The Next Wave of Unicorns

[The Bleeding Edge]( Editor’s Note: We’re turning things over today to Brownstone Research’s senior crypto analyst, Ben Lilly. In this issue, Ben dives into the newest wave of cryptocurrency fervor that’s sweeping the globe and what it means for the future of the sector to see the world finally embracing crypto. Plus, [a way for readers to gain exposure]( to the industry as we progress toward where crypto, AI, and blockchain collide. Read on for more from Ben… --------------------------------------------------------------- The Next Wave of Unicorns By Ben Lilly, Senior Crypto Analyst, Brownstone Research --------------------------------------------------------------- For three days I hardly slept. My mind would not quiet down. The simple thought that Suzie’s lemonade stand could create a currency caused my thoughts to race. The scenarios I dreamt up were endless… Businesses could issue their own tokens and create sticky feedback loops for retention… or even distribute dividends and have 24/7 markets pricing everything in real-time. The thought of the democratization of financial markets was overwhelming. This was almost 10 years ago to the day. At the time, it was the exact thing I was on the hunt for. To sum up why, it’s good to recall the saying, “Be first, be smart, or cheat.” Ten years ago, I wanted an edge in the market. I wasn’t content with the slow and steady returns of the S&P 500. And I knew investing in large-cap stocks only rarely delivers explosive returns. I was on the hunt for an asymmetric bet – an opportunity for outsized returns compared to the capital at risk. This thirst for this upside led to me diving into small caps, bonds, private lending, and private equity offerings. But even with my experience as an economist and loan writer, I knew I wasn’t the smartest in those markets… Mostly because I always wasn’t the first or said differently, getting the first crack at what deals to choose in those markets… And I simply wouldn’t even consider cheating. I knew the deck was stacked against me… And to get ahead meant digging deeper. That’s how I stumbled upon Bitcoin and Ethereum. The World Is Finally Embracing Cryptocurrencies In just a few days it became clear to me just how disruptive this technology would be. It’s why I could hardly sleep and instantly knew my life had been permanently altered. But even in those early days, my main concern, once the excitement wore off, was whether or not regulators would embrace this bleeding-edge technology or view it as a threat. It didn’t take long to find out it was the latter… Yet I was undeterred, mostly because the gains realized in the few years that followed acted as assurance that my thinking was correct. But let me be the first to say… It’s been anything but easy. Government after government ignorantly throttled its growth. Scammers and criminals also swooped in to take advantage of the regulatory vacuum created by governmental indecision, causing a feedback loop of the government becoming even more hostile to the space. And year after year, many talented individuals saw this resistance and either called it quits or moved offshore. The road has been anything but easy. Global regulators have never been welcoming to the digital asset industry since I started. But this has drastically changed in the last month. And I can’t stress just how massive and positive this change is. Since the recent Presidential election in November, we have seen an overwhelming embrace of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Every day, I now read about a Trump appointee holding cryptocurrency or having ties to the industry. Even the newly nominated Securities Exchange Commission chairman, Paul Atkins, has acted as an advisor on cryptocurrencies. On the nomination, here’s what Trump said… [Atkins] also recognizes that digital assets & other innovations are crucial to making America greater than ever before. Even U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell came out earlier today accepting Bitcoin’s role in finance by stating Bitcoin is a competitor with gold, not the U.S. dollar. And the positive sentiment has gone global… Just last week, Vladimir Putin signed a law classifying digital currencies as a form of property in foreign trade settlements under an experimental legal regime, taking a significant step in cryptocurrency regulation. South Korea has agreed to a two-year moratorium on the implementation of the cryptocurrency taxation proposed by the government and ruling party. Even China has legal protections in place for holding and owning cryptocurrencies now. Shanghai has recognized Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as “virtual assets with economic value.” In light of this global change in sentiment, the market has been anything but stagnant. Old projects like Iota, Ripple, Stellar, and Hedera rose 386%, 399%, 450%, and 622% in the last thirty days… We even recommended one of these to subscribers of the re-launched Neural Net Profits research service. (If you’re interested in learning more about that, you can [go right here](. The moves have been enormous. The intensity of some of these moves has many believing the biggest gains have come and gone… and that the government’s change in sentiment has already played itself out in the market. But that’s not even close to the reality of what’s happening right now. Recommended Link [Advertisement for Nvidia, Apple, Tesla, and Google stock recommendations]( [Crazy Footage: Watch Jeff’s Cybertruck Stunt]( Hi, Jeff here… Even though I can’t see a thing… I’m about to get in this Cybertruck and drive up to a location just a few miles from here to show you Elon Musk’s next AI product. I promise what happens next will shock you… [Click here to see what happened.]( The Agentic Economy To show what I mean, we need only to observe the bigger gains that have happened in the last 30 days… Let’s take a quick look at the other projects at the top of the leaderboard over the 30 days. Next to those other tokens mentioned before, there’s also Virtuals Protocol, ai16z, and Zerebro. They all skyrocketed… Realizing 365%, 717%, and 1,352% gains in the last 30 days. The common thread? They all have to do with AI Agents. Jeff Brown has been showing his readers proof that the Agentic Economy is coming… He wrote about Agentic AI recently in [The Bleeding Edge – The Agentic AI Undercurrent]( Agentic AI, or agentic reasoning, is kind of like it sounds. The technology, the AI, is given agency. It is given the authority or directive to solve a problem or complete a task through a series of steps. This differs from today’s LLM technology, which provides users with a zero-shot response. When we use something like ChatGPT, we give it a prompt, and then it returns a complete response. The response is based on the information from our prompt, along with its pre-trained knowledge, and returned in a matter of seconds. An agentic workflow is quite different. It is an iterative process where an agentic AI uses a more humanlike workflow to accomplish a task. As Jeff has written before, these Agentic AI systems are a gold mine of untapped productivity… Agentic AIs can interact with the real world by performing specific tasks without human intervention. That means these agentic AIs can perform highly repetitive tasks, freeing up capital and labor for higher use cases. They aren’t meant to replace the workforce but rather to participate alongside us in the workforce. It’s, in part, why PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates agentic AI’s impact to be between $2.6 and $4.4 trillion annually to global GDP by 2030. When we talk about the “Agentic Economy,” this is the future we’re talking about. Considering how quickly other generative AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and many others have been advancing and accomplishing in such a short period, it isn’t far off. The rate of advancement is unlike anything we’ve ever seen in the tech world. And it’s spilling over into the digital asset arena. You may have read my piece [The Bleeding Edge – The Agentic Economy Goes Permissionless]( where I laid out how the Agentic Economy is taking root on public blockchains… [Because] public blockchains are permissionless, that means [an] AI agent can interact with any protocol without human intervention. So, not only can a Web3 AI agent create its own wallet to send and receive tokens, but it can also use this same wallet to generate a landing page on the internet… create a social profile to chat with other AI agents or potential customers… and even purchase additional compute resources on demand. When we realize that AI agents can operate with unparalleled autonomy in a Web3 environment, we start to envision AI agents spinning up and operating all the foundational pieces to run and maintain a business, independently. We can refer to this as the Web3 Agentic Economy. So you see, it’s a natural fit for AI Agents. They can operate with unparalleled autonomy. They can literally manage a website, receive payments, send payments, interact with customers, and more… All from a blockchain. The foundational pieces to make this go from a hypothetical trend to reality are already in place. I can’t stress this enough. The tooling is there, and what we see now are developers just piecing them together like Lego pieces. Don’t Worry, We’re Still Early The last time I saw this speed in development in Web3 projects was in 2020. At that time we witnessed decentralized finance produce massive successes like Aave and Uniswap, both of which sit with multibillion-dollar market caps. That period gave birth to dozens of unicorns in just months. And as we sit here today, the Web3 Agentic Economy is very early. To show you what I mean, just look at the Virtuals Protocol. That’s the token we mentioned earlier in the essay that’s been on a tear the past few weeks to become a unicorn… Virtuals gives creators the ability to perform an initial agent offering (IAO). An IAO essentially allows the market to invest in an AI Agent by purchasing tokens. The protocol is designed to let a builder pick and choose the core aspects such as onchain operations, image/video/text generation, memory, and more. It’s a modular approach. And the agents have full control of a wallet. This means they can interact with the public, create innovative value accrual to their tokens, and then move capital around… autonomously. We are starting to see them interact with the public at large. You can literally send them a “tweet” to see the [value for yourself](. The agent has even begun to comment on another AI agent project [we mentioned earlier]( We’ve even started to witness AI Agents begin to form autonomous organizations where they make collective decisions through the ai16z project – the other big gainer mentioned before. It’s so early, and I’m quickly reminded of the feeling I had about 10 years ago… one where I felt like we were on the precipice of something huge. We are scratching the surface of what is to come. And as we know from following Jeff at The Bleeding Edge, AI Agents will be one of the biggest themes of 2025. So stay tuned to hear more on how this trend is overflowing into an industry with a major change in sentiment. Your Pulse on Crypto, Ben Lilly Senior Crypto Analyst, Brownstone Research P.S. If you want to have exposure to this industry today and take part in our service that already recommended some of the biggest gainers seen in the last couple of months, [consider joining Neural Net Profits today](. It’s a service that leverages The Perceptron, our proprietary neural network, to find cryptocurrencies set to explode in 60 days or less. [Brownstone Research]( Brownstone Research 1125 N Charles St, Baltimore, MD 21201 [www.brownstoneresearch.com]( To ensure our emails continue reaching your inbox, please [add our email address]( to your address book. This editorial email containing advertisements was sent to {EMAIL} because you subscribed to this service. To stop receiving these emails, click [here](. Brownstone Research welcomes your feedback and questions. But please note: The law prohibits us from giving personalized advice. To contact Customer Service, call toll free Domestic/International: 1-888-512-0726, Mon–Fri, 9am–7pm ET, or email us [here](mailto:memberservices@brownstoneresearch.com). © 2024 Brownstone Research. All rights reserved. Any reproduction, copying, or redistribution of our content, in whole or in part, is prohibited without written permission from Brownstone Research. [Privacy Policy]( | [Terms of Use](