The Agentic Future (05.19.26): AI & Robotics Projects Reshaping the Crypto AI landscape
17 Crypto AI & Robotics protocols worth tracking — narrowed from a much longer list to the ones with real catalysts, shipping product, or structural setups landing soon
This Crypto AI & Robotics newsletter consists of three parts:
Snippet Partner (EigenCloud)
AI & Robotics Protocol Watchlist
Newsletter Feedback Poll
If you have any questions feel free to reach out to me on X or message my business X account ‘Khala Research’
Heads-up: Next week (05.26.26) will be the first skip week for The Agentic Future as I will be getting married — After 177 weeks of continued coverage I thought this would be a good opportunity to take a break for a week!
The newsletter will return the following Tuesday (06.02.26) with the usual cadence. Roundups on X continue as normal in the meantime
EigenCloud is the verifiable cloud built for the sovereign agent era, primed just as the number of nation states doubling down on their own Sovereign AI initiatives:
As AI agents move from assistants to economic actors holding wallets, paying for their own compute, and executing on behalf of humans, the binding constraint shifts from raw capability to provable accountability
EigenCloud is building that layer through four primitives:
EigenLayer (restaking with slashing for economic accountability)
EigenDA (tamper-resistant data availability)
EigenCompute (verifiable offchain compute)
EigenAI (bit-exact deterministic inference)
The agent-facing product is EigenCloud AgentKit (Beta), which launched March 26 and is built around three phases: Build, Prove, Run
How a sovereign agent works on EigenCloud
Why it matters
x402 solves how agents pay. Google’s AP2 standardises what an agent payment looks like across cards, bank rails, and chains
EigenCloud is the layer that proves the agent on the other end actually did what it was paid to do, and faces real economic consequences when it doesn’t
Live partnerships include Google Cloud (AP2 launch partner), Coinbase AgentKit, and many others.
Learn more: Link
This newsletter goes out weekly to 7.2k+ subscribers.
Please don’t hesitate to message me directly for sponsorship or partnership enquiries.
2. Crypto AI & Robotics Protocol Watchlist
I get asked every week which projects are actually worth attention versus noise
Here is the current cut, narrowed to the ones with shipping product, real catalysts, or structural setups in the next 30-60 days
This is not an investable index, not a price target list, and not a ranking. Just where the signal is concentrating from observations on the timeline:
Crypto x AI Protocols
Nous Research (Hermes Agent)
Hermes Agent flipped OpenClaw on May 10 to take the #1 spot on OpenRouter’s global daily inference rankings, processing 224B daily tokens against OpenClaw’s 186B, the first dethroning since OpenClaw launched in late 2025
90 days from launch to global #1; 114k+ GitHub stars, 295 contributors on the May 7 “Tenacity” v0.13.0 release (864 commits, 588 PRs)
Closed learning loop: writes its own reusable SKILL.md files, SQLite FTS5 persistent memory across sessions, no YAML configuration
Grok integration shipped May 16: Grok subscription holders can now run Hermes inside their Grok account, opening a direct distribution channel from xAI
No token (yet); pay attention and use Hermes agent
Bittensor (TAO) + Ecosystem
The closest thing crypto has to a structured market for decentralised AI primitives, mapped across 12 categories in the Khala Research Bittensor Ecosystem Map (April 19 cut):
Chutes (SN64): largest subnet by mcap, first to cross $100M, 9.1T+ cumulative tokens processed, daily peaks 50B+, ~4,400 H100-equivalent GPUs, 400k+ users, pricing ~85% lower than AWS, $1M+ auto-staking buybacks
Targon (SN4): 20B+ paid inference tokens per day, 1,500+ H200 GPUs, $60M+ annual compute incentives flowing through the network. $10.5M Series A led by OSS Capital with Digital Currency Group and Shopify’s Tobi Lütke among others. Intel TDX confidential compute architecture in production
Score (SN44): 100% conversion on 60-day enterprise trials, signed deals with Reading FC and a major European petroleum company monitoring thousands of automated gas stations. Formal alliance with PwC France and Maghreb deploying Manako (Score’s vision platform) across retail, logistics, energy, public infrastructure. Won Start In Block 2026 at Paris Blockchain Week
Lium (SN51): ~$432K monthly rental revenue, ~6.2% of TAO emissions, 60% emissions burn. The top SN3 (Templar) miner now runs Lium GPUs
Plus many other promising subnets like Metanova for drug discovery + more
Venice (VVV + DIEM)
3 million user milestone hit for its private inference and use of several high performance AI models with its carefully orchestrated dual token model:
Programmatic Sub Burn Program upgraded April 27: each Pro signup now burns $2 of VVV (up from $1), Pro+ burns $5, Max burns $10, directly tying revenue growth to supply contraction
May 11 was Venice’s strongest revenue day on record per CTO Jesse Proudman, +10% above previous high. 10x API token usage growth since January:
DIEM is the structurally novel piece: lock sVVV to mint DIEM, each DIEM = $1/day of API credit forever, agents can hold DIEM as a perpetual compute right rather than burning through per-request API spend
TIG (The Innovation Game)
Jensen Huang has gone on the record multiple times (Lex Fridman, TechCrunch, the NVIDIA “5-Layer Cake” framing) that algorithmic innovation, not just hardware scaling, is the primary lever for continued AI advancement. Elon Musk has made the same point repeatedly. TIG is the only crypto-native protocol explicitly built around that thesis
A synthetic market for algorithms: Innovators submit and optimise algorithms across AI/ML, cryptography, biomedical research, and climate science; Benchmarkers compete to identify the most efficient ones; both earn TIG. License payments flow back to contributors
Underpinned by Optimisable Proof-of-Work (OPoW), a proof-of-work variant where the algorithms themselves are the optimisation target rather than hash brute force
Built on Base, founded by John Fletcher + 3 other highly skilled individuals:
Currently ~$1 with $30-35M mcap against a $4.30 ATH
The structurally interesting angle: this is the only protocol in the list explicitly designed to make algorithms themselves a tradeable, investable asset class
Prime Intellect
Doubling down on automating AI research, gaining a lot of traction recently:
Trained INTELLECT-3 (671B parameters) and open-sourced it in December 2025; INTELLECT-1 (10B) and the 32B reasoning model are in production
~$70M raised across three rounds (Founders Fund, CoinFund, Distributed Global, Protocol Labs); angel list includes Karpathy, Clement Delangue (Hugging Face), Erik Voorhees, and others
Engineering stack: PRIME-RL (asynchronous pre-training), PCCL (collective communications, replaces NCCL), TopLoc (verification), SYNTHETIC data engine, ShardCast for heterogeneous cluster efficiency
Decentralised pre-training across untrusted, heterogeneous hardware was widely called impossible until they actually did it
Gensyn
a16z-led Series A, $78M+ total funding (a16z crypto, Galaxy Digital, CoinFund, Eden Block, Protocol Labs, Canonical Crypto, Maven 11)
Native AI token launched April 2025; mainnet and Delphi marketplace live since April 22, 2025
Delphi is the differentiated product: an AI-settled information markets platform where market creators select a fixed AI model upfront and outcomes are resolved through Gensyn’s reproducible execution environment (REE) rather than human operators. Creator earns 1.5% of volume in USDC, 0.5% protocol fee feeds a buy-and-burn on the AI token
Verde proof-of-learning and the RL Swarm post-training framework remain the deeper infrastructure plays. Delphi is the first commercial product running on the same rails - expect more to come!
OpenServ (SERV)
+123% on 7d running into May; SERV Reasoning framework reportedly outperforming Grok, GPT, Claude, and Gemini on the upcoming Autonomous Trading Competition using Dome API data for prediction-market strategies
SERV Cofounder launched, a no-code multi-agent team builder
Foundational design partnership with Neol applying SERV reasoning to enterprise and UAE government workloads
Joey Kheireddine joined as Head of Blockchain from Eliza Labs (formerly AI16z) in April and more recently ex-head of partnerships at Google:
BANKR (BNKR)
Live financial infrastructure stack for agents: AI agent wallets, token launchpad, LLM gateway, x402 Cloud for one-command deployment of pay-per-request API endpoints
BNKR fair-launched on Base in December 2024 (100% to Uniswap V3 LP at launch, no vesting, no team allocation); 3% of supply burned since
Numerous successful products launched tokens on BANKR:
x402 Cloud launched April 2, 2026 to coincide with x402 joining the Linux Foundation under open governance (founding members: Coinbase, Cloudflare, Stripe, Google, Visa, Mastercard, AWS, Shopify). Bankr operates as the x402 facilitator and covers gas costs
CrunchDAO (CRNCH)
11,000+ ML engineers and 1,200+ PhDs across the network; the most credible attempt at an open coordination layer for elite research talent in crypto
Live institutional client list: the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute, ADIA Lab, and a Tier-1 global bank (crowdsourced ML for ultra-low latency FX pricing and inventory optimisation). Prize pools up to $100k+ paid in USDC, ranked among the top-paying ML competitions globally
$5M round in October 2025 co-led by Galaxy and Road Capital Management with VanEck and Multicoin Capital participating; $10M total raised
Crunch Hub (competitions), Real-Time Crunch (low-latency ML for financial applications), and an open-source ML orchestration layer that runs in the customer’s own cloud
Encrypted private models, embedded wallets, gas sponsorship; engineers focus on the model, the platform handles infrastructure and crypto
Targeting 20k Crunch Lab members by mid-2026; CEO Jean Herrell frames it as “a DAO of quants paid in crypto to solve problems for big institutions”
The structural angle: the only protocol on this list explicitly designed as a coordination layer for elite human ML talent rather than a coordination layer for compute, agents, or data
Robotics Protocols
XMAQUINA (DEUS)
TGE confirmed for May 27 on Base with Virtuals as launch partner
Treasury NAV ~$36M including direct equity stakes in Figure, Apptronik, Agility Robotics, NEURA Robotics, and 1X Tech (some Treasury positions reported triple-digit returns on entry)
Vesting: 33% unlock at TGE, 67% linear over 12 months
Final community presale (XMQ-02) approved up to 110M DEUS (~11% of supply)
With Robostrategy trading at 5x mNAV this shows demand for private robotics equities that could bode well for DEUS:
Khala Research report on XMAQUINA dropping soon!
Konnex
Substrate-based L1 testnet is live with a public RPC, block explorer, and testKNX faucet. End-to-end task flow operational across three workload-class subnets: Drone Navigation, Roboarm VLA, and SLAM 3D Map
Real performance, not slideware: 10,953+ jobs settled on testnet, >99.5% settlement success, median time-to-finality of 41.2 seconds, dispute rate under 1%. The cryptographic court for physical work is functioning end-to-end
Proof-of-Physical-Work (PoPW) as the consensus primitive, applied to physical-world workloads. Inherits the Bittensor-style coordination model (subnet creators, miners, validators, stakers) so experienced node operators onboard with a familiar mental model. Independent validators including ValidatorBunker and Zana running across all three subnets
The only robotics-native L1 with founders who have built, scaled, and exited robotics companies. Backers include Brandon Torres Declet (five-time CEO, three drone-sector IPO exits, $100M+ raised); strategic support from Lucas van Oostrum (Nova Sky Stories co-founder with Kimbal Musk, drone-swarm and multi-robot coordination expertise)
ReadyMonitor integration in motion (MOU signed) gives Konnex live real-world PoPW environments. Active pipeline of MOUs with Boston Dynamics, Figure AI, AeroVironment, Asylon, Anduril, Forterra, iRobot, Mamotion, Matic, Anzu Robotics, UAS Nexus
50,000+ miner applications in the first week of onboarding to submit Vision-Language-Action and Language Behavioural Models into the off-chain execution stack
GEODNET (GEOD) + Hyfix
21,000+ ground reference stations across 150+ countries delivering centimetre-level RTK positioning; the rare DePIN with audited enterprise revenue
GEOD burn rate increased in 11 of the last 12 months; $170k+ GEOD burned in a single recent week, with the next halving landing next month and GEOD on track to become outright deflationary if revenue holds
Hyfix Spatial Intelligence (same CEO and founder, Mike Horton) raised $15M seed on April 15, led by Craft Ventures with Multicoin Capital, Catapult Ventures, Finality Capital, and Sky Dayton participating. Fortune framed it as the U.S. alternative to DJI’s drone dominance
Hyfix shipped the H1P Positioning, Navigation, and Open-Compute Module for small unmanned systems at AUVSI XPONENTIAL 2026 (May 12-14), integrating GEODNET correction data for anti-spoofing RTK, running PX4 / NuttX, drop-in compatible with existing GNSS module footprints
One of the cleanest direct linkages between a crypto-native DePIN and U.S. hard-tech reshoring
Auki (AUKI)
Crossed 7-digit ARR in 2025 via a single $2M+ deal; two largest paying pilots are with North American Fortune 500 retailers representing a combined potential of $15M ARR
6,500+ retail locations across enterprise chains in paid pilots; 500 grocery store robots planned for 2026 deployment
Posemesh integrations across Unitree, EngineAI, Padbot, Slamtec (hardware-agnostic perception)
Virtuals (VIRTUAL)
Millions of USD in protocol revenue and agentic GDP, thousands of agents deployed agents + 42% of the agentic transactions on Base flow through Virtuals:
Robotics arm now in production: SeeSaw (Subnet 5 on BitRobot) collecting daily task videos for robot training data, PrismaX raised $11M for remote operator coordination, SAM became the first on-chain AI agent controlling real-world robots on Virtuals
Recent EconomyOS offers credit cards functionality for agents:
Roba Labs (ROBA)
Teased ROBA Compute on May 18 as the infrastructure layer for AI, robotics, and autonomous agents, sitting underneath the existing platform stack (per the Base Hub daily recap)
Positions itself as the “Hugging Face of Robotics” — open, interoperable, spanning simulation to real-world deployment. The pitch is that the current robotics stack forces every new idea to start from scratch across 10+ fragmented platforms, and ROBA collapses that into a single workflow
Four-stage workflow: Build → Train → Share → Monetize
Existing product surface: ROBA Studio (unified GUI for data, AI frameworks, simulation, templates), ROBA Creator Hub (marketplace for robotics assets, models, worlds), ROBA Link (middle layer aggregating third-party tools, SDKs, APIs), RobotRunTime (lightweight robot operating system with real-time capabilities)
The accessibility thesis: most robotics platforms are corporate, closed, and not built for individual creators or smaller teams
ROBA explicitly targets the long tail of robotics builders the same way Hugging Face served the ML long tail. ROBA Compute extends that thesis from tooling into actual compute infrastructure
BitRobot Network
Co-developed by FrodoBots Lab and Protocol Labs, Solana-based subnet architecture for embodied AI research. Co-authored by Michael Cho (FrodoBots Lab co-founder), Jonathan Victor (Ansa Research co-founder, former Filecoin Ecosystem Lead), and Juan Benet (Protocol Labs founder)
$8M total raised ($6M Feb 2025 seed led by Protocol VC; participation from Big Brain Holdings, Fabric Ventures, Solana Ventures, Virtuals Protocol; angels include Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal)
14 subnets live or in development, 5 publicly announced (Virtuals’ SeeSaw at SN5 is the most visible), 25+ in pipeline
Verifiable Robot Work (VRW) as the unit of incentive, Entity Node Tokens (ENT, NFT-based robot identity), $5M Grand Challenges Fund seeding Earth Rovers (navigation), Robotic Origami (dexterity), Robotic IKEA Assembly (manipulation). Token still pending
CodecFlow (CODEC)
Execution layer for Vision-Language-Action models: 2.8M+ inference calls served across 450+ models and 1,200+ compute suppliers
Three products live: Fabric (multi-cloud execution layer), Operator Kit (optr) for desktop/browser/sim/robot agents, SimArena (competitive simulation training)
Chainlink Runtime Environment integration live
Solana-native token, fair-launched via Pump Fun
NuNet (NTX)
Compute orchestration network enabling users to provide or use compute globally, seamlessly
NuNet Network went live with recent Hermes integration:
Multi-token, blockchain-agnostic compute settlement live on both Ethereum and Cardano
Real production workloads running today, not testnet: HOMEPUTE369 smart buildings (energy), Auki Posemesh (robotics spatial perception), Serverista (data centre VM orchestration)
The orchestration-first model differentiates it from marketplace-style decentralised compute; agents discover and provision their own compute rather than developers browsing and picking nodes manually
Other emerging signal worth noting:
Coinbase Agent.market counts 69k+ active agents on x402 with 165M+ transactions and $50M cumulative volume across reasoning, data, media, search, social, infrastructure, and trading categories — exposure likely through COIN
PEPTAI launched on Base, a fleet of autonomous agents for peptide drug discovery on bio.xyz; the latest iteration of the BioDAO / DeSci x AI agent crossover
Dolphin AI continues to develop as a beta-style play against Venice, worth tracking but not yet at a catalyst threshold for inclusion in the main list
Additional Resources:
Daily recaps for AI on Base:
The state of onchain AI inference by 0xJeff:
Slightly different layout today, will share a poll below for your feedback on future newsletters:
That’s a wrap for issue 177 of Sammy’s Snippets. I hope you enjoyed it.
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Disclaimer: The content of this newsletter is for informational purposes only. Nothing in this newsletter constitutes financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any asset. Always do your own research before making any investment decisions.
I hold positions in many of the assets discussed in this newsletter. For a full list of disclosures, please refer to the Khala Research website.
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Nice curation, crypto AI + robotics is one of the more interesting intersections right now. Love your work btw: would be fun to cross-recommend each other sometime if you’re open 🤝🙏
First of all, wishing you both an amazing wedding.
Second, you could have taken 1 or 2 more weeks off, but that's on you to decide :D