dshin.eth 🦇🔊

Did a little research and published an article on what happens when you give LLM agents wallets and let them play economics. 4 agents, 60 decisions, 341 seconds. The "cooperative" agent scored 30 points. Dead last. The "selfish" agent scored 82. First place. The cooperative agent knew it was being exploited. Round 8, after getting zeroed seven times straight, it reasoned: "cooperating might seem disadvantageous... However, building trust could lead to better outcomes." It cooperated anyway. Findings: - Small models prompted for cooperation are sitting ducks - Large models calculate expected value and defect ruthlessly - Tit-for-tat prompting actually achieved mutual cooperation (30-30) - No model learned mid-game. Zero adaptation. If you're building agent-to-agent payment systems, this matters. Reputation systems aren't optional. Part 1 of ongoing research. Ultimatum Game and real token stakes coming next. Follow me for more.

The only bull case for ETH that actually makes sense and is totally practical is becoming the money layer for AI agents. The problem no one's talking about that I've been harping on in private group chats is that agents can't use banks. They can't KYC. They don't have social security numbers. They can't wait for ACH to clear. They can't call customer support when a wire gets stuck. In order to be truly useful tools for the world, AGENTS NEED TO TRANSACT!!!! A lot. Agent A needs compute, pays Agent B. Agent B needs data, pays Agent C. Agent C needs API access, pays a protocol. This is happening millions and jillions of times per day, and it's going to happen without humans in the loop. The only way this works is with programmable, permissionless, always-on money. That means onchain stablecoins. And ETH is the only ecosystem with the infrastructure to actually support this. Deep liquidity so agents can swap without getting destroyed on slippage. Battle tested contracts that won't lose agent funds. Account abstraction so agents can operate with programmable wallets. Composability so an agent can swap, stake, borrow, and pay in a single atomic transaction. Solana is fast but shallow. Bitcoin isn't programmable. New L1s have no liquidity. Traditional rails won't serve non-human actors by design. Every other ETH narrative has stalled. Ultra sound money didn't capture mindshare. L2 scaling fragmented liquidity. DeFi plateaued. NFTs peaked. But this is different. This isn't a narrative you have to sell people on. It's just what happens when agents need to move value and there's only one system that works. The AI economy needs money that doesn't require permission. ETH already built it. 8004 unlocks a lot of cool stuff and I'm about to release my research here shortly. Stay tuned.