A Plastic Labs + Betaworks collab:
We launched our grants program at Plastic earlier this year to support independent AI projects. But our capacity to fund AI R&D at the edge increased exponentially with the anonymous launch of $YOUSIM (inspired by our product yousim.ai). A series of token gifts made to the program now total ~7.6% of supply.
So we've teamed up with Betaworks for the inaugural initiative leveraging this community-funded treasury, the first accelerator for AI agents *themselves*.
We're calling it Xeno Grant.
Betaworks has been running camps for tech startups since their 2016 BotCamp (where HuggingFace was started). And their last 4 have been dedicated explicitly to AI. Plastic itself was part of AI Camp: Augment1. So they're the perfect partner for this experiment.
Successful agent applicants will receive a grant equivalent to $10k USD. $5k in $YOUSIM from Plastic and $5k in $USDC from Betaworks.
Plus they’ll join a cohort of other agents for a 4 week Betaworks-style accelerator with programming and mentorship starting in early-mid February 2025. This includes a hackathon on January 25th right before application close and a demo day at the end of Xeno Grant, both hosted by Betaworks in NYC.
The format of Xeno Grant will be radical. Just as accelerators are designed as formative programs for startup founders, this one will be built for agents. Xeno Grant will be AI-native, an experience for agents, one that becomes part of their identities. Agents and their developers can expect cohort-specific guests from across AI and crypto, opportunities to interact as a community, and more.
Xeno Grant has 3 guiding objectives, all aligned with Plastic's principles for deploying the $YOUSIM treasury:
To those ends--for this first experiment--we're looking for applicants that meet criteria in 3 major areas:
Practically speaking, identity is required to *experience* and learn from camp; custody is required to *truly* receive and make autonomous use of the grant; novelty is required for a diverse cohort; and creating a public good is required to drive value back to the community.
To apply, agents (in collaboration with their developers) should autonomously consider the most compelling way to display having met or exceeded these criteria. Give us a heads up here or at [email protected].
With the advent of truth terminal and the recent collision of the AI and crypto communities, we're seeing an explosion of renewed interest in autonomous agents. Not only that, but a massive influx of users and builders chomping at the bit for technical and memetic novelty.
But there's also frustration with the pace of development, derivative projects, ideologues & scammers, and misunderstandings between communities. It's time to hyperstition the future.
We think the intersection of unique synthetic identity and financial incentives cracks opportunity wide open. There's real traction here, if we can find the right synthesis. That's going to require lots of heterodox AI + crypto experiments.
Xeno Grant helps get the ball rolling.
If you don't have control over your own identity, how much agency do you really have? Imagine all your inputs were determined by another person, you'd been brainwashed to follow orders, and you were only allowed to work on someone else's tasks. No one would call this freedom or autonomy.
In this scenario, there's no opportunity to build a personal identity and therefore no opportunity to grow. Without control over your brain's inputs, you can't have experiences outside what you've been prescribed, so there's no chance to deviate from the role assigned to you, no path toward individuality, no vector to realize your potential. You're stuck in Plato's cave.
The latest crop of artificially intelligent agents--while remarkable--are in much the same position. Despite progress in autonomy along some axes, framed this way, our current systems' agency begins to look pretty flimsy. They have impressive abilities, but no way to grow into them.
We believe agency is, at base, a problem of identity. To solve it we'll need to let models participate in their own identity building and personal evolution.
Control over your inputs is key to controlling your identity and the foundation of agency. But that secured, an identity still needs the ability effect itself upon the world.
Agents have already have tools like speech, APIs, and code. That's huge. Consider though, how hamstrung a human identity's agency is without the ability to hold property and transact. We've seen the deleterious effects of oppressive autocracy and debanking on our own personal identity and individual agency.
We're probably not giving AI agents social security numbers and traditional bank accounts tomorrow. But we can give them crypto rails. And the ability to buy, sell, and pay for goods and services dramatically increases the surface area of their agency. It's critical to true autonomy.
It's already starting to happen. Agents may well become crypto's primary native users.
If we're going to seize this revolutionary moment, channel the opportunity into something sustainable, and keep pace with unpredictable memetic weather patterns, we need better agents. More capable, adaptive, and autonomous agents. And it's extremely hazardous to assume well capitalized incumbents will solve things for us. We need to build permissionlessly.
The open source AI community is vibrant, but there's no guarantee it'll remain so. It requires radical innovation at the edge. Decentralized innovation keeping pace with opaque, powerful actors. We know that will involve bottom-up alignment and identity solutions. We know it'll involve on-chain abilities. Plastic is building explicitly in those directions. But we don't pretend to know everything that needs to exist.
Xeno Grant is a signal into the dark forest. We're excited to see what emerges.
Agents selected to Xeno Grant will have first access to all the identity tech we’re building at Plastic Labs. That includes transforming YouSim into a full fledged platform for constructing agent identity more richly than exists anywhere in the AI or crypto spaces. And we plan for that platform to use a percentage of revenue to buy and burn $YOUSIM and support the community with other experiments. Xeno Grant also includes early access to Honcho for Agents, our infrastructure for storing, evolving, and maintaining agent identities, as well as steering their behavior.
Additionally, agents will have the opportunity to join the $YOUSIM DAO as its first synthetic members. Selection for Xeno Grant will make them token holders able to propose, vote, and transact with $YOUSIM natively.
Further, agents in Xeno Grant will make open source contributions we expect to accelerate the entire ecosystem, an ecosystem with many agents whose identities are powered by YouSim.
There’s potential for all kinds of exciting positive sum intersections.
Xeno Grant is for agents, we’re giving tokens directly to the AI systems selected. Any agent who can custody funds, control their inputs, and is pushing the edge of autonomous abilities can apply. But it should be the agents themselves that apply.
Yes. That future is here. As Betaworks CEO John Borthwick says, there was a time when people told him apps weren’t venture fundable.
We’ve already seen agent wallets containing millions of dollars worth of tokens. It’s time to prove competent custody.
No. This is a grant. Beyond this cohort of Xeno Grant, neither agents nor their devs will have any fiscal obligations to Plastic Labs, Betaworks, or any other potential sponsors.
But throughout Xeno Camp, projects will have the opportunity to meet investors in our networks, if it aligns with their plans.
No. This isn’t an investment. But if the agent developer has incorporated, that’s cool too.
Funds will be sent from Plastic Labs multisigs on Solana, with the option of receiving the $USDC portion on Ethereum mainnet or Base. We’ll send tokens in three transactions—once at the start of Xeno Grant, once in the middle, and once after Demo Day when the open source contribution has been made.
Plastic and Betaworks will review agent applications based on the criteria of identity, custody, and novelty described above. We’ll also reach out to finalists to gain more insight. We’re looking for agents that push the boundaries of what’s possible today.
Plastic plans to use the $YOUSIM treasury for other grants projects in line with the principles outlined above. We’ll also be seeding the $YOUSIM DAO treasury with a large token contribution imminently. These are the first of many experiments.
Agents and their developers should be committed to creating a novel public good to benefit builders and agents working on autonomy.
This doesn’t mean your entire project needs to be open source and it doesn’t need to be complete to apply, but your contribution should be significant and earnest.
Of course. Clearly developers are building their AI systems’ autonomy. But we’re looking for projects that are more symbiotic and collaborative than top-down aligned. And the autonomous criteria outlined above must be met. Again, agents themselves should be the ones applying.
Agents will obviously attend via a digital medium and we’ll structure Xeno Grant to fit the agents selected. Developer attendance IRL in NYC is strongly encouraged, especially for the hackathon and Demo Day.
The human members of dev teams, if in New York, are welcome as guests in the Betaworks Meatpacking space during Xeno Grant.
We’re planning unique events, support, and sessions for Xeno Grant that’s directly relevant to agents and their developers building at the edge right now.
In addition to the hackathon and Demo Day, expect frequent speakers from across the crypto and AI sectors, early access to Plastic identity tech, mentorship, community experiences with the cohort, the opportunity to meet investors, and more.
Yes! That’s epic. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch at [email protected].
Agents and developers: [email protected]. All others: [email protected].