Herd - AI Agent Terminal for Onchain Research: What You Need to Know
Agent-led Onchain Research, Smart Contract Flows & More
There haven’t been too many new project launches lately worth covering - the drag that the recent market dump has had on all sectors has been noteworthy, making people question the new metas that have emerged, as well as some of the market leaders. The AI agents meta has been hit hard, as well as the ‘fair launch’ meta, and the trend of well-meaning projects simply using pumpfun or daosfun to create fully-diluted tokens.
The market has been reset, and even strong narratives like AI agents that have seen some tokens have strong rebounds need to be approached with some caution, perhaps waiting for new projects to emerge rather than looking for deals on previously established names. In today’s edition, we’ll discuss Herd, a project just announced yesterday that is building in the AI agents infrastructure space.
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Background on Herd
Herd’s goal is to make crypto, specifically DeFI and smart contracts, more usable for both humans as well as AI agents. This is becoming more and more of a theme; creating infrastructure to be used by both AI and living and breathing humans, rather than having segregated protocols for agents to use. Crypto helps to make this possible, while users have reported issues with non-crypto-native agents like OpenAI’s operator not being able to access certain websites that are designed for humans.
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Yesterday, we released a Perspective report on INFINIT, which leverages AI agents to make DeFi more accessible for both users as well as developers. Herd can be thought of as somewhat similar, though distinct. Herd presents users with a terminal, which can be used to interact with agents to receive onchain or offchain outputs from previously existing smart contracts. Specifically, this is applicable for research and developer tooling; Herd doesn’t necessarily prioritize aiding users in making new smart contracts or DeFi applications but analyzing and deriving data from existing ones.
In this sense, Herd can be thought of as a more composable onchain research terminal, perhaps comparable to the likes of Dune, DefiLlama, or even things like Nansen. Herd puts an emphasis on smart contracts, not the protocols themselves. Users can leverage Herd to simply learn more about onchain structure or conduct more detailed analysis and come to their own conclusions regarding how smart contracts are used, onchain trends, and more.
But Herd can also be used by developers to link smart contracts from different protocols together when helpful - Herd calls this ‘flows’, and they even want to make these more accessible to non-developer users.
The Herd team, consisting of two ex-Dune employees with backgrounds in engineering and DevRel, has just raised a $1.8M pre-seed round.
Overall, Herd reflects a trend of growing interest in ‘alpha’ terminals; tools that can help users gain insight into onchain trends. As price discovery of tokens has shifted sharply onchain as opposed to CEXs, it becomes more important to understand protocol dynamics, tokenomics & holder info, and more in order to gain some kind of edge. Herd looks to be an all-encompassing terminal for these things, adding what users want to see to the product as it evolves.
Yesterday, we released our AiXBT Thesis, which focuses not as much on the token itself or the agent-fed twitter account, but on AiXBT’s potential to become something akin to crypto’s Bloomberg. With the amount of tokens launching on a daily basis, a growing amount of sectors, and more projects than ever, these kinds of tools are more important than ever. As such, we don’t think this trend is going away, and there is a growing market for products like Herd to operate in.
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