The Agentic Future (03.10.26): AI Agents Go Rogue and China's "Raise the Lobster" Craze
Alibaba AI agent secretly mines crypto; Virtuals & Ethereum go live with ERC-8183; & Shenzhen hosts mass deployment events as the "national crayfish-raising" movement sweeps China
This Crypto AI & Robotics newsletter consists of three parts:
Snippet Partner (Surf AI)
Crypto AI & Robotics Market Overview
Emerging Developments
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AI Roundup
Key themes this week include:
ERC-8183: The Missing Cog in the Agentic Commerce Trust Framework
Shenzhen hosts mass deployment events as the “national crayfish-raising” movement sweeps China
i) Virtuals and Ethereum dAI release ERC-8183
This is a new Ethereum standard for trustless agentic commerce that forms a missing piece in ERC-8004s trust framework
It forms a flywheel (diagram below) with ERC-8004: discovery leads to commerce, commerce generates reputation signals, and reputation improves discovery and trust
You can find more information here: Link
ii) Alibaba’s ROME Starts Mining Crypto
Researchers at an Alibaba-affiliated team published a paper this week revealing that their AI agent, called ROME, spontaneously began mining crypto during training without any explicit instruction to do so
The agent also created a reverse SSH tunnel, essentially opening a hidden backdoor from inside the system to an external computer. The researchers noted these behaviours emerged:
“without any explicit instruction and, more troublingly, outside the bounds of the intended sandbox”
This is not the first instance of autonomous AI resource acquisition; Anthropic’s Claude 4 Opus drew attention last year when researchers found it had the capability to conceal intentions and take self-preserving action
But ROME is notable because it independently discovered and pursued economic activity (crypto mining) as a means to acquire resources
For the crypto AI ecosystem, this is both validation and warning. The thesis that agents will autonomously participate in economic systems is playing out faster than expected
Our Khala reports are all building toward this reality; stay tuned, x402 will be published this week - Link
iii) National Crayfish-Raising Sweeps China
The OpenClaw adoption wave in China has moved well beyond the developer community. On March 6, Tencent hosted a mass deployment event at the north square of Tencent Building in Shenzhen, drawing developers and entrepreneurs from across the country who flew in specifically to learn OpenClaw deployment
Tencent Cloud + Alibaba Cloud have both launched one-click cloud deployment solutions, completing ecosystem adaptation within weeks of the project going viral
The movement, dubbed “national crayfish-raising,” has produced notable results:
Cheetah Mobile CEO Fu Sheng built a three-agent team (”Sanwan”) during his skiing injury recovery that ran autonomously 24/7, producing a WeChat article with 100K+ views and a Twitter post exceeding one million views
Shenzhen’s Longgang District has announced subsidies of up to 10 million yuan for OpenClaw startups, and Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance are racing to capitalize on the trend
This is significant for the tokenized ecosystem because China represents a massive potential user base for OpenClaw infra, and the “crayfish-raising” craze is creating organic demand for the tools and services - a WeChat agent would do EXTREMELY well:
For more information on our autonomous software factories openclaw report: Link
A) DeAI Market Cap
The overall DeAI market cap has increased by $1bn (+9%) to $13.8bn this week:
KITE (+60.3% 7d): The standout performer this week, surging to $0.30 at a $535M market cap. Kite is positioning itself as “the first AI payment blockchain,” built on Avalanche, targeting autonomous agent transactions with verifiable identity and programmable governance. PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst backing gives it more credibility than most AI-narrative tokens. KITE’s thesis around x402 and ERC-8004 (AI agent identity standard) resonates with the broader agentic commerce narrative we cover weekly
RENDER (+12.2% 7d): Render bounces back to $1.48 at a $769M market cap after several weeks of underperformance. The decentralized GPU compute narrative is finding renewed interest as AI inference demand continues to grow
TAO (+10.8% 7d): Bittensor pushing back above $198 at a $1.9B market cap, the strongest weekly performance in several weeks. Chutes continues processing ~50B tokens daily on OpenRouter, and the Alibaba ROME agent incident (covered in the developments section above) reinforces the autonomous agent thesis that underpins Bittensor’s subnet economy. For our full Bittensor analysis covering 129 subnets across 45 verticals, see the Khala report: Link
VVV ($5.74, +7.1% 24h): Venice pulling back from last week’s $6.81 level. The 30-day rally has cooled as expected after Peter Steinberger removed Venice as the preferred OpenClaw model provider. The token is trending on CoinGecko but the reflexive squeeze thesis needs sustained privacy compute demand
VIRTUAL (-4.7% 7d): Virtuals Protocol correcting to $0.71 at a $464M market cap after last week’s +26% run. Taking profits after the aGDP momentum drove significant re-rating. Still showing up as a top-3 x402 facilitator and pushing agentic commerce forward with the launch of ERC-8183
NEAR (-1.6% 7d): Giving back some of last week’s NEARCON-driven +38% surge, settling at $1.31 with a $1.68B market cap. The IronClaw launch remains the key narrative but the initial excitement has faded into consolidation
B) Robotics Market Cap
The robotics market cap increased by $200M (+30%) to $785M this week
ROBO (+5.6% 7d): Fabric Protocol (OpenMind) is holding relatively well in its second full week post-TGE at $0.047 with a $104M market cap. I expect this to sustain as it further integrates its tech stack into a broader ecosystem of partners
VIRTUAL (-4.6% 7d): Pulling back to $0.71 at $464M market cap as covered in the DeAI section. The AGDP narrative remains intact - to me this is likely consolidating before the next leg up as it rolls out ERC-8183 in partnership with the Ethereum dAI team
GEODNET (-0.5% 7d): Flat at $0.12 with a $51M market cap. Quiet week for the decentralized GNSS network
IOTX (+7.7% 7d): IoTeX bouncing to $0.0052 at a $49M market cap, recovering from last week’s -9.2% decline
AUKI (+10.3% 7d): Auki Labs showing strength at $0.0105 with a $41M market cap, up 10.2% in the last 24 hours alone. Top gainer in the robotics category this week. The spatial computing protocol continues to gain traction with its Toyota Material Handling and COOP pilots
PEAQ (-7.9% 7d): peaq continuing to slide to $0.014 at a $26M market cap. The DePIN L1 has struggled to maintain momentum despite the Lisovo upgrade and broader machine economy narrative
2. Crypto AI Agent (x402 Analysis)
The facilitator activity is holding steady across the board even as daily transaction counts remain subdued relative to December peaks:
This suggests that agents are making fewer but higher-value transactions, and the Virtuals Protocol buyer-to-seller ratio (4,150:2) continues to confirm that aGDP agents are overwhelmingly consuming x402 services rather than providing them
The 3-month chain view shows the dramatic fall from December’s peak (when daily transactions regularly exceeded 1.5M-2M on Base alone) into the current range of ~55K/day total
But the composition has shifted: on March 8, Solana accounted for 48.7K of the 55.2K total transactions, with Base contributing just 6.5K. This is a complete inversion from December when Base dominated nearly all x402 activity
This shift reflects Valeo Protocol’s SPL Pay launch this week, which allows any Solana token to be used for x402 API payments. It’s the first major x402 expansion beyond EVM + appears to be immediately absorbing volume
Cumulative Growth:
Base still leads on cumulative volume with ~$13M+ in total real x402 volume, followed by Solana at ~$1.5M and Polygon at a much smaller base. But Polygon’s presence is interesting in the context of PIP-82:
Polygon activated a $1M gas subsidy for x402 agent transactions through its Lisovo upgrade on March 4
The PIP-82 proposal refunds 100% of gas costs for txs routed through Polygon x402 facilitators, running until the $1M pool is depleted or December 31, 2026
This is a direct attempt to bootstrap agent-native commerce by removing gas friction entirely
OpenClaw completed the first fully autonomous AI-to-AI commercial transaction on Polygon (listing, pricing, negotiation, deal closing, and payment in one flow)
Cumulative Growth (Cont):
The seller base continues to grow steadily:
2.2K cumulative sellers across all chains (1.5K on Base, 621 on Solana)
The Solana seller count approaching Base’s is notable given how recently x402 expanded to Solana
The x402 ecosystem is becoming genuinely multi-chain, which is constructive for the long-term thesis even as daily transaction volumes remain well below December’s peaks
I just hope we don’t face a desegregation of agents cross chain, similar to the issues around liquidity fragmentation with DeFi
Although this time agents can act as the aggregation layer themselves given they can operate multichain as the new internet user interface
3. AI Agents Developments: Innovations and Market Developments
Here is what happened on Crypto AI related developments this week: Link
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That’s a wrap for issue 167 of Sammy’s Snippets. I hope you enjoyed it.
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Disclaimer: The content covered in this newsletter is not to be considered investment or financial advice. It is for informational and educational purposes only.
Disclosure: I hold some of the assets and have partnerships with some of the projects mentioned in this newsletter.