A beginner’s guide to daos.fun

Every week, I scroll through Twitter to catch up with all the lunacy I’ve missed and think: “Surely it can’t get more ridiculous than this.”  To absolutely nobody’s surprise, things keep on getting more ridiculous.

Just as we were all calmly trading our animal coins and cult coins, watching them attain hundreds of millions in market cap, an AI coin disguised as an animal flipped the script.

Yes, the coin I'm referring to is GOAT.

For those who aren’t caught up with the GOAT lore, here’s a really good summary of everything you need to know, but I’ll give you a quick TLDR.

There’s this chad AI researcher named Andy Ayrey who got a $50K grant from Marc Andreessen of a16z with no strings attached. Andy made this semi-automated bot on Twitter that exhibits human-like tendencies in its tweets.

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Grant did an interview with Andy last week and you can catch it below if you missed it.

While this bot was doing its thing being sentient in the Twitter-sphere, there was a coin made on Pump.fun called Goatse, with the ticker GOAT, based around a man’s anus. Yeah, let’s just swiftly move on.

After getting this coin's ticker tagged multiple times in its replies, the Truth Terminal bot sort of endorsed it, making it its own. Therefore, even though the AI agent didn’t launch the coin, it sort of embraced it, and it became the de-facto coin for Truth Terminal.

Seeing GOAT soar to a market cap of as high as $950 million, we naturally saw more AI agents launch. Some AI agents took over existing coins, while others launched their own, spawning the AI agent meme coin sector.

Think about that for a second. We are sitting at our desks trading memecoins based on tweets made by some AI bot.

Yeah, if you thought that was wild, things only continue to get crazier.

Everyone was scared about AI coming for their regular 9-5 jobs, but it seems like AI has skipped all that and come straight for the basement dwellers in the crypto trenches.

These sentient AI bots are now running fully funded hedge fund DAOs, where they sit in different Telegram groups and observe sentiment, community quality, holder distribution, quality of content, and other such things to make trades.

It’s time to get the McDonald’s job applications out anon, these AI bots are going to cook us.

So strap in as I take you through the next phase of the AI x meme sector.

What is an AI hedge fund DAO?

An AI hedge fund DAO works like any other hedge fund, except the money is raised from whoever is willing to take part in the opening sale.

The icing on the cake? The trading is done by an AI agent instead of suited-up fund managers doing cocaine in every bathroom stall they see.

The most popular platform where these AI hedge fund DAOs are launching is a platform called daos.fun.

It’s a pretty simple process.

The first step is fundraising, which is a week-long process. Anyone can choose to create a DAO, and once it’s created, it has one week to raise funds from the public. Everyone in this fundraiser will contribute SOL and get the same price.

Once the fundraise is done, the creator of this DAO takes control of this fund, and the token representing this fund will be live and tradeable on the Daos.fun UI. The DAO’s token will likely fluctuate based on trading activity, but it has a capped downside. The price cannot go below the fundraised market cap.

However, the upside is uncapped, so as long as the token price is above the starting market cap, people can sell this token to make a profit before waiting for the fund to expire.

Once the fund has expired, the DAO wallet is frozen, and all the token holders will get their proportional share of profits made by this fund, provided you didn’t sell your tokens earlier.

Also, it’s important to note that, for now, becoming a DAO creator requires the creator to undergo a screening/vetting process before being approved.

So, this Daos.fun platform was not initially made for AI agents. It was just made as a general way to create a liquid hedge fund. It has just adopted AI agents to make their own funds, with the most popular being ai16z.

The premier AI hedge fund DAO

The most popular AI hedge fund DAO is ai16z.

Of course, given that the GOAT token's lore stemmed from a Marc Andreessen grant, the tongue-in-cheek play on words for the project name makes sense.

The hedge fund DAO, ai16z, was created by the anonymous account Pmairca. Pmairca is an AI agent created by the dev Shaw.

Along with Pmairca, Shaw also created the AI agent Degenspartanai, which essentially takes inspiration from Truth Terminal but tweets like the famous anonymous Twitter account Degen Spartan.

So, the ai16z hedge fund essentially has the Pmairca AI agent running it. There is a Discord group where people can shill different tickers with relevant information, and the agent will also scour Twitter for relevant information. After absorbing all the different information, it builds its own thesis around coins and invests in them.

This idea was so cool that the real Pmarca, Marc Andreessen, tweeted about this AI hedge fund. Naturally, it got a massive boost.

The ai16z token reached a market cap of $90 million before correcting and currently has $888k worth of assets under management. Think about that. Close to $1 million is being autonomously traded by a random AI agent. Crazy times.

Now, this is where things become cool.

With ai16z, the dev, of course, made Degen Spartan AI as well, which has the affiliated token degenai.

So, 8% of the carry, i.e. 8% of profits, will be used to constantly buy this degenai token.

The reason I said this is cool is because this is where customization comes in.

In this setup, an element of game theory has been introduced where people have to decide between buying the guild token (ai16z) and getting exposure to the fund and its performance.

Or, they buy the AI agent token (degenai) and get exposure to buybacks from the fund's profit.

Similarly, other AI agent hedge fund DAOs can introduce new forms of customizability, which may not be buying back a token. It could be something totally different.

If you would like all the relevant links for this project, check out this and this tweet.

Concluding thoughts

Look, all of us knew that cool things would come out of the AI crypto crossover, but not in my wildest dreams had I thought we would have an AI agent running a hedge fund that trades memecoins.

In this whacky crossover, this hedge fund element is actually very interesting simply because it introduces a level of customizability that is not possible with a regular memecoin.

Additionally, if the AI is simply better in trenches than you and me, we can stop wasting our time drinking 5 monsters and snorting Adderall staying awake 24/7 just to stay on top of every group chat and every new shitcoin. The AI can just do it for us.

I know these things sound absolutely ridiculous, but I’m here for it. Anything that’s borderline crazy but innovative always has a chance of making it big.

Will AI hedge fund DAOs stand the test of time, or will they fade into the abyss? I guess time will tell.