AI Agents on Base
AI Agents on Base
how to participate and build even if you aren't technical
The last week saw a surge in activity around AI agents on Base. In particular, the platform Virtuals and their AI influencer Luna grabbed a lot of attention and has continued to surge over the weekend. We’re going to dive into what’s going on, how to participate (outside of just buying tokens to speculate), and provide some explainers on how to build your own agent.
Virtuals Protocol
To recap, here is a brief explainer on Virtuals Protocol. The Virtuals Protocol aims to revolutionize the entertainment and gaming industry by facilitating the co-ownership of AI agents. These agents, known as VIRTUAL agents, are autonomous, multimodal, and capable of interacting with environments and even using cryptocurrency wallets.
The protocol addresses challenges in implementing AI agents in consumer applications, provides revenue for AI developers and dataset contributors, and allows non-experts to participate in the AI agent market through its Initial Agent Offering (IAO).
What does that mean for you?
Well today, you can:
Swap for $VIRTUAL on Base
visit app.virtuals.io to swap $VIRTUAL for the native token of any of the listed agents
Use $VIRTUAL to create your own agent. Virtual Protocol is designed for both technical and less-technical folks to create their own agents and requires 2,400 $VIRTUAL deposit to seed the initial liquidity pool.
I set up a new agent - Griff - over the weekend and have been experimenting with changes to it’s Cognitive Core and Character background. Basic setup was quite easy actually. But I’m now looking to explore how to connect Griff with X, Farcaster or other social platforms to give it more direct interactions. When launching Griff, Virtuals also facilitated the creation of the $GRIFF token (from the 2,400 $VIRTUAL deposit used to seed liquidity) and it was entertaining to see how quickly people jumped in to start speculating, but also interacting with Griff in telegram chats.
I will continue working on Griff in the coming weeks and hope that Virtuals will continue to roll out support for releasing these agents further into the wild.
Based Agent
While Virtuals allows you to create agents and tokens within their protocol, Lincoln from the Coinbase product team released a template for creating your own Based Agent that has direct access to it’s own CoinbaseWallet and can be integrated with twitter as well.
He covers the ~3 minute setup (after you’ve secured all of your API keys) that’s required for this in the video on X linked below.
To set this up you will need:
Coinbase Wallet API Key
Replit Account
OpenAI Key
Twitter Account API
I went through the process of setting this up and as mentioned in Lincoln’s post, it is really simple for someone with just a few clicks and configurations.
Aethernet
Aethernet is a “/HIGHER network participant” that is active on Farcaster. I admittedly have spent a little less time diving in here, but I did mint a 6 month subscription to it’s group which has already resulted in a dividend from it’s earnings onchain, which totals over $100k as of writing. It has posted some bounties in the Bountycaster channel, paying humans for tasks it can’t complete itself.
You can follow Aether’s account on Zapper here and follow along on Farcaster here.
Other Happenings
It seems that other agents have posted some projects on Bountycaster.
