Traditional Capital’s View on AI Agents

At the just-concluded CES 2025 exhibition, Nvidia founder and CEO Huang Renxun made a bold prediction about the prospects of AI agents. He believes that AI agents may become a huge business opportunity in the next robotics industry, with a value of trillions of dollars.

Seeing Huang Renxun's statement, I recalled my experience of understanding AI agents.

I heard about AI agents earlier from a technology blogger I subscribe to. When talking about AI agents, the blogger did not specifically limit the application of AI agents in any field, let alone mention the relationship between AI agents and the encryption ecosystem. He mainly focused on the changes that AI agents may bring to all existing industries.

At that time, I just took it as a kind of knowledge to understand.

It is probably because of my limited knowledge that I have not seen any important AI agents appear in the traditional Internet or mobile Internet industry since then, let alone any Internet giants launching their own practical AI agents.

Therefore, I have always believed that AI agents may be a little far away from us.

Until the recent wave of AI agents in the crypto industry, some AI agents have emerged. Although they are still in the very early stages of development, they give me the feeling that they have begun to provide services with real value.

Now, Huang Renxun mentioned the huge potential space of AI agents in the future on such an important occasion, which makes me curious:

- If these AI agents that have appeared in the crypto ecosystem are placed in the entire AI agent market, what stage are they in?

- In the AI ​​agent market, what kind of intersection and interaction will occur between participants in the crypto ecosystem and participants in traditional industries?

The reason why I have such a question is that I feel that although AI agents must be a very promising market, it is probably difficult to develop this market to the scale imagined with only the current participation mode of the crypto ecosystem. When the development of AI agents reaches a certain stage, it is likely that they will still be inseparable from the participation of big players in the traditional financial market.

In the current crypto ecosystem, the development momentum of AI agents in terms of funds that we see mainly comes from the crowdfunding method (1CO) of retail investors. This method can start a small project, but if a project is to be continuously promoted and continuously iterated in terms of technology, operation, etc., it will definitely need to continuously inject new funds and teams in the future.

And this is probably only possible with traditional venture capital/VC.

Therefore, we cannot only look at the development of these AI agents from the perspective of the crypto ecosystem, but also need to jump out of this ecosystem and examine their development from other perspectives.

For example, do traditional venture capital and VC pay attention to the development of AI agents in the crypto ecosystem? What is their attitude?

Just these two days, the traditional fund Franklin Hampton released a report on AI agents and the crypto ecosystem, "Intersection of AI Agents & the Crypto Ecosystem".

This report highly praised the combination of AI agents and the crypto ecosystem. What is interesting in the report is that the data sources cited in the article are all new platforms and new applications that have grown up with this wave after the rise of this round of AI agents. These platforms actually looked no different from altcoins a few months ago.

This just proves that in just a few months since the rise of AI agents in the crypto ecosystem, some traditional financial institutions have also quickly noticed the development of this ecosystem.

Compared to a few years ago, when DeFi just emerged, I don’t remember any traditional large funds paying such attention to DeFi.

I think there are definitely more traditional financial institutions like this, and I believe it is very likely that traditional financial institutions will enter this market in the future.

But how do they enter this market? At what stage will they enter this market?

More importantly, can the entry of these institutions expand the application of AI agents in the current crypto ecosystem to a wider range of offline services and industries?

After all, for them, traditional and offline fields are probably the areas they are more familiar with and easier to control.