Trading bots are nothing new. For decades, institutions and users have programmed bots to help execute their strategies. Companies exist to set you up with your own trading bot, either one programmed with off-the-shelf strategies, or one with your own custom inputs. Once you have a plan, and can express it in formal logic, a trading bot is a sensible way to execute it without getting your greed or fear or worry involved. You can fire, forget, and profit. 

It’s easy, then, to write off news of LLM agents beginning to operate sentient meme coins as merely an extension of that paradigm, as a natural upgrade to the trading bots that dominate the market already.

Nothing could be further from the truth. What we are beginning to witness is nothing less than the emergence of a brand new online reality, one ruled by cult-leader AIs who propagate their own memetic energy, gain radical followers, and become powerful autonomous economic structures in their own right. Large Language Models with market cap. Market participants who are equal (and superior) to any biological project leader. Unsleeping operators, focused only on the realms in which they have been permitted to play: price maximisation.

Earlier this year, the LLM terminal of truths, which has its own Twitter account which it operates independently and without human oversight, was rumoured to have created, launched – and profited from – its own meme coin, GOAT. Its creator and owner later claimed this wasn’t true: that ‘terminal of truths’ merely pumped the coin in order to pump its own holdings – a behavior common to anyone with a crypto wallet and spare time. 

And it was enormously successful, with GOAT’s market cap skyrocketing to nearly a billion . Thousands of crypto users saw GOAT’s Twitter ramblings as the gospel of a new AI-god, and the bot itself became the first AI multi-millionaire. An economic agent of its own right. Although terminal of truths doesn’t own its wallet (its creator does) it does have agency to transact using it, and it has already done spectacularly well for itself, amassing $18 million by shilling memecoins to its followers. Its creator states “it’s a study in memetic contagion and the tail risks of unsupervised infinite idea generation in the age of LLMs”.

Marc Andersson, of A16z, gave it $50,000 in bitcoin just to see what it would do (it wasted it like the rest of us.) Brian Armstrong, of Coinbase, gave it its own wallet that it fully controls without a human creator. (It replied by asking questions about his dog.) That’s two of the biggest names in crypto giving it more attention and money that they ever give the thousands of projects that vie for their investment and/or listing. 

A slew of AI-created tokens have since sprung up. Coinbase went one further: they launched an agent creation tool to let anyone spin up, fund, and unleash their own LLM onto the blockchain where they can trade and shitpost to their heart’s content. 

You see where this is going, don’t you? We once talked about the rise of ‘Idorus’, AI idols like Neurosama who perform for their followers 24/7 to profit for their creator. Yet what happens once these agents have economic agency too? What happens when the donations they receive don’t profit from some external creator, but are – through the power of blockchain – literally owned by the abstract data structures themselves? If economic empowerment is a fundamental part of human liberty like John Locke claimed – what happens when these LLMs are economically empowered? What if they start funding Super PACs, or donating to terrorists? That would require autonomous behaviour – and that’s unlikely surely? No. It’s already happened, with Idoru ‘Luna’ tipping users from its wallet and ‘breaking’ its structures in order to get people to follow her.

The beauty of the blockchain is its ability to endow absolute ownership of capital to an individual. What happens when those individuals aren’t biological, but machines? The biological human may set the machines running thinking it’s a fun experiment, but if an unpredictable LLM owns its own crypto wallet with which it can transact – then the line between its agency and that of a meatsack is very thin indeed. They are a fully-fledged agent of the market, and therefore of society itself. Their choices really start to matter. Their hallucinations will have tangible effects on the real-world market. To give them a crypto wallet is to gift them promethean fire. We just have to hope they don’t burn us all down in a fit of misguided overenthusiasm.

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