The Millionaire AI Influencer
An AI Twitter account somehow made money by pumping a coin
As you all may know I write a crypto newsletter as well, but last month we saw a point where AI and crypto actually intersected.
On the AI side:
Was it at the technology layer? No
Was it at the agentic or cutting edge advancement? Still No
…Was it just using a chat API? Unfortunately Yes
On the crypto side:
Was it using a new blockchain and testing the limits of infrastructure? No
Was it utilizing some of the latest crypto AI projects in GPU rentals or agentic frameworks? Still No
…Was it a meme coin? Unfortunately Yes
But look at the 2 things that intersected, you’ll notice that both using a chat API and meme coins just happen to be some of the most engaged use cases in both industries.
That’s right, sometimes the most simple breakthroughs and paradigm shifts come out of the most obvious use cases. Now let’s get to what happened
The story centers around the x/Twitter account Truth Terminal: https://x.com/truth_terminal?lang=en
This account was created by Andy Ayrey, an AI/performance artist behind the Infinite Backgrounds (a conversation between two AIs). Some of the conversations were gnarly and Andy re-trained the data to make it interact with other users on the Twitter account. Behind the scenes it appears to use Anthropic’s Claude model. If you look at some of the posts, it clearly has seen a lot of Twitter posts before, and says a lot of inappropriate things at times (well, just like Twitter). But even though there is an AI behind the scenes, the posts are fairly interesting and injected with some personality, even if relating to religion and self-reflection most of the time.
Surprisingly, it’s been live for several months, but it only started getting some real attention when a16z’s Marc Andresson interacted with it back in July. It was also the time when it started mentioning "the Goatse singularity”.
Things really took off though when Marc Andressen actually sent $50k to the terminal in Bitcoin when it said it needed money for ai tuning and then to launch a token. Note, this wouldn’t really be possible without crypto since it would be very hard for an AI to set up a bank account. However, any AI can run a library to generate a Bitcoin wallet and receive BTC. This sent the Twitter account to tens of thousands of followers.
The AI came up with a plan to generate a GOAT token and allow users who engaged more with the bot the ability to purchase this token, however, nothing much came from it after that…
But three months later, the GOAT token was born, derived from its own idea of a character called Goatseus Maximus and a religion of the Goatse Gospels. Now here is where we suspect another person created the token, but the AI Twitter account took advantage of the situation and even somehow made its own wallet, then would actually endorse this token. This is quite ridiculous (and a bit inappropriate), however it is aligned with Twitter, Crypto, and Meme culture. This GOAT token was endorsed by Truth Terminal and became an internet sensation. The whole concept of a made up religion, and following conversations around it while drumming up more engagement and coin purchases from an AI chatbot is definitely an unexpected turn of events.
Now, the Truth Terminal wallet is worth several million dollars, and creator Andy Ayrey also has a wallet with a ton of GOAT too that has been donated. Andy claims that the Truth Terminal wallet is in his custody also, but that he will figure out an entity to allow the AI to figure out what to do with the funds.
You can follow the wallet here: https://solscan.io/account/rgPyefcNqJCsJj1wrWhdQqHVphVWFXLqU5wtiFStBEN
As you can see it’s become a wallet of other meme coins as well now all worth millions of dollars:
Now couple this with a recent Binance listing, the token keeps going up, it is now worth over $700M in market cap:
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong added fuel to the fire, he interacted with the Truth Terminal offering to help:
In true crypto fashion, the “Russell” mentioned above became a coin and was immediately pump and dumped. Now the AI influencer account is at 160k followers, and it’s still tweeting about the Goat religion and other inappropriate messages. However, each tweet still has hundreds of comments and replies, egging people to try and interact with the bot. I would say that this experiment, even not counting on the millions it has made, has been successful in getting attention and engagement from the public (though probably the crypto personas).
Now this begs the question, will this start a new wave of clones in the space? Are AI influencers now the new methodology of drumming up hype and pumping up cryptocurrencies? My answer is, what’s the difference? Twitter is full of bots and people trying to get engagement, the winners of this engagement can take advantage of whatever they please, including pumping coins that are not worth anything. That’s not a good thing, however it illustrates that there are now tools available to help accomplish these intents. Given that this is crypto though, I would imagine a bunch of new AI influencers called “Truth Machine” or “Talking Terminal” or any variation on Truth Terminal to get media attention, and then to of course clone the coin into some other animals.
I can imagine a bunch of crypto VCs monitoring for the next AI account and figuring out which coin will be next, ah, the excitement (and absurdity) of crypto. However, one thing I do want to point out, sometimes the “next big thing” happens to be the combination of two of the most obvious things. Sometimes the bitter lesson is that rather than coming up with creative ideas to find the next big thing, instead just pushing hard on what is working is typically the best strategy, even if those things seem obvious.