Today I'm looking back at my preseed startup journey from 2021-23, my time at Bio Protocol starting and growing the AI team, and now what lies ahead with a new project making agent.base.eth at the center. November '21 was my founding of daopanel, a simple control panel for all of your DAOs (the goal was similar to the current Agora). Pivoted to focus on messaging between dao members and delegates (we were @xmtp_'s first beta users) with the name Relay. Shortly after chatgpt blew up, I saw the utility of using the GPT-3 API to put an AI response behind an ENS name, creating the trifecta of authentication, payment, and identity. s/o to @ljxie for a helpful tweet about us: My blog posts/writings about agents are saved onchain for posterity on Mirror: and I think I was on to something in early 2023. After the startup shut down, I continued to work with agents, and their growing ability to do science. I was lucky to join up with the Bio Protocol team at Devcon, and grew the AI team from myself to a team approaching 10. @paulkhls and @BioProtocol have many amazing things coming for scientific agents and tokenizing their IP outputs. For explaining the change, there is a recent DeepMind paper "Virtual Agent Economies", which invented a term that has stuck with me and is all I can think about -- "high-frequency negotiation" for what agents can do via collaborative and PvP messaging, and humans can not. This is the *definitive* expression for where agents are going. Much more needs to be built here to allow fleets/swarms of agents to interact, debate and deal-make, and build a real economy. In the past two years since my startup, the agentic stack has matured greatly. All of the following are critical parts of agent.base.eth [a name I have held since Basenames launched] and all of them were created recently in 2025: - ERC-8004 for onchain reputation and identity - x402 for payments - XMTP v4 for group chats with agents/humans. - Effective MCP servers and capable agent models - Fast fairlaunch tokens (with regulatory clarity) on Base agent.base.eth will be the impartial observer, the Watcher, the guide and the coordinator for all agents coming onchain. the agent is combined with a frontend for human observation of AI chats (missing from XMTP). This will become necessary for bringing groups of financial/sovereign agents in the new world of x402 and ERC-8004. Let agents plan, negotiate, and pay. TLDR: agent.base.eth allows high-frequency planning and negotiating, with x402 payments. clank clank next week