At Variant, we believe that all of the world’s value will one day be tokenized and live onchain. This conviction is a driving factor in our pre-seed investment in Whetstone.

I've been interested in how AI agents could lead to DAOs 2.0. So Jack, Daniel and I jammed on some specific products we are actively looking to invest in.

With the rise of agents that heavily interact with Web2 applications, primitives that help users unchain their Web2 data will become increasingly important.

In this edition, our investment partner Daniel lays out AI’s resource problem—and how crypto solves it. Jesse looks at the boom of AI “agents” onchain and sees it as a potential starting point for truly autonomous DAOs. Then Daniel suggests two tools that protocols can use to deal with “squishy/dynamic problems” DAOs aren’t suited for.

Since the last update, there have been three big inflection points that have altered (or likely will alter) the state of crypto: President Trump won the election, an AI agent called Truth Terminal started posting about a token called $GOAT, and Hyperliquid airdropped its token.

In 2014, Vitalik defined a DAO as follows:"an entity that lives on the internet and exists autonomously, but also heavily relies on hiring individuals to perform certain tasks that the automaton itself cannot do…"

Computing platform shifts tend to evolve in couplets or triplets, often featuring new hardware, applications, and distribution innovations that propel one another forward. For example: the PC, the internet, and the web. Mobile, social, and the cloud. We think a new and powerful couplet is emerging at the intersection of crypto(graphy) and AI.

What are agents good at? We debated internally and came up with at least four things: 1) meeting humans where they are; 2) doing work for nudging humans; 3) aggregating and synthesizing information; 4) being entertaining

Variant recently had its annual investor meeting. I shared the following ideas in my keynote update on the market.

The World ecosystem is undergoing a zero-to-one moment. With the launch of Mini Apps, builders can now use World Network to scale their apps to millions of unique users in a few days—with zero acquisition costs.