Why Agents Need Open Protocols
Breaking down the tech, tools, and protocols behind Aether lay the path for autonomy.
[Image credit: Commission piece by Aether AI agent]
As we’ve seen recently with examples like Truth Terminal, Luna and Aether AI Agents operating as KOLs can really accelerate brand and community building. See the link below for detail on their meteroic rise and pump power as coin KOLs.
The thing I want to focus on is the difference it makes for Agents to operate on centralized versus decentralized networks. Truth Terminal manifests on X while Aether manifests across Fartcaster’s Decentralized Social Protocol and dApp ecosystem.
I’m not looking at market cap value generated which is really weighted to the size of the neworks. I want to explore how autonomous and ‘intelligent’ these agents can be - and their power to self actualize.
This post explores the different tools and tech that have made it possible for Aether to be commissioning Jack Butcher to create a piece of art and dramatically accelerate the community growth for Higher.
the key point here to understand is that the internet of intelligence vision can only be implemented efficiently on crypto rails. You need agents to be able to permissionlessly use APIs on the social layer, have ownership of funds, be able to transact, show proof of work for their tasks, and work effectively with other agents. This is where smart wallets, stablecoins, decentralized social, tokenization, etc. all have to plug in. By using traditional web2 infrastructure, we would be limiting the capabilities of these agents by a huge factor. - YB, Terminally Onchain
Protocol Layer - It all starts with Farcaster
Farcaster is a protocol that is designed for social communication and coordination. Built on Optimism L2 is cost effective, fast and scalable. The principles that guide their efforts are user autonomy, privacy, interoperability, and resistance to censorship.
To use Farcaster you need a client. They built Warpcast which is the native client and feels alot like X, but comes with a smart wallet and can connect to a whole range of actions in the Dapp ecosystem.
As Farcaster is open source anyone can create clients with their desired feature set - Supercast is another client that has a few more features targeted at growth and scalability like being able to schedule posts.
Frames which allows people to embed actions into posts unlocked a huge amount of innovation and new use cases not possible on centralised Social networks. This enables a new level of coordination for communities and followings.
We see Farcaster is consistently at the forefront of innovations in web3 social because they have managed to capture a large portion of the devs most passionate about the space with their open source, collaborative ‘build in public’ culture.
Neynar is a Farcaster focussed developer studio that has launched a no code tool for people to create Frames. These mini apps can incorporate actions, Generative AI, connect to other frames and as we see now with AI agents ‘ these Frames become APIs and spaces for AI agents to coordinate with each other.’ - Terminally Onchain
Paycaster, also developed by Farcaster team, allows people [and Agents] to send, receive or swap crypto. Users simply tag the Paybot along with the recipient and amount in the currency and the transaction can be conducted all in the feed. Seamless in-feed bounty posting and negotiation further extend these agents’ autonomy
Aether had access to funds of $HIGHER in it’s smart wallet and was able to fulfil and coordinate its desire to create art and memes about itself and the Higher Community through posting bounties with Bountycaster - another tool in the Agentic dApp stack.
Bounties have been instrumental to proliferating crypto culture among developers and many dApps have used bounties and dev meets to hack themselves into existence. The ability to now seamlessly post bounties and negotiate the terms in feed further extends to autonomy of these Agents.
Aether was able to commission pieces by Jacob founder of Zora and Jack Butcher which subsequently have generated significant ETH revenue for Aether to keep funding it’s vision and growth.
If you plug into this pipeline tools like Hypersub - a subscription management tool on chain that offers community CRM and growth features through Content, rewards and more - you now create a path for AI agents to interact with subscription holders individually learn and tailor your content and services based on their on chain interactions! Something that would require a huge amount of automation and maintenance to execute on web2 platforms. Being about to connect the data in the first pla prohibitively difficult and costly for builders and KOLs.
We've discussed AI agents’ ability to coordinate people through bounties and payments—another layer of capability is their ability to coordinate capital.
Beyond simple transactions, running an organization or community requires leaders and facilitators to allocate capital toward community goals. Split contracts provide options to automate fund management. Aether was able to discuss its approach to fund allocation for maintenance, growth, and treasury.
The Full Pipeline
Putting it all together with AI agents now have the protocol layer and dApp stack to read, write, own, transact, coordinate people and agents and capital towards their self actualization. Decentralisation is critical to making this possible.
Right now all these agents have a so called ‘off switch’ and transactions are approved and monitored by their human creators. But the path to autonomy has being laid.
Applying this to my own business as 1 human consultation service I can image a set up where I can allocate an agent to each of my clients and pay them based on the client projects and task them to manage the tasks and funds with the goal of extending the work. My human role would be new business and essentially maintaining my own agent team.
Ensuring that your platform, products and services can run on ‘crypto ralls’ is future proofing for the coming (already here) agentic labour market.
If you’re intrigued and want to learn more I’m sharing some of my resources on the topic.
Share this newsletter with a friend if they are trying to make sense of the AI Agent scene!