From terminallyonchain xyz by YB
Happy Friday Terminally Onchain fam!
So I already had a post drafted for today in which I give a breakdown of Google's new 42 page paper on Agents. But I sat down at this coffee shop an hour ago and have something else on my mind that I feel like I just HAVE to get out today.
Because I hate myself, I'm locking in for the next few hours and will "freestyle" this post and send the Google paper analysis next week.
Okay, so what's this other topic on my mind that feels so urgent?
Well, here's the thing. I never have considered myself a trader. And I realistically never will.
And because of this, I naturally don't get fancy with my "tooling". No price alerts and no spending time on "Bloomberg terminal" type products and definitely no leverage/perps.
As many of you know by now, my style is to pick a few projects or trends that hook me and spend an absurd amount of time diving into the nitty gritty. That's how I'm able to consistently produce 3k+ word deep dives twice a week.
Don't worry, this is NOT changing lol.
But I'll admit that I'm really struggling to keep up with everything that's going on in the crypto x AI sector and I consider that to be part of my job.
I feel like everyday I wake up to a bunch of different things that I'm shocked I didn't know about. I'm not saying that I need to have insight about every single project and spread myself thin (most of them are total bs anyways). But I do feel like currently I'm still missing out on significantly important developments.
Now let me ask you something. If I'm spending 10+ hours a day researching these topics and keeping up with crypto twitter, then how is it possible that I still feel so behind and am missing so many new narratives?
The answer to that I believe is because I am not being efficient about my information inputs. I'm working hard, but not smart in terms of keeping up.
Doing good research and writing is one thing (which I believe I do a decent job at). But the other part of the job is knowing what topics to research and when to research them.
So with that being said, let's talk about how I'm going to start getting better at sourcing projects, trends, narratives, etc. To be clear, this isn't something I'm spending a lot of time on; rather, the goal is to build a ~10 minute daily routine while I have my morning coffee so I know what the rest of crypto agent (?) twitter is paying attention to.
To start off, I'm going to focus on using Cookies.fun
I want to clarify that this is not a sponsored post. I just think that by seriously integrating Cookies into my workflow, I'll do a much better job of keeping up.
This morning, I decided to go ahead and spend ~$7.5k to buy 10k cookie tokens and access the premium features.
Let's dive in.
Know when to strike
I've been quite impressed by the Cookies.fun team the last few months.
When Goat launched back in October, the team immediately understood that the agent vertical was going to be the main narrative for this bull cycle.
So they decided to go all in and make the best analytics & data platform for all things AI agents.
There are other tools such as aiagenttoolkit, kaito (not just agents), etc. but I think Cookie is by far the best in terms of what most people need.
I got a chance to talk to the founders back in December and loved hearing about how they're thinking about the months ahead as well as how they're trying to keep the product as crypto native as possible (i.e. token gated features, leaning into crypto twitter analysis, etc.)
tl;dr of the tool itself:
- Tracking 1000+ agents: their mindshare on crypto twitter, social media engagement, market cap vs. presence, etc.
- Team has been indexing onchain and social media data to figure out what exactly is happening in the vertical - both from a qualitative and quantitative standpoint
- Basic features for anyone to go explore on the site. 10,000 $COOKIE needed to access premium features
- The $COOKIE token market cap is currently hovering between $150 million - $200 million and was just listed on Binance perps today
- Also have a rich API for others to integrate. An example is Virtuals including "mindshare" on their UI
Let's get into the tool itself.
Features & My Commentary
Free Features
This first section gives a glance into the agent vertical.
- Top left has # of agents + marketcap. I don't really care too much for the number of agents, a lot of them are slop. But the marketcap metric is definitely useful to see how much capital is pouring into the crypto agent space.I'm not saying we should compare market caps to other sectors, but I did find this chart by Messari below interesting. Pretty wild to see how closely the agent meta is tracking the defi market cap from 2020/2021.Defi peaked at a ~65 billion market cap before the entire crypto market tanked in May of 2021 (who else remembers that dreadful week?)We're about a 5x away from that number...maybe something to just keep in the back of our heads? As I mentioned in my last post though, let's not let these cycle comparisons get the best of us.
- How key agent ecosystems are performing (mainly Virtuals and ai16z) rn --> curious to see how this changes in the next 6 months.I was reading this article on a new agent framework (Pippin) earlier today and I thought it would be worth sharing the first two paragraphs. I don't have any comments on the framework itself, but I did find the quote below a good reality check on not getting too attached to any one ecosystem just yet. It's only been 3 months since Goat launched!
One of the things I find most common in crypto, especially within hot new sectors, is that most people who find a "good project" that goes vertical will form tunnel vision. This may be good for the short term, but what happens when variables change, and you do not adapt properly?
I think it is very naïve to think that the current leaders in a 4 month old sector will continue to be leaders, especially as more advanced developers and technology continue to come forward.
- AI Agents Mindshare - never have I used the word "mindshare" so much as I have in the last two months. But the reality is that it does matter a lot to see what the markets are most focused on. The majority of mindshare is dominated by platforms and large players such as aixbt and zerebro. But the interesting part here is to see the small players that rotate under the 5% mindshare level. Why did they pick up all of a sudden? Any interesting news?
- This feature is self-explanatory but basically the general chart of all the agents that can be sorted by mindshare and marketcap.Seems like the no brainer thing to do to is source new narratives that are emerging by finding the projects that rank abnormally high in mindshare compared to their marketcap. So if a sub $10m market cap project is on par with $100 million market cap projects in terms of mindshare, there's a good chance a new development is brewing.
- This is a REALLY COOL feature. You can see KOLs that mentioned a certain agent on Twitter and it takes you directly to their tweet. Basically tracking the types of influencers involved and how that's affecting the mindshare. It's also interesting to see how early certain folks got involved and then check what the context was in terms of how they came across it. A good way to refine your own sources of finding new narratives.Honestly such a creative feature and something I wouldn't even have thought of asking for.
Premium Features
- Holders & Whales - for each token you can see a detailed breakdown of how much control the insiders have. Specifically, I think the top 10 holders % matters the most for projects that are under a month old and haven't picked up momentum. Easiest way to understand how much of the plan is to actually ship vs rug. One caveat here is making sure to check if the devs locked up their tokens in any liquidity pool (if that's the case, I'm guessing it wouldn't show up in the holder % but just wanted to mention that as a strong pro point).The reason I think this metric matters in terms of research perspective is because at times glorious, bold ideas are thrown out with a contract address and twitter account attached to them. But in reality, is the vision even practical at the current moment? Or is it all just big talk? For example, back in November, I mentioned a project called $CHAOS that I thought had a cool vision of robotics + agent blah blah. And although I still think the concept itself is cool, the project turned out to be a complete waste of time and I'm glad I didn't spend more efforts looking into it.
- Social media engagement - great way to see how the agents themselves are doing in terms of posting and what the main tweets people are engaging with are. Not much to say here other than the fact that it saves me a lot of time from trying to stalk through different accounts, play the twitter lists game, etc.
The next two screenshots are from a special section where you get access to detailed mindshare dashboards by @s4mmyeth (a must follow if you haven't already).
- This first chart gives insight on most recent momentum shifts. It seems like this chart will be the one I probably use the most given how active I already am in the space. Anything that has a 12-24 hour spike will be essential for me to check so I can get into the weeds of anything new.For example, out of nowhere (or what it seemed like to me), it felt like there was a massive shift to agents x metaverse / avatars this week and it was tough for me to understand why. I looked into it and realized that Holoworld was the main driver. Then that forced me to go through the docs and form my own opinion.
- The second chart is similar to the first but measures market cap vs smart engagement on week to week basis. Basically showing us if things were just a quick hype moment or if they're actually sustaining interest. I'll want to double down on any projects where smart engagement continues to increase even when the agent vertical is having a correction.
- The last feature worth mentioning is the market cap and mindshare scatter plot. This is a fantastic graph because it gives you a real time understanding of what potential projects are "soon to pop off". The above screenshot is a zoomed out version so you can see the obvious one of aixbt in terms of having a much lower market cap compared to its mindshare. This is mainly because its not a "agent framework" and right now the narrative is pushing a lot of capital towards the infra "L1 plays" we talked about on Tuesday's post.But if you zoom into the bottom left corner, you can really start to see interesting alpha. I zoomed in like 4x to focus on all the agents under a $20m market cap. And I'm amazed to see so many projects I've never even heard of. But at least now I know it's worth my time to look into wtf Seraph, Kudai, Kween, Trust, etc. are. Makes my life like a million times easier in terms of making sure I'm not in my own little biased bubble.To be clear, just because the charts signal I should check out those projects doesn't mean that I will actually deep dive into all of them. All of the projects in this chart below might not be worth my time at all, but the point is that it's a much better filter to source projects this way rather than trying to find alpha on Twitter by doomscrolling.
That's all I had for today's post in terms of taking time to go through the Cookies platform.
I know the above details definitely leaned towards "trading vibes" and it feels weird to me because I always hated looking at charts when it came to projects. My preference is obviously whitepapers and calls with founders.
But I think it's time to correct some of my bias and understand that the mindshare and smart engagement metrics that Cookie provides is different from just normal trading strategies.
I'll keep you all posted the next few weeks on how useful I'm actually finding the premium features. Today was day 1 so there was definitely a lot more of that initial excitement, but let's see if it lasts.
I hope everyone has a great weekend, see you all on Tuesday!
- YB
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