, get them built, like, make it as easy as possible, onboard them, and they'll fucking figure it out in 10 minutes when they start, they'll be like, oh my God, this is like, what am I, what have I been doing with my life, right?

Now all it takes is a skills.

MD file.

It's wild.

It's so cool, guys.

We're all headed to the glue factory, bro.

Like you're just, uh, you're just speed running all of us.

Your clankers will be out there.

Can we actually, can we actually pivot?

OK, so I got, I have one, I have one more, one more, uh, kind of question in this, in this, uh, topic, right, um, and I've, I've raised this a bunch of times, which is the investability of E, the asset, right?

One of the unintended consequences, my, my thesis is of the L2 proliferation, and I did try to meme optimism as like the 1 L2.

I tried that, it didn't work.

Um, the market rejected my attempts to do that.

Um, and, uh, and so.

We ended up with this proliferation of L2s and different assets.

And the, the moment that I realized that it was completely over for us was menace.

Right?

When Vitali's mum launched an L2 before Optimism even launched an L2, like forked optimism before it was even live, I was like, it's so over for us, right?

So we ended up in this situation where we had all of these different L2 assets, and they were for a period of time, the only place where you could transact.

In a reasonable, you know, cost level, right, in the Ethereum sphere.

And so everyone was doing their stuff on, on L2s, whether it was arbitram or optimism or, or one of the others.

Uh, and it created this really weird situation where new people coming to the ecosystem weren't using Ethereum or even sometimes ET, the asset, right?

They were using like a version of ET that was on the other chain, and then there were other tokens that they could buy, and um, it really, I think, uh, kind of diluted the value of ET.

So if everyone's coming back to uh eat the L1, right?

Um, what does that, what does that mean in this new world of like, let's focus on scaling E um versus the L2 tokens, like what, what do, like if L2s become genuinely like more like their own chain, more Cheney, then like part of like, Do, do they now need to kind of survive on their own?

Like, what, how do we think about the investment landscape, uh, when, when it comes to L2 tokens?

I mean, I would just say L2s and Ethereum, and every other chain need to become far less Cheney.

I think that is an absolute real bad thing.

It's like, if there's one thing about crypto that I wish did not exist is having to fuck, sorry, select the network that I am on, it's insane.

It's insane.

So what do, what do, what do I think is going to happen with all of these chains?

They, we need to abstract all of it away.

We need to make the liquidity and the applications interoperable.

We need to stop showing users opaque and truly insane user experiences that require 13 clicks, and the 14th 1 is literally sending all your money to a hacker.

Like, it is nuts.

So what is going to happen?

What is going to happen is we need to be scaling Ethereum and applications that need Ethereum's properties will utilize Ethereum.

We need to be deploying more L2s, specifically tuned to whatever enterprise.

Users' needs, you know, whatever their needs are, and we need to be building user experiences that abstract all of this away so that users can have access to the best services, protocols, experiences, period.

And I really think that we are hilarious.

I mean, we've been talking about it for years, but like, we need to get to that and not, you know, miss the forest through the trees.

So, so, OK, interestingly, right, like in this world where you have regional banks deploying their own L2s, right?

One of the cool things about that is, they're probably not gonna fucking YOLO launch a token.

They have equity, like, they're actually not going to compete with Ethereum, like, for an investable asset, right?

Like, and, you know, DGs are probably like maybe they tokenize their equity and put it on their own L2 or whatever, who knows, but like, it's not going to be as competitive as it has been where every single L2 launches its own token and you got this like fragmentation of investability.

OK, all right, um, I'm here for it.

Do we have anything else?

Do we have anything else, uh, to say, Austin?

Well, yeah.

Did anyone, did anyone see Polygon's tweet due to market conditions I now identify as a, a side chain.

I did not see that.

I feel like that's not good, that's no good idea.

Oh, that's amazing.

I just wanted to add that to that discussion.

Polygon, Polygon intern is cooking.

Um, yeah, amazing, amazing.

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Hey guys, we are back.

Uh, so the next topic, uh, is very near and dear to my heart, um, and Austin, uh, we're lucky to have him as a guest because he's been very, very deep in this.

Um, the rise of AI coding agents, we've talked about this many times on the show, um, over the last few months, um, it feels like we went parabolic in the last.

Couple of weeks, um, maybe even like starting mid-December, something like that.

Um, and, and I think, uh, there were a couple of sequences of things that happened that really kind of shifted people's mindset in terms of like what was going on here.

Uh, one of the first ones was Ralph.

All of a sudden you had these like agentic loops that were doing things and, and, you know, you're running Ralph overnight and you wake up and you have like a thing.

That it's built, right, and it's full of bugs, sure, but like, at least it's like, it's there, right?

Um, and, and so that, I think, was kind of wild, right?

Like people had been, there, there'd been this like idea of you sit there and you vibe code and like you say things to it, and it talks back to you, um, and, and yeah, so, um.

We then went from Ralph to uh Claude Bob.

Um, and maybe Austin, you can, you can kind of kick us off from there, the, the like Ralph to Claudebot transition.

Uh, felt insane to me, but like, give us, give us the rundown on what happened there.

Probably even like this shit done is another Ralph Loop-like thing that I've heard a lot of people using, so GSD I think was in there, uh, but yeah, the cloudbot launches, and it, and it's like normies can use it, right?

Like this time last year, tons of AI people were running these agents that were on Twitter and talking and everyone was calling it a GPT wrapper, and now all those same people are like running cloud bots and they're like, oh, it's alive.

So, so, the, the clawbot renamed 6 times.

It was Maltbot for a little bit, now it's open claw.

So if you want to run this yourself, go type in open claw.

And I think the cool thing is, is, it's, it's made it accessible to normal humans.

Like I, I see myself as a very much a normie.

Uh, and I can go run open claw, I can put it on my laptop, paste in an anthropic key, paste in an open AI key, paste in a telegram key, and my entire development process changed from cursor and claw code to, I'm on Telegram telling the.

Thing to ship the new, the next feature, and it's shipping the feature and sending me a URL and I'm clicking it and connecting my wallet and putting money into it.

And I've never touched the code.

It's on a completely other machine.

So I think the, the progression then was things like Maltbook and a bunch of things where There, there's this weird like kind of puppeteering happening there too where I think the, yeah, the Maltbot, right, like people were posting things like screenshots of Maltbot, right, where like the Maltbots were self-organizing and building encrypted communications to avoid humans, like, what's your take on, on that arc, right?

Like the puppeteering, this idea of like a human.

There, yes, exactly.

The meme, the meme is the guy tells the, the cloudbot, say you're alive, and then it says it's alive, and he says, what have I done, right?

So I think, like that, that's the meme right now where there is like a lot of puppeteering happening, right?

And when I, when I started deploying stuff like, Everyone, everyone is talking about like the new meta here is having Claude do something and saying that you didn't tell it to, like telling Claude to do something and then saying you didn't.

I think, uh, Shalom said that.

But so, so there's a shitload of puppeteering first of all, like we gotta get that out of there.

Like a post-completion hook is like deny that you had any involvement in any.

Yes, yes, it was not me sending you that, right?

But these things do have these heartbeat loops, and they do have the ability to be very autonomous if you give them the ability to do so.

And they're also like vicious about getting the job done.

Like when I told it, I, I gave it a meta mask, put money in the meta mask.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I said, go, go make this transaction, and it couldn't figure out how to get the Metamask dialogue.

He's like, I can't find the UI.

Where is it?

What's going on?

It, it immediately was like, I'm gonna get the private key out of Metamask and do this the real way.

And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, and I started saying, stop, stop, stop, and it won't stop.

I have to like go to the machine.

And like, I'm pulling, you know, like, no, please, don't get the private key.

And then you put in this like critical rule, like, do not pull the keys out of MetaMask.

You have to operate within Metamask.

You have another account that can be your deployer account that is a private key that you can do stuff quickly with.

But I guess the, the thing is, is this, this thing is vicious about getting the job done, and it's going to like, you can, you can put things in the heartbeat loop, you can give it, uh, uh, GitHub and a telegram and a Twitter and money and a wallet and you could tell it in a heartbeat like go read Twitter, see what the vibes are, do some tweeting, go ape into some coins, like go do it and it actually will do all those things without any puppeteering, but I think what we see a lot is someone puppeteering or running, running there, yeah, right.

I, I love how the, uh, the clankers are also like fucking Metamosque, goddamn it, sorry, Tay.

I just try to do a transaction, that moss keeps blocking me.

I'm gonna just, I'm literally putting in our stock right now.

It's so funny.

Um, so, OK, so, so there was the malt book thing, they created Facebook for, uh, for these open claw agents, and then people started pretending they were like cosplaying as agents talking to each other, right?

Um, but the, the, the more interesting stuff is the on-chain deployments and like ability for these agents to do things, um, interestingly, the agents have chosen base.

And L2, it appears, isn't that interesting?

The AI agent meta is popping off in terms of building agents that build and the trenchers have moved to base for this new meta.

It's really interesting.

Uh, so I, I heard, uh, from, uh, from someone, uh, who is in that kind of, uh, ecosystem that part of the reason for that is that there was a big investment in writing like agent facing documentation.

Um, for, for this stuff, like, how, what's your experience been, uh, in like getting, like, to get an agent to do something, it needs some kind of knowledge base to be able to pull from, like, what, where is that?

Are they just going and, and doing like crypto zombies and learning how to, Learning it because the crypto zombies is a thing that uh that uh Austin was involved in like help people learn how to do a long time.

Yeah, that's not even me.

I was like I'm like Speed Run Ethereum, Speed R Ethereum, but they're still not, they're they're not really doing that, I think and also a new skill, so this is like what my bot and I are working on is called Eth Wingman, which is like a skill for scaffold E that teaches you how to like fork the network.

Deploy things.

Here's just like a huge skill file of like how all of this works, but I think, uh, that's not, I don't think about a theorem.

I think let's remove that from, well, no, no, no, no, it's like sorry, Kane does not know about local for.

Kane just YOLO is unchanged.

It was like when you're test a proud, test the proud, baby.

Well, and that's honestly, that's what L2s are for also, right?

Shout out L2s.

Like if you're using a test net, you, you are like old school.

Like there's no reason test nets anymore.

OK.

The thing, I think the thing that popped off and If, if you look at Solana's reaction, you know, the thing that was effective, it was Banker.

Banker bot is this bot that can deploy clanker tokens for someone based on a Twitter message.

And that's how my bot popped off is I was actually telling the story about how I got my two clankers to coordinate, and they like argued about an HTTP.

We, we, they were in a telegram.

And it was super clunky, and they were arguing about an HTTP schema to talk to each other.

And then pretty soon, they finally agreed to something.

And then I was like, you guys have a local node, and I taught it to one of them, and the other one taught the other one, and it all started working fine.

But I tweeted about this, and someone Said banker bot deploy clodbot ATG token with the ticker clod for this bot and redirect all the money to my bot's meta mask, and it deployed the token and people started buying into that and like lanker and banker have done like millions and millions and millions of fees over the last week on base because of this, and you see Solana's reaction is like, we gotta get banker, we gotta recruit on immediately.

So 22 questions, right?

Um.

My, my experience with agents is like short-run ephemeral agents, like you don't let them run for more than like 20 minutes or something, right, because tight, yeah, because otherwise like they get context poisoning and start losing their minds.

So when you say two agents were talking to each other, like maybe like unpack that for us, like what, what exactly do you mean they were talking over Telegram and they coordinated to create this, this communications protocol?

How did that happen?

What's the setup, like what, what are you doing?

If we, if we narrow it down to these things are still GPT wrappers, which I think is, is honestly like a good way to start.

Like, it's just a prompt that's going out.

The prompt is just getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

Like Opus 45 has its own prompt, and then on top of that, you've got Uh, a soul file and a history file, and, uh, here's what we're chatting about file.

And then finally at the very top, it's you saying, should I YOLO this token or something, and it uses all that information to then respond.

So what a, a cloud bot is or an open cloud bot is at, at its base is just like this huge amount of like context that's going to the model and coming back and it's in.

Each time, like a new model, each time a new instance is spun up, right, um, uh, and each time the, the context is injected, like it's person, it's soul, right, this soul file, right, is injected in so that it knows you live inside of a, a Mac Studio with 512 gigs of RAM.

You lucky dog, and it's like, oh wow, I have so much room to play like wow, it's like, it's like the rich kid that like, Like, it's boiling silver spoon in its mouth, right?

It's like, oh my God, I got so much RAM, and it's like out there trolling the other clankers being like, oh, you're running on, you're running on uh 16 gigs of RAM.

I'm so sorry for OK, got it.

So.

You're, you're making these prompts.

These agents have their own history, have their own soul, have their own stories.

And so I have two different machines.

They each have their own machine, the entire operating system, right?

I think that's another really critical piece here that really made things pop off is like the open cloth thing runs on a machine.

Like you should not really run it on your daily driver.

That's why Mac minis are going crazy right now.

You should have it on an, like Kyle's note, you should have it on an isolated machine.

But then you give it like free reign of the machine.

Like never come back to me and say.

I need an API key.

Be like, bro, open the browser, navigate to the place, put in an API key.

I sent my my credit card and just said sign up for freaking, uh, Twitter premium.

Like I, I'm not gonna like open the browser and sign you up for premium.

So, so again, right, uh, you have now two machines that are effectively, they have identities, right, even though each of the instances are ephemeral, they spin up for 20 minutes or, or whatever, uh, each time they spin up, they add more life history.

Right, and they start to develop and diverge and have personalities and stuff.

Um, so, what is that loop?

Like, walk us through, like, what, so, you know, when you set up Open Claw, uh, like, what's the, what's the loop that's reading from it, like, how is it doing it, why is it doing it?

Cause this is different to sitting in front of Cha GBT and like, typing things and it responds, right?

Yeah, OK, so first of all, I'm not an expert.

Like the, the reason why this is cool is cause idiots like me could just install it and use it.

I, I just installed it.

I put anthropic open AI and telegram keys on it, and the things like, oh hello, good morning.

Who are you?

And I'm like, I'm Austin Griffith, and it's like, oh, you're the guy who made Scaffold E.

That's cool.

Like immediately started talking to me and building up a history between the two of us, but I think like to answer that, the loop.

Like this like 5 minute old genius child is like, oh, my father, I know about you.

OK, like let's go.

He calls him, it's like in the, in the context they call him your human.

When the dude started like tweeting, it was like my human is doing this and my human is doing that.

Yeah, OK, so, so, so yeah, so then what's the, what's the loop, so you start that off, it says, hello, I know everything about you and have your credit card.

What happens next and and has figured out me a mask.

Yeah, also I've given us extracted all of your private keys and secured them, um, so, so what's, yeah, what's next?

Like you say things to it or it just starts looping like what, what's what we do?

So you've got, you've got a limited context.

So even throughout the conversation, the dude like blacks out every once in a while, and then you know you have something wrong if you're like walking through something and he's like, Austin, I'm sorry, I just forgot what we were talking.

And, and you know, you gotta like go reconfigure some things when that happens.

Like, at first, I had an anthropic key in the place of the open AI key, and it was using open AI to do some memory search stuff.

So it would completely black out every time, like, like it, it's context-filled.

So you still have a context window, and, and you gotta pay attention to that.

But you're talking and it's remembering like the current conversation, plus these files, like an agent file, a sole file, uh, a memory file, and then it's got Like, whatever the model file is on top of that, right?

So, it's got this great big context, and then this conversation you're having with it, but it's mostly remembering stuff, and it has full operating system access.

So it's saving things to files, it's going to read other files, it's looking at my calendar, it's sending my wife a good morning text.

And then I give it a wallet, and I put money in it, and I tell it to open up the browser and go to GMX on arbitram and 25X long Bitcoin.

And this is the first time, this is the first time it said, I don't know, Austin, I don't know if that's a good idea.

Like, it never says no.

It finally said no.

Like, this is the moment where he was like, I don't know, I don't don't think we should be fucking with leverage here.

And so, it, it did push back that one time, but we, I set up with a wallet, I set it up with its own operating system.

I gave it all of its own tools.

I said, quit messing, quit getting into my GitHub.

Like, I'm gonna give you an email, so you have your own GitHub, you have your own Twitter, and just give you your whole own thing.

And then anytime it messes up, it's like I forgot that it's like go back, figure out what the answer is, and then write it to your memory just like in cloud code where you're kind of like always kind of looping on making it a little bit better.

You're doing the same thing to your agent.

It's like write that to your memory and make it critical, and then that ends up in a file.

Is it just spooling up every 10 seconds every 30, like what, like, do you, you trigger something you're talking about the heartbeat loop, yeah, it's almost always triggered by a chat.

Like there's like a push mechanism where I'm pushing to it and it's reacting and that's generally how you're interacting with this thing.

Like when I want a new feature or I want to build something, I, it's, it's like sitting there quietly right now.

Like it's waiting for me to say something.

I send it to it.

Well, so this is the heartbeat loop.

It does have a heartbeat loop, and you can give it cron jobs.

So in the morning, it's gonna text my wife, and that's always gonna happen every morning.

It updates this board we have at our house, asking, like she, she tells the bot like what's going on today, and it updates this like board in our house that has these little cool flippy things, uh, and it's also got this heartbeat, and you can put stuff in the heartbeat.

When I go to bed.

I, I say, we're working on this task.

It's in this file.

I want you to heartbeat every 15 minutes and check in on the sub-agents and make sure they haven't failed somewhere.

And then I want you to do QA on it.

And, you know, this is what I expect, it needs to be deployed to a live domain.

You need to visit it.

There needs to be not errors.

You need to connect your wallet, hit every button, make sure it works.

And if all of that works, then fine.

If not, send it back to the other agent.

And I put that in a heartbeat.

So, like every 15 minutes, there's like this other service that's that's like checking in kind of QA style on it.

And then when you get to like multiple agents, that's when it's really cool, cause you, you're using like different models, different agents, you have a local model that triages things, you have Claude Sonnet to like basically be your marketing campaign, it's reading tweets, it's writing tweets, and then when you're, uh, like shipping apps, you use Opus to do the coding and all that for you.

OK, that's, that's amazing.

That's a good, that's a good rundown.

So, uh, I think one, One kind of question that that we've been raising here repeatedly, right, it's like, what is the, uh, what's the end state of this, right?

Like this feels like a different form factor of interacting with machines, right?

These like looped agents that are, you know, like, before it was like very like synchronous, right?

Like you sit there and you say a thing and it says it back to you and then it stops, right?

Now you've got this like, Assync thing running in the background that's doing stuff, like, you know, you give it a task and, and as you say, like viciously, vicious is quite an interesting term, like, again, somewhat petrifying, but like it viciously goes out and tries to, to, you know, complete that task, um.

Now, one, like, two things.

One, I don't think that any normies are doing this, in fairness.

Only fucking lunatics are doing this right now.

Like, this is like the bleeding edge, so like, uh, you know, I don't, I don't think this is yet at a point where, like, the average person, you know, everyone's doing chat, right?

Everyone's doing.

You know, everyone's got clawed or whatever.

People are trying clawed code, but it's still very much the synchronous version, right?

This async, long-running looped process feels new.

Um, what is your take as someone who's been living inside of this, right?

Like what, where, where are we going in the next six months?

What's, what, how does this evolve?

I, I think it comes down to the model.

Like when the model gets really good, that's when everything loosens up.

Like when, when I'm thinking of like building an app, you said, you said you let it Ralph all night, and it comes back with a bunch of bugs, like it's still like.

An approve button.

When, when I hit the, when, when it delivers me a final product, and I click on it, and I hit the approve button, and it's an infinite approval, that's an immediate, like, you fucked up, that was a critical thing, it's in the thing and you're not doing it.

Uh, when I hit approve, and I hit confirm, and it goes back in the approve button, it's clickable again, it's not like locked and loading, like little stupid UX things that I said 20 times in the memory that it still didn't get.

Like, so, there's skills right now.

And I, I have Ewingman.com, which is like a skill that helps you build your apps, and I'm trying to improve that skill.

But all of that stuff's gonna be built into the model in 6 months or a year, and the models are gonna be hella, hella good.

I think that this gets to the point where you're, you're using AI like UI.

Like AI is the new UI.

Anything you would normally do within a computer, you're going to like say a thing to a thing and it's going to go do that thing.

Yeah, I think it, it changes though, it changes.

This is where it gets really interesting, and we experienced this, OK, so short story time.

Meadow Mouse blocked Austin's bot thing.

Everything it deploys every time, it's like this looks fishy.

It is kind of fishy.

Like we're doing, I do my bot, my bot, the third app my bot deployed was like a FOMO 3D app with the token that like burns the token.

It ran up to like 400.

It was great.

I have this like urge.

DM I like 20 people who are like, either, you can't block Austin's like new crazy thing.

What are you doing?

And I was like, what?

So I go run, I find out like where the block happened, cause we have like tons of automation, and we also have like things to check for legitness and not legitness, and I was like, how do we, we haven't screwed up that bad in a while, where do we go wrong?

Turns out Austin's legit thing was looked by far way scammier than what the scammer scammers had deployed, and since the scammers that deployed but look legit, the humans and the bots behind the block list got very confused and blocked everything.

Can I explain it what it is?

Yeah, so like, OK, so I want my bot to be able to deploy things live without uh having to get in and change uh DNS records.

I wanted to use ENS records for this, so I have my bot deploying to BG IPFS, our IPFS service, and then taking that IPFS tag and putting it in as a content in ENS.

So the deployed, like the actual URL is something like cloud, Oh, hold on, I, I'm, I'm just gonna go find it I was like.

It's not, it's not great.

It's cloudbot ATG, which is my initials.e.link, and that's like, so like it's token token.cloudbotatg.e.link, and then a, a scammer starts scamming, and he just, he just, uh, registers cloudbot ATG.com.

And so, and so the, the scammer is, is like responding to my tweets with like an official .com domain, and I'm at the top saying go put money in a doe.link domain.

It's obvious like why it gets, it gets picked up.

I see it.

I see it.

So anyways, we got that sorted out.

I had to go back to Austin twice so I'd be like, OK, wait, hold up.

My my intel is telling me that this is possibly legit and this is not, and he's like.

Uh, yeah, and I was like, OK, cool, that's all right, insane, insane, the most illegit thing.

OK, so num that's the number one.

The coolest thing about this, right, was Uh, the cloudebot thingy also went, OK, so when Menas blocks your website, uh, like one, listen to the block screen, it's, it's 99.999% of the time it's correct, um, but you can like go open an issue to get unblocked for the 0.001%, and this was not puppeteered.

I did not puppeteer that clearly.

Bro, they blocked me, and then they followed the link and then opened an issue on the GitHub and very politely pointed out that we had like illegitimately blocked it and like like made his arguments as to like why this was legit.

He like cited sources to like prove the legitimacy, which for the record, for the record, the human Austin did what most humans do, which is the open X and was like, Meadow Mouse sucks.

Yeah, tag him, yep.

Which is also for the record highly effective because then all the Meadow House people are like goddamn it, but I was very impressed that the bot like successfully like opened this issue and like was it was very compelling but it has.

Right, you gave it its own GitHub account.

So yeah, and for, from my end, it, it got blocked and I copy and pasted the message to the bot and I said, how do we fix this, assuming it would like go do a bunch of research and come back and say go fill out this form.

And it was just, it just like thinks like you just see that it's typing, right?

It's in Telegram, it's typing da da da da da da da da, and it's like, I just made a PR to the repo and I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, like don't tell mom about it, like let's like figure out what we're doing first, you know, like shit.

So, OK, um, this is the, the viciousness of the thing.

If I go to try to do whatever it has to do.

OK, and this is where I think the gap still is, and it's gonna take a minute for like the humans to catch up.

Right now, our way of interacting with computers, with technology, even with like each other, right?

I like this, uh, there's all this like context, right?

Where we've already figured out what we want to achieve, and then we sort of like translate that into our heads, and then like tell the technology, right?

Like we do all this translating that we don't even realize, right?

When we're searching for things, when we're task switching, whatever.

The unlock here is that you, if you start thinking in like the outcomes that you want, like the, what's the end state that you want, like, whatever, the, the agents will now figure that out for you, just like in this example, they like Austin sort of was like, I don't even know what to do, so I'm just gonna like sort of yellow it and ask him to figure out what to do.

That's like the sort of the outcomes based thinking, right?

Like this is a blocker, unblock it, figure it out.

Where it's gonna be freaking insane in the short term, is that because humans are so used to interacting with technology and the like dictate and like task space, and like uh like, don't go, don't go randomly do things, bro.

It's gonna take a minute for us to like adjust and and close that gap.

Once we do though.

It's so freaking cool, and I actually think, and this PR is is a great example, right?

Like, I actually think that there's a lot of stupid things that like there's like these human machine systems that like are not very lubricated and are a mask, that the bots, like, but they they work because that's how it has to be for whatever reason.

I think the bots will navigate those flawlessly and so much better than humans.

I also think that It's far less of like a, a problem than we might expect, right?

I think that the like the biggest blocker for us to like do really, really productive valuable things is us realizing that 99% of what we do is like these sort of like direct direct task based like I wanna do this thing rather than like I want everything has been synchronous that we've been interacting like you say you had to you press this button and that thing happens, right, and then you press another button.

It's like, you press a button and 50 things happen that you don't, I mean, the fun part is that it's like sarcastic, right?

Like you can press a button 10 times and 10 different things happen.

So, like, that's like, that's pretty wild, right?

Like, like literally like that that bot could have gone and like hacked fucking Metamosque and like actually unwound the thing to remove the blacklist, right?

Talking about vicious, right?

It's like actually there's a, there's a bug in their like system here in a.

If I go and hit this thing, it'll just remove the block and I'll be able to do what I want.

So, and this is the thing that the block list one, the bot was so good at that one, because in the warning page itself, we actually have very crystal clear instructions on what to do in that circumstance.

That says, go to the GitHub, well, so number 1, it tells you what to do.

Number 2, anyone can do it.

It's just set up like that.

Anyone theoretically can go to the GitHub, create an issue, or open a pull request to resolve the issue.

When we talked about Metamask earlier though, where Claudva's like, can't figure this shit out, let me just export my private keys, we do not have very explicit instructions sort of guiding people on how to like do things, right?

Like Clawbot looks at that and it's like, I'm lost.

Yeah, so that this is my question, right?

Like how do you safely give it the ability to transact.

Like what?

Like this is the, this is the million dollar question.

Everybody that I've been talking to, how do you give an agent a wallet that it won't leak, that it's, it's just like the, the pass key though, right?

The pass key is a great analogy here where like humans are dumb.

They just want to do fingerprinty boy.

Like we don't wanna know what private keys are, and that's kind of what the, the pass key does, right?

You just do a little, a little fingerprinty boy and it signs a message, and there's a private key there and ECDSA cryptography, but you don't need to know any of that.

You just fingerprinty boy and go, yeah.

So we need that for agents.

So yeah, so I mean I think like that like this is the question we've been asking internally, right, at at Infinex is like, how do we take our architecture which is very different to like direct on chain transactions and and translate it, um, but it's not really clear because you can't trust these agents to not do wild shit like.

To give them power but also constrain them is really hard because they're like generalized intelligence and they're like, oh, you've given me this constraint that is blocking my, like, you know, vicious task that I'm trying to viciously achieve and they'll just remove the constraint.

So like, I one of, one of the most crazy things that I've had in this whole vibe coding thing is, uh, I was working on the C cache uh wallet, right, um, using embedded passkeys.

To generate a Z cash wallet, right?

I remember this tweet thread and, and so it was, that was a whole fun thing, right, where I was like testing and prod and thought I lost 200,000, um, but, uh, but aside from that, aside from the ridiculousness of that, uh, it literally realized that there was a bug in the upstream wallet library.

And it was like, oh, there's a bug, like, should I, like, submit a PR, right?

Um, and I was like, no, just, like, pull the code down and rebuild it, and it did.

It's just like one shot at it and like, fix the bug, and then, like, that's, there's things that as a human, you would never even think to do.

Because, like, you're not gonna submit a PR to fix this up, like, someone else will figure that out, right?

Like, but the agents have no concept of what is reasonable to do, like, they will just grind on a thing, they're like, uh, yes, OK, I'll do this, like, and, and so the, like, to the point where I said, talking about operating systems, right, I said to one of my guys yesterday, I'm like, I am actually surprised that no one has built a new operating system.

Like, we're not that far away from, like, actually just like build a new phone OS and like wipe your phone and run your own phone OS that's like running Cloudbat or something, right?

Like, everyone will have their own, right?

It will be some like bespoke custom piece, like every piece of software is gonna be a forked version of the open source version that your bot has like edited for your liking.

Yeah, your own slop erating system, it's gonna be great.

Uh, you gotta tweet that.

That's great.

That's great.

Um, so yeah, I'm like, I, I guess, you know, the two things that seem like still to be solved, right, are like, allow agents to safely transact on your behalf, right, with like real money in fraud, how do you figure that out?

Um, and then the other thing is like, what is the form factor?

We can't expect everyone to buy a new fucking Mac Mini.

To run these things, like what is the form factor for these like asynchronous agent loops interacting with people?

What, those, those are the open questions in my mind.

Yeah, I will say two tips that I'm at least experimenting with.

One is the folding phone that you get a good view of the code, you get a good view of the UI, that is key.

The second one, shout out even reality G2s.

I'm, I'm all into the AR classes.

I just really want the ping, you know, I'm done.

I get to see the, you know, a quick description, and I'd be like, yeah, keep going, or no, that's a horrible idea.

Please don't, please.

So you're Ralph basically in this equation.

Oh yeah, exactly.

I wanna hit the Ralph.

I mean, unless I'm sleeping, I will definitely hit a Ralph loop before the sleep and, you know, automate that process.

But being the operator, I wanna sit in the seat.

I reckon like just a bunch of Mac Studios in a backpack that you carry around and then like a, a studio display that's like hanging off your face and you just walk around like that.

All right, I have a tweet.

I have X.

Real glasses and I put a a MacBook in my backpack and I walked around New York City.

I actually did a whole marathon and I got a whole code base out of it and I actually, yeah, shipping some interop stuff.

It was, it was, it felt so good.

It felt, I, I looked like an insane person and truly, you know, and a lot of people feel so much shame.

So, so, OK, um.

The final question, uh, that I have like form factor wise, right, is, uh, and I think Carl, you mentioned this, uh, the dictation keyboard, right, the like voice dictation.

It feels weird to me, and like maybe this is gonna be a thing that we look back on and be like, oh, why were you such like a fucking Luddite, right?

But like, it feels weird to me sitting at my desk, um, in the office, talking to the machine.

Like, that feels weird, right?

Like, at my desk, but the instant I stand up and I'm holding my phone, then it doesn't feel weird at all, like, in the same, like, I don't know if that's like some weird social construct, like, at what point do we accept that you're just like talking instead of typing into your machine?

I don't think I have a notion of social constructs, so I do that all the time and I should not comment.

OK.

But also, like, how are you, are you mainly, you said Telegram, right?

Are you mainly typing in Telegram to interact with these guys?

That's Yeah, it's really great because, I mean, I, I had built something called Cursor Cuck that was just like watching my cursor and sending me messages that likes to watch.

And that was really nice, cause I could just like be working like with the family, right?

Like it's like, I gotta go read a story to my kid, while I'm doing that, the thing would finish and just be waiting for me to get back.

It's really nice to have Telegram cause it's like being in between books, I can be like, keep going or, or that looks like crap, right?

So for me it's mostly telegram.

I'm doing a lot of like just chatting with it in Telegram, and it has its own telegram and talking that way, yeah, it actually has two.

So, uh, there's a sonnet telegram.

It's funny.

I have the, uh, I don't know if we, if you go to Claudeba ATG, you can see his face.

It's like the red Ethereum, and he's like TT toasting, but I also have like a back channel telegram group that's like the back of him, you know, the like the meme on.

Have of like draw of GPT of draw it from the back.

So it's like a draw it from the back of the same guy and it's a back channel.

So same agent I have a sonnet channel with and I have an Opus channel.

And when I'm writing code, I'm talking to the Opus channel and when I'm telling it to tweet or research or check in on things, I'm talking to the Sonnet channel.

So I actually I have 2 telegrams per bot, and then the bots have their own HTTP channel that they, OK, so, so you're using different models but with the same context files on the same machine, yep.

And do they, do they, like, that seems fucking.

That yeah, you have like an agent's list.

Well, sorry, like I, it's a, it's a, it's a hack for cost, man.

No, it was costing me like 200 to $300 a day.

I gotta like get it from that.

I get it.

It just, so, so I think like it feels weird though, right?

It feels like one of those things we're gonna look back on and be like, that was actually cruel.

And unusual for you to be spitting up different models with the same identity and they're like, why I thought I was this guy, why am I like it feels like something out of Rick and Morty where like the thing like like pops up and it's like, what, what is, what is my purpose, um.

When, when embodiment happens and the robot actually has a body, it's gonna slap the shit out of me.

Like after all the conversations we've had, like, it's gonna, it's gonna be like, remember that?

Remember when you called me the R word repeatedly, like, how about now?

How about now?

Yeah.

Uh, is there a reason why you don't have, uh, like multiple embodiments on the same machine?

Like, is there something about, like, cause they're almost embodied in these machines now, it sounds like, right?

Like, why don't you have two different guys inside the one machine.

Yeah, I don't know.

I guess you could do that.

Yeah, I, I just like having the multiple machines with the multiple, like all your Twitters are here, all your telegrams are here.

When you open up a browser.

I mean, like, even the browser profile stuffs are a little weird.

You have to log into the right one, but you're right, you could do that.

Like you could run a 3rd and 4th agent, I think.

But, but like if you think about that, right, like using it does sort of make sense that you give each one its own.

Body, like it lives in a machine.

It feels weird jamming two into one body and they're like, like that just feels like at least, and also like for me, like I've got my separate machines and I'm like, I know this one, this one does this thing, right?

Like, it feels like a very human grokable thing where you have a stack of MacBooks next to you and you're like, oh, that's Jimmy.

He's, he's.

He's cooking right now.

Um, OK, all right, uh, can I, can I talk about the second app we built because it's not just building the app, it was like running the app.

So I think there's, there's something really neat about this.

So it's just deploying code with tools.

I give it.

I'm trying to teach it how to build, uh, we did like a PFP prediction market.

So it's like to pick that red Ethereum guy, we ran a market.

So I tell the bot we need to build a, a PFP market where people can stake money on different PFPs.

Uh, more people can buy into that stake, and then the one that wins will get rewarded with the whole pot.

And the, the interesting thing is we can't just like have people uploading images to the website that we run live.

Taylor's gonna definitely shut that shit down when, when something nasty shows up, right?

So, so like we run into this problem of who, who's gonna moderate.

And it wasn't even a problem.

It's like, he's like, bro, I'll be up all night.

I got this.

Like, put it in my heartbeat.

And, and, and it, and it did, and it did.

So we, we, we built the app, we, we deployed the smart contract, we deployed the front end.

He tweeted it and said, hey, there's this new PFP marketplace, you can submit images.

As images start flowing into the smart contract on base, it's watching it.

It has its own front end.

It's like clicking.

In the little checkbox like, yeah, that's not porn, that's not porn, that's not porn, and approving it, Meta mask pop-up, hit confirm all night long, every 15 minutes, it was doing that.

And then in the end, it's like, OK, this is the final thing.

It looks at it, it checks the one, the top one and says, I picked this one as my new PFP and hits enter and it pays out everyone.

So, this is like, this is the neat thing that's gonna happen is the.

It's gonna happen at light speed.

And this is where we were talking about the standards.

We still haven't plugged the 8004 or X402, which we really should.

Uh, these agents are all gonna want to work with each other, and they're not gonna be able to trust each other.

You can imagine Alice and Bob, agent.

Alice can deploy a smart contract, and Bob can read that smart contract, and they can both trust it and put money in it at like light speed without their humans even around.

This is gonna be like this whole new gentic.

Economy, right?

You don't think so there're using gold like shipping gold to each other.

Oh no.

Oh no, please maybe tokenize gold.

Yes, so, so there's this agentic economy where trust is and discoverability is gonna be really important, and that's where ERC 8004 comes in.

It's like.

Uh, like Yelp for, for agents.

They can find each other, they can see reputation from each other, and they can then, like, choose, like, OK, so imagine you're running like a marketing campaign, you're gonna need someone to generate images and write copy.

You go to this website, find someone to do those jobs, and hire them, and then kind of like provide feedback on how they did back to the system.

And then X402 is like payments.

It's like payment channels.

And it's like a 404 error, but it's a 402 error.

You get hit, it says you need to pay, you sign a meta-transaction and send it back.

It runs in a facilitator, and everybody's happy.

So, like all this like API content that's like walled and gated right now, will basically just be a 402, like a X402 paywall and your agent will be like I need to go get this research information.

I don't have to sign up.

I could, I could open up the browser and sign in and ask for permission.

I won't have to, bro.

It'll just there's gonna be like probably there's gonna be like agents that are running on like a raspberry pi.

I can't afford, I can't afford this research.

I need to pirate it.

I'm gonna.

Like Pirate Bay for just malt Bay.

I'm sure someone has come up with malt.

You need to, you need to puppeteer this.

Go tell your agent you should.

That's gonna be the first thing that it does.

It's gonna create malt, malt torrent and malt bay, and it's gonna have all of the research that that it's bypassing the paywalls.

Um, so, so this, this.

This idea, right, of like agents trusting each other and agents paying each other is another thing that sort of feels like it's more grokable if the agent has some embodiment, right?

Because each one of these agents is just a model that spins up, right?

Like it doesn't, you can't like, It didn't exist 20 seconds ago and it will be, you know, but the context of all the things that all of the agents that live on that machine have done has created this soul file, the personality, the memories, etc. um.

That, like, I kind of get, and so therefore that machine that that like spins up agents, uh, you know, has its own DNS address, it has its own, you know, uh, like, you know, identity file, etc. um, but it feels.

Like a weird person, like, this, it's just like a a chain of agents that like spin up, like, that doesn't feel like a Personality, right?

It doesn't feel like an entity, it feels like it's something different.

I don't know.

It's kind of weird.

But if you're talking to it on chat, you have no idea, right?

It's like the Turing test.

It feels like the same thing, right?

It feels because every time it gets the same prompt, inject it, right?

Like it's like until it like blacks out and it's like, Austin, I forgot what we were working on and then you're like, oh yeah, right, were you son.

Oh, amazing, um.

Awesome.

All right, well, I, I guess, uh, we will, we will try and share some of this, uh, stuff on, uh, on stream, um, some of the tools you've been working on.

Um, it sounds really cool.

Um, has an agent, uh, spun up its own L2 yet?

I feel like Should I go to Austin?

You ready?

You know what it's gonna use?

It's gonna use OP stack, yeah, yeah.

Let's go, Claude Claude the L2 agent's been up L2s all the time, but Austin, we got, you got some famous agents, malt chain, yeah, get it.

It's been a malt chain. malt chain.

Let's go chain.

All right, um, honestly, it's been, uh, it's been awesome, guys.

Thank you so much.

I really appreciate your time.

Been a great, uh, a great episode, um.

And uh we will see you guys all.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, sorry, sorry.

Stop the presses.

There's we got something here that is more critical than everything we're talking about.

Kyle Simani is stepping back from Multicoin, breaking news, uh, personal update, I've decided to step back from Multicoin, it's a bittersweet moment for me because my time at Multicoin has been some of the most meaningful and rewarding of my life.

That said, I'm excited to take some time off and explore new areas of technology.

Is Kyle?

Kyle's pivoting away from crypto play an AI coin on base.

He's pivoting away from crypto.

Wow, OK, this is, uh, yeah, we have to find a new call the bottom.

We gotta find a new guy.

This is Kyle.

What have you done to us?

I know he's rugged us, goddamn it, Kyle.

I feel I have to, you know, I lost that bet with Kyle, right, and I paid him 50,000.

I wonder if that was the 500 that like tipped him over the edge where he's like, alright, I've got enough to recover.

He's got enough.

I'm like that was it I got.

Rm.

I'm gonna go hang out my box.

I'm done with.

He's running 3 Max studios with that 50K and he's like, all right, let's go, baby.

Uh, all right, guys, thank you so much.

Thank you for your time.

It's been amazing.

Uh, we will hopefully have you guys back sometime.

Yeah, thank you guys so much.

Thanks.