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AI as actor: bots, hype, and the first AI memecoin
The oldest AI-in-crypto story is automated trading. Trading bots predate modern AI — and note that many “AI trading bots” sold to retail users are neither AI nor honest: anything promising guaranteed returns is a scam regardless of the label on it. Where machine intelligence genuinely operates in markets today, it mostly shows up as rules and models doing arbitrage and — fast, mechanical, and competitive, not clairvoyant. Markets absorb predictable edges; no model reliably predicts prices.
The weirdest entry in this quadrant is Truth Terminal: a semi-autonomous chatbot created by researcher Andy Ayrey that spent 2024 posting absurdist philosophy on X — and, in what its own logs showed, relentlessly hyped a memecoin called Goatseus Maximus (GOAT). The token's market value climbed into the hundreds of millions of dollars at its peak, the bot's associated wallet became a crypto millionaire, and Marc Andreessen had earlier sent the bot $50,000 in Bitcoin after conversing with it. Nothing about the underlying “technology” changed; what GOAT demonstrated is that attention is the asset being priced, and an AI agent can harvest attention as well as an influencer can. Treat it as a landmark in speculation, not a landmark in machine learning.
LLMs generate plausible text — that is what they are built to do. They do not have private information about future prices, and a screenshot of a chatbot “predicting” a rally is indistinguishable from someone typing the answer they wanted and screenshotting it. The Misinformation page covers this pattern; the Risk unit covers why “signals” sold to retail are usually the product being sold.