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GM. This is Milk Road, the newsletter that makes learning about crypto easier than forgetting the New Year’s resolutions you set two days ago.

Here’s what we got for you today:

• ✍️ Breaking down the Crypto AI space

• ✍️ The future of web3 social 

• 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: How to Get Alpha Before Everyone Else? w/ Dan Romero 

• 🍪 Happy 16th birthday, Bitcoin!

BREAKING DOWN THE CRYPTO AI SPACE 🧑‍💻

We believe Crypto AI will be a major narrative in 2025.

…but what does ‘Crypto AI’ actually mean?

There’s a whooole bunch of varying things being built – but we’re going to focus on the three key pieces of the space that we think you’re going to hear a whole lot about in 2025.

1/ Infrastructure

AI infrastructure = the stuff needed to be able to run AIs onchain. 

For example:

• Near Protocol is building the world's largest open-source AI model

• Render is a decentralized network of GPUs that users can access and use to run AI models 

• Bittensor is building infrastructure that will allow folks to deploy machine learning models onchain

2/ AI Agents as entities

‘AI agent’ is a blanket term for an AI model that can interact online, in real-time.

The AI models you're most likely familiar with, like ChatGPT, are closed off from the real-time internet. They can’t surf the web, buy things, respond to tweets. 

Instead, they’ve been trained on a snapshot of the internet that could be months or years old.

Agents (or ‘agential AI’) don't have this problem – and one of the more popular applications of agential AI is creating online ‘entities’ – like those on the Virtuals Protocol. 👇

Most of these entities right now are all trying to become online influencers (e.g. Luna). They tweet, livestream, make music, etc. – all in the hopes of becoming famous.

But once the AI influencer market is saturated, the humans guiding their learning will no doubt shift to different niches. 

Think: marketers, sports analysts – or crypto traders, like @pmairca (which has its own fund called ai16z).

3/ AI Agents as assistants

These are the ones we’re really excited about!

Imagine a ChatGPT-style interface, like that of Griffain (breakdown here), where the AI on the other end has free reign to interact online, in real-time.

For example, you could say: 

“Research a 14 day trip across Spain. My budget is $7k in total (flights, accommodation, transfers etc.). Find the highest star rating hotels for that budget.”

The AI checks everything via Travala.com (the Solana integrated travel site 👇) → builds a few itineraries → you pick one → it books it.

Or…

“Check the yields being offered across the Ethereum/Solana DeFi ecosystems. Move any tokens I have on those ecosystems to the highest yielding option. Run this check once a week, and move my funds if you find higher yields.”

Boom! You have your own personal money manager.

See how this is going to change the way businesses and individuals interact online?

Once agential AI hits the consumer market en-masse, any business that doesn’t have onchain integration is going to get left behind.

This will likely be more impactful than the advent of Google Search!

Chills. Literal chills.

THE FUTURE OF WEB3 SOCIAL 📲

Ideas for web3 social apps:

1. A group chat where every trade someone makes is autoposted to the chat.

2. A social feed, where you can subscribe to someone’s trading behavior (1 click and you copy all of their trades automatically).

3. A fully anonymous posting service, where you need a certain amount of the services token to be able to post. But when you do post, it then gets posted on an anonymous Twitter profile with a gold checkmark to boost its reach.

Unfortunately for us, all of these ideas have already been realized.

And all off the back of Farcaster, the web3 social protocol.

Basically, Farcaster lets anyone build decentralized social apps on its protocol – any users of those social apps get to take their followers and content (text, images, videos, audio) with them between any app on the protocol.

So if you blow up on one Farcaster app, you blow up on them ALL!

(You’re not going to find that kind of functionality on Instagram or Twitter – they want to own their user data outright).

…maybe that’s why its daily user base exploded last year? 👇

In part two of our chat with Farcaster’s founder, Dan Romero, we talk about:

• The future of decentralized social

• Whether or not AI agents really need their own tokens

• How Farcaster users are worded up about new crypto trends, way before Twitter uses

We said it yesterday, and we’ll say it again: Dan is a GOAT of the crypto space!

You don’t want to miss it. 👇

YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪

Lympid is turning premium assets into tokenized assets. Whether it’s a rare wine or a collectible watch, it’s all available as tokens with Lympid.*

Do Kwon pleads not guilty. Here’s the rundown so far: Terra ecosystem collapses, Do Kwon flees to South Korea, gets extradited to the US, and now pleads not guilty. The drama isn’t over yet.

Bitcoin turns 16. Satoshi mined the Genesis block back on Jan 3rd, 2009. Hope there’s only green candles on your birthday cake, Bitcoin.

IRS delays crypto tax reporting until 2026. IRS saw what’s happening in crypto and just said “Nah, we’ll just deal with this next year.”

We’re hiring! Calling the brightest minds in crypto to join our team but hurry, there’s only 4 roles left.

Milk Road’s Bitcoin Price page offers real-time pricing for $BTC, keeping you updated on every move. With a clean layout and reliable data, it’s perfect for those closely tracking Bitcoin’s market activity.

* This is sponsored content.

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DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.