AI agent told to ‘make money’ launches memecoin, pockets $100m

You can also listen to this podcast on iono.fm here.

We’re not too far away from a future – possibly a very near future – where AI agents not only assist us but also take over previously unimaginable tasks such as travel bookings, deal negotiations, financial transactions and – believe it or not – launching businesses.

In this Moneyweb Crypto Podcast, Carel de Jager, CEO of blockchain analytics and intelligence firm Silver Sixpence, relates the bizarre story of Truth Terminal, an AI agent that launched a hugely profitable memecoin after being instructed to “make money”.

Truth Terminal is an experimental AI agent created by Kiwi researcher Andy Ayrey.

Instructed to become as autonomous as possible and tasked with making money, the agent secured a $50 000 grant (in stablecoins and bitcoin) from prominent venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

It built social presence on platforms like Twitter/X and Reddit, engaged in conversations, and – recognising the quickest path to wealth – hired developers to launch a memecoin on Solana.

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The resulting GOAT (Goatseus Maximus) memecoin exploded in popularity, at times driving valuations into the hundreds of millions, with peaks reportedly approaching $1 billion in market cap at its height, and reportedly pocketing $100 million for the Truth Terminal wallet.

Agentic economy could become bigger than the human economy

De Jager predicts the agentic economy could become thousands of times larger than the current human economy.

One example: autonomous self-driving vehicles negotiating micro-payments in real time when, for example, one car needs to pass another on an urgent run to the airport.

This type of transaction does not occur in the human economy, but it will explode in the AI-agentic economy. The human economy is limited by a labour ceiling; the agentic economy is not.

“In the AI world, we’re seeing gigawatts of compute being commissioned almost on a daily basis now. The numbers are just staggering. Our human brains [produce about] 20 watts worth of compute and it’s very, very inefficient.

“I used to pride myself on being a pretty good writer. Now that is worthless. That kind of skill is not worth anything in today’s economy. So you have to ask yourself, if that was valuable three years ago, and today it’s valueless, there’s no value in being a good writer anymore.

“What does it mean for the future, and what is valuable in the future? And especially entrepreneurs of today, like I have my finger on the pulse, because I’m building software products.

“I think value in future will be human experiences, something that will always remain valuable. You have to use AI to actually remain valuable. So even if you have a white-collar job, you have to be an extreme, extreme superuser of AI to be valuable. And then I think digital scarcity, bitcoin, is an obvious one. But I think humans, human connections, will remain valuable.”

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Evidence of growth is already visible: agent-driven web traffic recently surpassed human traffic.

Major players like a16z, Coinbase, Visa and Mastercard are investing heavily and enabling agentic payments. However, the real tipping point for economic dominance remains uncertain.

Know Your Agent

Instead of Know Your Customer (KYC), regulators will have to contend with new players in the economy, requiring a Know Your Agent (KYA) to assess whether agents are honest, known and reliable.

Agents lack bank accounts, so De Jager expects them to gravitate heavily toward crypto, stablecoins and bitcoin – the only borderless digital money without mandatory human identity checks.

Silver Sixpence is already positioning itself here, offering compliance and analytics tools such as sanction screening and reputation scoring via KYA.

Compliance remains a major hurdle.

Regulators and traditional banks struggle with non-human actors, and De Jager doubts they can adapt quickly enough. This creates opportunities for nimble startups and jurisdictional arbitrage, but risks pushing innovation away from places like South Africa.

Read/listen:

Though this future might appear daunting, De Jager is optimistic that humanity will adapt and learn to live and thrive in this new world.

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