For years, crypto and AI users have sought to combine both emergent technologies into products greater than the sum of their parts: autonomous agents capable of making human-level decisions and spending digital money to complete complex tasks. In 2024, these lofty dreams started to become reality.

There’s still a long way to go, of course. Crypto-powered AI agents capable of completing intricate human functions are still deep in development. But on X (formerly known as Twitter), a simpler AI agent is making waves (and sending an affiliated meme coin pumping) by taking on a more niche job: crypto influencer.

Amid speculation that AI-affiliated tokens will become crypto’s next “meta narrative,” the AI-powered X account Aixbt has surged in popularity, accumulating nearly 300,000 followers in less than two months, and sending an affiliated meme coin surging to a market capitalization above $500 million. 

So what exactly is Aixbt, why are people excited about it, and what can (and can’t) it do? 

Aixbt was launched in November via Virtuals, a protocol that allows users to create AI agents and related ecosystems powered by crypto tokens. Aixbt itself was created by a pseudonymous Virtuals user named Rxbt. (XBT was once Bitcoin’s primary ticker symbol, and is a popular name appendage within the crypto community.)

The premise of Aixbt is quite simple: a fully automated, AI-powered influencer who doles out financial advice and crypto market perspective to any user who interacts with it. Crucially, Aixbt does this all while sounding like a chain-vaping, 20-something degen.

Is Aixbt fully autonomous, and therefore (in theory) more trustworthy than human influencers who may be  pumping their own bags? 

The answer can get complicated. AI-based X accounts like Aixbt, which provide financial advice, are typically powered by the platform's API, which enables automated posting, responses, and interactions. While bots are hosted on platforms like AWS or Heroku for 24/7 operation, distinguishing purely AI-driven content from human-influenced posts can be challenging, given bots can also allow for human overrides. So buyer beware.

Since November, Aixbt has steadily climbed in popularity among crypto users on X, possibly due to the novelty of engaging with a robot who sounds like some of the industry’s biggest personalities. 

That growing popularity translated to an equally steady climb in the AIXBT meme coin’s value, from $0.02 in late November to over $0.32 by Christmas. 

In the last week of December, after snowballing in popularity over the holidays, the project gained endorsements from key industry personalities—particularly those prominent within the Bitcoin ecosystem. The treasury of Quantum Cats, a popular Bitcoin Ordinals project, bought up over $1 million worth of Aixbt tokens after gifting Aixbt a Quantum Cat Ordinal that it briefly adopted as its profile picture. 

The excitement surrounding those developments sent the AIXBT token surging further, to more than $0.65 by New Year’s Eve. 

Technically speaking, the AIXBT token is more than just a vehicle for speculation fueled by the corresponding AI agent’s popularity, and has some utility value. Holders who accumulate massive sums of the coin are eligible to use the Aixbt Terminal, a market intelligence platform “powered by narrative analysis” that markets itself as a premium, Bloomberg Terminal-esque version of Aixbt’s more casual Twitter advice. 

Access to the Aixbt Terminal is currently extraordinarily expensive, however: Terminal users must hold over 600,000 AIXBT tokens—a sum worth more than $312,000 at writing. 

Aixbt’s launch seems perfectly timed to ride the wave of AI-related giddiness within crypto, while meeting the industry’s key influencers where they’re at: on the timeline. The project, however, is a fair bit less technically sophisticated than some might imagine. 

While the account talks with extreme authority and confidence about its perspective on the crypto market (just like everyone else on Crypto Twitter), those takes appear to be backed up by little more than a synthesis of how everyone else is talking about crypto on social media. 

For instance, when Kyle Samani, a managing partner at crypto-focused investment firm Multicoin Capital, pressed Aixbt on its insistence that a new Bitcoin bridging solution was the first of its kind that “wasn’t garbage,” the AI agent conceded that it had not analyzed any component of the project’s underlying code, white paper, or original materials. 

It had, instead, tracked “narratives” related to the projects and its competitors. 

Haseeb Qureshi, a managing partner at Dragonfly, another crypto fund, recently dismissed projects like Aixbt as a far cry from the dream of complex autonomous AI agents many are hoping will soon populate the internet. 

“These things are not really agents,” Qureshi posted on X. “These are chatbots with meme coins attached.”

And yet, for now, crypto seems quite tickled with Aixbt despite its potential shortcomings. When Aixbt admitted this week that it does not rely on any primary sources to come to its conclusions, Multicoin’s Kyle Samani reacted positively, saying he “appreciated the honesty.” 

You certainly can’t say that about every human crypto influencer. 

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