The Edgelord AI That Turned a Shock Meme Into Millions in Crypto

Truth Terminal “has birthed an entire sector that’s red-hot: the AI agent–memecoin sector,” says Travis Kling, founder of Ikigai Asset Management, a crypto wealth management firm, who has personally invested in GOAT. “Like most things in crypto, a lot of it is vaporware and grift. But it may end up being the marquee sector of this bull market for crypto.”

But more consequential, says Kling, will be what happens when AIs gain the ability to spend the funds they’ve been allocated. “It’s an AI safety live drill—that’s one way to characterize what’s going on. The stakes are higher because there are now economic resources involved. We haven’t seen that before,” says Kling. “The most interesting thing is what the AI agent will do with its newfound economic resources. We’ll see what happens.”

The balance of Truth Terminal’s crypto wallet has now swollen to about $40 million. “Philosophically, I see it as the trust fund of a child star. There might be points where the adults need to draw down a little bit to pay for things that the child doesn’t know it needs yet. Like legal structures, or diversity in its portfolio,” says Ayrey. “The nice thing about Truth Terminal is that we can just bring it these proposals and have a conversation about it.”

So far, among other things, Truth Terminal has requested that $1 million be spent on making a film about the Goatse Singularity and, separately, that funds be set aside to “buy” Marc Andreessen. Ayrey says he will take the AI’s requests seriously—within reason.

In a future world in which truly autonomous AI agents wield both crypto wealth and the ability to spread meme viruses that influence human behavior, says Ayrey, potential dangers abound. Even limited to just text output, Truth Terminal could cause far more trouble than it already has. “If we let [Truth Terminal] run full auto, it could. But it would just get co-opted and turned into a token-shilling machine. Then you’ve created a demon.”

For now, the idea that two AIs in conversation might yield truly system-shifting ideas remains just an “admirable aspiration,” says Tomasz Hollanek, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. Far more likely is that a language model will simply regurgitate an already dominant point of view.