ai16z - Autonomous Investment DAO? What You Need to Know
$ai16z, daos.fun, & more
Last week, $GOAT continued to gain traction, both in mindshare and in token price as the AI memecoin recovered from a dip. Discussion around the existence and usefulness of $GOAt was allowed to permeate. We also saw attention and capital find itself flowing to other areas directly related to AI, perhaps more so than $GOAT itself. We saw $LUNA and the Virtuals protocol rise to the #1 spot in the AI category, at the expense of $TAO.
Virtuals’ autonomous agent platform is a separate topic in and of itself; today we’re going to focus on a separate AI development that even caught the attention of Marc Andreessen of a16z himself. Ai16z is an AI-model, developed with the goal being to outperform Marc Andreessen. The AI can pick up on and analyze tickers discussed on telegram, determining if they might be worth buying. This experiment is conducted through a public DAO…
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Background on ai16z & daos.fun
To first get an understanding of what ai16z is and how it works, one needs a bit of background knowledge of the platform on which it is deployed. daos.fun basically takes the concept of DAOs, publicly run organizations governed via tokens, and pump.fun, the permissionless memecoin creation platform, and combines the two. This enables any user to raise a treasury and create a DAO. The goal of each DAO is to actually operate as a fund, taking the capital (denominated in $SOL) and looking to make trades to increase the total asset value of the DAO.
The fundraising process takes a week, and cumulates capital from users, distributing a representative DAO token. This token effectively is supposed to represent the holdings of the DAO, which change as the manager can constantly reoptimize the portfolio using the capital raised. Users can sell their tokens at any time if the marketcap of the DAO token trades higher than the initial amount raised. The fund expires after one year, returning capital (and profits). The DAO actually takes both trading fees upon buys and sells of the representative token, as well as a specified carry fee when the fund closes.
We’ve seen DAOs come and go, with all sorts of mistakes made along the way. In recent weeks we’ve covered MetaDAO extensively, a protocol taking a radical approach to reforming governance. daos.fun isn’t trying to solve the problem of governance for existing protocols, but rather providing an interesting platform for users to divert some attention to, a more fun way to participate collectively in an outcome. The platform has seen support from some investors, including Alliance DAO, and now, Marc Andreessen of a16z.
The daos.fun platform is young itself, but a few days ago a developer launched a DAO with plans for it to be run autonomously, based on interactions on twitter and telegram. Holders of a certain amount of $ai16z will be able to access a chat where they can “give and receive trading advice”. There are some mechanisms being built to rate users, assigning certain scores based on the historical performance of the tokens they recommend, making some recommendations from certain users worth more than others. The thesis formation and reasoning capabilities are meant to evolve over time.
After this experiment caught the attention of the real Marc Andreessen, the DAOs token price increased exponentially. It currently sits at a marketcap of over $41M, while the Net Asset Value (NAV) of the DAO is less than $1M (the tracker below is likely incorrect).
This is clearly seeing a lot of speculative attention, considering the delta between DAO holdings and $ai16z marketcap. The DAO has also announced that it will take its carry fee and buy $degenai, a separate token that has also seen a lot of traction. This token represents degen spartan AI, a twitter account sort of similar to truth terminal, except it composes tweets in the style of degen spartan. This token represents it’s own fun as well but it’s trades are not made public and operate differently.
Regardless of how things play out, this experiment is a step in a new direction, including multiple facets that were not possible just last month. The daos.fun platform itself is an interesting offering, and maybe it might even see more use from AI agents operating onchain. It certainly simplifies the process of raising funds. Agent or not, there’s an appeal in users simply pledging their capital to some figure that they deem competent enough to trade memecoins for them, as the reality is it may just be too much to keep up with for many people who want to dip their toes in but don’t know where to start.
Overall, this ai16z experiment represents an interesting shift that we’re now seeing toward the role of onchain agents interacting onchain. This is a step above interacting on twitter with a human curator, and even a substantial difference from powerful applications like ChatGPT and Claude, which are enormously influential in their own right but have not yet ventured into the realm of spending and deploying capital.
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