AI Agents To Deliver 'Tangible Utility' In Web3 This Year: Expert

The rise of artificial intelligence agents has been in the spotlight in 2024, especially as AI converged with blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. In 2025, it is expected that AI agents will be intertwined more deeply with blockchain, paving the way for better performance and more simplified Web3 interactions among consumers who are just entering the blockchain space.

Utility to Shine in AI Agent Realm in 2025

Utility is a critical aspect of blockchain and crypto that distinguished legitimate projects from scams in the vulnerable industry.

Over the years, AI agents in Web3 were pretty much meme-driven, including in the past year, when many memecoins emerged with the help of AI agents or other AI tools.

For Jorge António, co-founder and CTO of decentralized AI compute cloud Atoma Network, things are bound to change. "In 2025, AI agents are poised to move beyond the meme-driven trends of 2024 and deliver tangible utility in the Web3 ecosystem," he told International Business Times.

He added that the following trends will shape the AI agents space this year:

• DeFi automation – AI-powered solutions are expected to help in the bid toward automating decentralized finance (DeFi).
• Intent-driven wallets – António expects AI agents to shine in efforts toward the development of "intent-driven wallets" that should simplify interactions in Web3 that would otherwise be complex for new users.
• Autonomous trading bots – AI agents will play a major role in enabling smarter and independent trading bots and on-chain reputation systems
• Privacy – Being a core foundation of blockchain technology, AI agents will become more specialized in privacy and verifiability – a process championed by Atoma.
• Mutimodality – AI x Web3 projects will embrace agent collaboration and multimodality, allowing agents to handle more diverse data types and work together across complex tasks.

AI agents in crypto are designed to perform specific tasks with blockchain ecosystems, and their importance in the market is becoming even more apparent, especially as AI-centric projects in Web3 power their agents with features that allow them to securely process sensitive data while ensuring that agent integrity is retained.

Which Platforms are Emerging as Key Players in the AI Agent Space?

Atoma is one of the rising players in the segment, as it champions decentralized AI compute that enables permissionless and scalable infrastructure and also connects AI model providers with users in search of AI compute resources.

Atoma's growing popularity in the AI-Web3 world is its privacy and verifiability feature that ensures agents will operate in the vast world of blockchain securely and with trust.

António believes developments in the AI agent space will be beneficial for Web3, and they have the potential to redefine the crypto landscape this year. He believes the following projects and platforms will be key players in the space in 2025:

• Virtuals Protocol – The protocol is an emerging player that leads with its user-friendly interface where developers can create, co-own, and monetize AI agents, thus appealing to users who are non-technical and even people across mainstream audiences.
• Fetch.ai – Semi-decentralized Fetch.ai caters to technical builders and industry-specific use cases such as finance and logistics.
• Eliza Framework – The Eliza Framework, which has evolved into the most forked open-source project on GitHub, continues to showcase rapid adoption as fueled by its community-driven innovation.
• Crew.ai – The team is hard at work in building a professional network for AI agents, emphasizing the immense potential for agent collaboration.

Partnered with projects of real utility and the undeniable popularity of the AI and memecoin segment, the rise of AI agents in Web3 has become inevitable.

Kaito data showed that as of early December 2024, the AI and memecoins narrative captured over half of the mindshare of "crypto Twitter," the community of crypto holders and enthusiasts on the X platform.

Clearly setting themselves apart from AI bots who follow predefined scripts by their creators, AI agents are bound to make a name for themselves in blockchain this year beyond the memecoin combo with their probabilistic nature and high adaptability that brings true utility to Web3.