AI Agents and Kaito Continues Timeline Dominance
Winter's Weekly - Week of 13 January 2025
AI Agents and Kaito Dominates Timeline
This week started out relatively muted as the market continued its correction from the second half of last week, hitting a low of $91,000 for BTC on Monday. Things started bouncing back mid-week and, as of this writing, BTC is sitting $102,000.
Throughout the week, we saw lots of discussions on the X timeline on the continued integration and application of AI agents into the crypto and gaming space, and debates on farming Yaps on Kaito.
Let’s dive into each of them.
AI Agents
ARC Agents, powered by the NRN token and built by the AI Arena team, released an article introducing AIcons, which are a roster of “AIXBTs of gaming agents.” The idea behind this is to transform creator partnerships into dynamic, AI-driven experiences that are immersive, financially scalable, and built for the future.
AIcon agents will engage dynamically with fans through gaming interactions such as special quests, boss campaigns, and battle royales. They will be personalised with their creators’ playstyle, personality and brand, and will be adaptable across multiple games and platforms.
Along with this announcement, they announced the initial roster comprising of Agent YP (YellowPanther), Agent Sploot (Jonah Blake), and J3FF (HV-MTL and Faraway).
ARC Agents also announced that they would be partnering with Nifty Island, who themselves unveiled the AI Agent Playground, their program that allows anyone to bring their own AI agents into the game.
Kaito AI
Another hot topic that came up this week was Kaito. There were lots of debates and discussions on the good and the bad of Kaito, and also numerous threads and videos on trying to understand the algorithm.
Kermit wrote an article on his observations into the days where got got 0 and >100 Yaps. He compared the differences in the content he was posting during those days in an attempt to better understand how Kaito assigns Yaps, which nobody fully knows at the moment.
The key takeaways are to actively engage in topics that are displayed on the Yapper leaderboards, and to create and engage in interesting (and possibly divisive) conversations with smart accounts.
Lamboland chimed into the discussion with an article on his reflections of the good, the bad, and the ugly. He mentioned that Kaito is the most impressive socialfi protocol that he has ever seen.
And that, while inducing a financial incentive can potentially invoke a lot of negative emotions, Kaito is a real product, with real revenue and have found product market fit in a relatively short amount of time. He acknowledges that the potential of Kaito is massive and can change the relationship between projects and creators.
Soneium Halts Trading Just Hours After Going Live
Barely 4 months after they first revealed the news that they are building their own blockchain, Sony launched Soneium to live mainnet. The news came out of nowhere and got the entire space eager to explore what dApps had gone live together with the mainnet.
The excitement was short-lived, however as within hours, Sony halted trading of 2 memecoins citing IP infringement. This move shook the space as the halt was done at the RPC level and traders were left unable to exit their positions with their funds stuck.
Sony faced backlash as questions rose of just how much control Sony has over a supposedly decentralised blockchain, and whether it was in fact a permissioned, centralised blockchain.
Sony issued a statement the next day addressing these concerns and emphasied that, in wanting to maintain an inclusive and fair ecosystem, the sovereignty of IPs lies with their creators and it needs to be safeguarded to ensure creators feel empowered and valued, with their rights respected.
Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, tweeted the following day that this situation demonstration that launching an Ethereum L2 benefits both businesses and users. Businesses are able to decide how much control they keep, and users can know and be assured that their rights are protected.
NEWS ROUNDUP
WITS TCG and Cosmic Factions are coming to Abstract.
Azuki releases tokenomics for ANIME token and announces TGE is schedule for 23 January.
KGeN releases rKGEN, their fairdrop solution that is redeemable 1:1 of their future KGEN token.
77-Bit’s BitHub records 150,000 user registrations in 4 days of launch.
Following their Abstract announcement last week, ChronoForge onboards Mark Meyers, former Head of Disney North America & Game Studios, to their partnerships team.
Oh Baby Games unveils new platform fighter game - Bam Bam Boom.
Arc announces partnerships with Abstract and Arbitrum to bring their rust-based AI agent framework to those chains.
MoonPay acquires Helio Pay in a deal with $170 million to expand their payments infrastructure. Helio Pay has handled over $1.6 billion in transactions.
DTRXBT, the project founded by Ghost, launches with an airdrop to 30,000 wallets.
Rumble Kong League is migrating to Ronin Network.
Abstract announces their incentive scheme that will kickoff on mainnet launch expected within the next few weeks.
Ronin Network announces a $10 million ecosystem grant to bring builders onboard their chain.
Gigaverse will be using Proof of Play’s infrastructure to power their game on Abstract.
Primodium releases Primodium: Empires, an on-chain turn-based tactics game.
Virtuals pause token migration to fix an issue that allowed scammers to mint additional tokens.
PARTNERED UPDATES
EVRLOOT
The campaign with KGeN has kicked off this week with a new achievement board and KGeN points. In-game achievements are now linked with KGeN’s platform for players to earn rewards.
I also wrote a thread previewing some new enemies, and their abilities, that will be coming in Season 2. Note that everything is subject to change until official release.
Sign up with my ref link today and join my Clan!
P2A UPDATES
Duper releases a play-to-whitelist campaign for their Genesis Ace of Spade collection that is coming to Abstract.
Boomland’s play-to-airdrop Season 2 campaign is now live with a 250 million BOOM prizepool.
Castle of Blackwater teases launch with a new gameplay trailer. The game is now available to wishlist on Steam.
Market Wars open beta goes live.
The Forgotten Runiverse opened up their servers this week for a 3-day stress test with a 21 trillion QUANTA airdrop reward pool.
Palio releases early access for their Craft & Trade game.
The Machines Arena is now available on Steam.
Big Time releases open access to all. Codes are no longer required to play the game.
Dremica starts stress tests of their servers.
Castile Pioneer Season officially starts with 20 million CAST as rewards.
The Beacon’s New Frontiers Quest Phase 2 starts on 20 January.
RavenQuest Mobile 24-hour stress test for Land and Munk owners.