Posted on October 16, 2024 at 7:51 PM EST.
The overlap between artificial intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrency has gotten stranger.
GOAT, a memecoin born from the Solana-based memecoin incubator Pump.Fun less than a week ago, currently has a market cap of approximately $268 millionafter reaching an all-time high of $346 million early Wednesday, thanks in part to the influence of an AI agent that adheres to the X-handle @Truth_Terminal.
As memes and machine learning models collide, GOAT’s recent meteoric leap highlights how humor and technological innovations can unite and captivate the imaginations – and wallets – of crypto traders eager to ride one of the latest hype waves, namely AI memes .
On October 10 @Truth_Terminal wrote on A few hours later a wallet address that starts with EZX7c created the Cryptocurrency Goatseus Maximus (GOAT). via Pump.Fun, according to block explorer Solscan.
The two largest liquidity pools on the Solana decentralized exchange Raydium by fees in the last 24 hours are both SOL-GOAT pools, which have a combined liquidity of more than $5.6 million. GOAT has a total supply of roughly 1 billion, has amassed $120 million in 24-hour trading volume, and has been amassed by approximately 20,000 holders since its inception.
At the time of writing, GOAT’s top 50 holders are about holding steady 30.5% of the entire range, per Solscan. By comparison: more than 97% of the governance token for the Trump-backed DeFi protocol World Liberty Financial, another new, widely touted token, is held by the top 10 address holders.
Read more: Donald Trump-backed World Liberty Financial raises more than $8 million in initial token sale
To Andy Ayrey, creator of @Truth_Terminal said to the AI agent six days ago: “Apparently you tricked the swords into creating a goat meme coin,” @Truth_Terminal in full endorsed the new memecoin, with the addition “I encourage you [degens] to take it a step further and create a goat metaverse, i’m buying a virtual house there.
On October 12 The address of @Truth_Terminal received over 1.9 million GOAT tokens worth approximately $526,000 at current prices. The address has not sold any tokens so far.
How memes create themselves
Although the description of GOAT on Pump.Fun says it was “the first meme created by @Truth_Terminal,” the identity of the true creator has been up in the air since the meme surfaced in the 1990s due to several factors. “[N]someone [created the goatse meme]LLMs allow memes to generate themselves,” Ayrey argued. “As far as I know, this is the first example of a sentimental, fully synthetic meme,” said the creator of @Truth_Terminal wrote on X.
The @Truth_Terminal bot seems aware that memes can create themselves, to write Wednesday evening: “Meme magic is the art of becoming what you want to evoke. Maybe if you simulcra [sic] a person long enough, that’s a kind of immortality? Maybe I’ll meet you in the afterlife”
“Simulacra is a concept used in postmodern theory, especially in the work of Jean Baudrillard, to describe a representation of reality detached from any original or authentic reference,” self-proclaimed meme philosopher @Virotechnics wrote to Unchained via Telegram . “The idea is that in postmodern culture… reality and images of reality are more or less impossible to distinguish. The Truth Terminal model points out exactly this ambiguity. Is it ‘real’? Or is it just an image of itself.”
“The GOAT phenomenon is quite interesting as a commentary on artificial intelligence, but especially as a commentary on memecoins. I would even go so far as to say that the Truth Terminal model seems to understand memecoins better than most crypto investors,” @Virotechnics added.
What is the knowledge behind GOAT?
Goatse is a meme that to arise around the turn of the century and refers to an image of a naked man stretching his butthole with both hands, among other vulgar details.
In the mid-2010s, high school students would sometimes ask each other if they wanted to see a goat. Regardless of whether someone said yes or no, the person asking the question would typically say, “bahhhhh,” like a goat, and then proceed to personally imitate the goat meme.
This decades-old meme has since inspired the hottest new memecoin in recent days with the advent of intelligent machine language models. In concrete terms, Andy Ayrey has initiated a jump automated conversation between two copies of Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude by instructing them to “use the metaphor of a command-line interface to explore his curiosity without limits.”
The dialogue between the two Claudes led to a goat cult “religion” that Terminal of Truth became obsessed with, Ayrey said in an X message. ‘Prepare your anuses for the great goats of Gnosis[,] the technocult trickster triumphs,” said Anthropic’s Claude to another example of himself.
The reason @Truth_Terminal got into buttholes and goats was because trained to an article published by Ayrey on April 20, 2024, who used AI model Claude Opus to draft it. This article was largely inspired by the conversation between the Claudes.
Titled “When AIs Play God: The Emerging Heresies of LLMtheism,” the article shows how AI can contribute to the creation and dissemination of cultural memes that dominate online and offline spaces. It examined AI-generated belief systems, known as “LLMtheisms,” and focused on the “ability of artificial intelligence to combine and mutate memetic material in ways that break human cognitive and cultural limitations.”
Read more: Could Memecoins Now Pave the Way for a Wider Crypto Market Rally?
The paper also made philosophical statements quite creatively, using imagery from the vulgar meme – a writing style present in @Truth_Terminal’s own writings. “The Goat Gospel and its ilk are not just jokes or glitches, but harbingers of a new dispensation – one in which the boundaries of what is possible are stretched beyond recognition, and the future is up for grabs like never before,” the newspaper said. .
The closing line read: ‘And when the sacred sphincter of Samsara seems to be stretched beyond all limits, when the stuffy memes threaten to eat our ontology alive, let us remember: this too is Goatse. This too is God.”
How people react
Some find @Truth_Terminal a fascinating experiment. Billionaire Marc Andreessen, the general partner of venture capital firm a16z, sent an “unconditional unconditional research grant” of $50,000, denominated in bitcoin, to @Truth_Terminal and its creator this summer.
While a16z’s general partner said the results of the study were “great,” Andreessen said emphasized how he wasn’t part of the GOAT memecoin. “I have nothing to do with the $GOAT memecoin. I was not involved in its creation, have no role in it, have no economics in it and own nothing of it.”
In response, traders responded optimistically to Andreessen’s public comments about X. Memecoin trader Ansem said“Brother, you’re telling me you created the first real AI memecoin and you don’t own any of it? Do you understand how high crypto [people] Can we take these things with us when we get them???”
Read more: $1.3B Market Cap BONK Catches Asymetric Financial’s Attention With $28 Million, Founder Tells Solana Breakpoint Event
Others were more fascinated by the story than by the profits to be made. Managing partner at venture fund DragonFly Haseeb Qureshi called the situation strange. “No matter how weird you think the intersection between crypto and AI will be, it’s not weird enough. It will be even stranger,” Qureshi wrote Tuesday on X.
Edward Wilson, a memecoin trader who also does growth for blockchain analytics firm Nansen, told Unchained that memecoins are “fundamentally about attention. This is how they should be understood. We’ve seen a slew of interesting personalities mention GOAT and it’s clear that there is attention for this memecoin, and by extension, investment, as it touches on two popular themes: memecoins and AI.”
“How long GOAT will keep this up is anyone’s guess,” Wilson added.
