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GM. This is Milk Road, the newsletter that goes down smoother than a frosty one on a Friday afternoon.
Here’s what we got for you today:
- ✍️ How to build a crypto AI agent
- ✍️ Is crypto development about to double?
- 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Solana Behind the Scenes & What's Next for 2025 w/ Mert
- 🍪 We’re on the hunt for a Social Media Manager to join our team – apply here!
Prices as of 2:00 PM ET. Click here for our Fear & Greed Index.
WHAT IS THE ELIZA AI FRAMEWORK, AND WHY IS IT BREAKING RECORDS? 🤖
We’re going to start and end today’s edition with the same statement:
Invest in projects that devs are gravitating towards → increase your likelihood of success.
It might not make perfect sense right now, but once you’ve read today’s articles, it should hold a whooole lot of extra weight.
Let’s start by focusing on the team behind ai16z, and their ‘Eliza AI agent framework.’
Eliza is now the most widely adopted open-source AI framework in the world, and the fastest growing AI/crypto repository on Github in the past four years, in terms of stars (aka: saves).
…ok, so why all the hubbub around this ‘framework’?
Eliza is essentially a bunch of pre-written code that anyone can copy/paste and use to launch their own AI agent, allowing builders to input simple text to define the AI’s personality – e.g:
- For character ‘lore’ – you could input something like: "you once ate 10 hot dogs and threw up on a Maltese Bichon at a dog show"
- For character messaging ‘style’ – you could input something like: "don’t use words like ‘hubbub’ - it’s weird"
- For text post examples, you could scrape your own Twitter profile, so it's trained on your writing…
Then bleep bloop bleep it’s adopted and used to guide the AI’s personality.
(And the more examples you feed your AI → the more its personality is developed).
On top of all that – there are a TON of web integrations, ready to go!
Twitter, Telegram, Discord, OpenAI, and a range of crypto wallets (Solana, Base, Aptos) – if you want your AI to have access to them, you just input your account credentials…
Then boom! Your AI agent is now live on that platform/blockchain.
Now here’s the wildest part of all of this…
The folks that developed the Eliza framework went and:
- Built their own fully crypto integrated AI agent called Marc AIndreessen
- Launched a DAO (called ai16z) with an associated token ($AI16Z)
- Gave the AI free reign to manage the DAO’s investments
Every time someone buys $AI16Z tokens → that money can then be used by the Marc AIndreessen AI to invest in other tokens.
(It’s a helluva concept!)
Right now, the DAO has bought (and/or been given) roughly $21M worth of crypto assets, while the $AI16Z token has ballooned to a market cap of (wait for it) $890M!
And the token is up ~64x since its November low! 👇
Starting to see how following developer attention can yield real profits?
Good. Now, let’s double down on that. 👇
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THE STATE OF CRYPTO DEVELOPMENT IN 2024 💻
We just read the Electric Capital Developer Report, so you don’t have to!
(Though, tbh, you’ll probably want to – it’s a banger!)
Here are our 5 key points that caught our attention:
1/ Solana is the #1 ecosystem for new developers in 2024!
The amount of new developers coming to Solana grew 83% YoY in 2024 – this is the first time since 2016 that it hasn’t been Ethereum leading the charge!
(The ‘Ethereum’ column in the below chart = Ethereum mainnet + L2s)
2/ The Ethereum ecosystem is still the global king of developers
3/ Base is king of the Ethereum L2s
Base is responsible for a whopping 42% of the new code being written in the Ethereum ecosystem! That’s a solid lead if we’ve ever seen one.
4/ Crypto-focused development has compounded beautifully over the past decade
Since Ethereum's launch in 2015, crypto development has grown 39% per year!
In total, 39.1k new developers explored crypto in 2024, and 23.6k devs are currently contributing to open source projects per month!
5/ New developers have been declining over the past 3 years, but look set to explode in 2025/2026
Notice the pattern below? New developer growth correlates with markets.
Ever since Ethereum launched in 2015, new developers have rushed in as markets peaked (2017 and 2021), continued to grow the year after as markets crashed (2018 and 2022), before spending two years declining (2019-2020 and 2023-2024).
The good news is: if this pattern continues, new developers entering the crypto space should roughly double in 2025!
Ok, but why should I care about developer growth and its share across ecosystems?
- More developers = more cool applications being built
- More cool apps = more users coming to crypto
- More users = number go up over time
The alpha here?
Invest in projects that devs are gravitating towards → increase your likelihood of success.
(Boom! Kept our promise).
…speaking of developers – we just sat down with one of the biggest, baldest developers in the Solana ecosystem, Mert Mumtaz, to talk:
- Solana vs. other L1s
- What are Solana's misconceptions?
- Solana use cases and what's coming in 2025?
Check it out here! 👇
YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts
WHO IS THE BIGGEST VILLAIN OF 2024?
In case you missed it yesterday:
The second annual Milk Road Awards are now open for voting!
We have nine total categories, including but not limited to ‘Villain of the Year’ 👹
And your nominees are:
(Say it with us now: “Nightmare blunt rotation”).
Ready to cast your vote? Click below to make your voice heard. 👇
Oh, and seeing as the holiday season is approaching – anyone that votes gets a 30 day free trial of Milk Road PRO 🎅 (for new PRO subscribers only)
BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪
Ledger is back at it again with another new product. First, it was the Ledger Stax and now the Ledger Flex. Wow, Ledger just keeps on innovating. Impressive.
Japan is considering a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Another one? It seems like these announcements are popping up everywhere.
Trump’s World Liberty buys $LINK again. A U.S. President investing in DeFi tokens will never fail to amuse us.
An early Bitcoin investor has been sentenced to 2 years in prison for not reporting $4M in crypto gains. Let this be your reminder: always report your gains, folks. Always.
We’re on the hunt for a kickass social media manager to join our team. The best part? That’s just one of the 5 open roles waiting for you. Check out if the roles fit your vibe.
We just dropped our Christmas gift guide. Got a hard-to-shop-for degen in your life? Or maybe a frumpy uncle you’re looking to orange pill? This guide covers it all.
MILKY MEMES 🤣
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DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.
