JB Carthy: 0:00

Welcome to Helios Horizons, episode 35. Today we are chatting about connecting agents with apps. We have Bertug Oymak from agentipy joining us. AgentiPy are obviously. Their Python toolkit enables, as I said, agents to connect to apps. They're having great progress, recently winning a Solana Hackathon. So, yes, super excited to have you joining us, bertolt. How are you today?

Bertug Oymak: 0:29

GM. Gm, thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here. Okay, I fixed the voice a little bit. Yeah, I enjoy talking about AI agents. I enjoy talking about how AI intersects with blockchain and how we try to utilize it. So glad to be here.

JB Carthy: 0:52

Sweet man 100%. I think maybe obviously a good place to start is maybe give people anyone who's listening now will listen back in the future a little bit of an introduction into your own journey and your own background in Web3 and blockchain and how you even got here.

Bertug Oymak: 1:11

Yeah, that's another story. I've been a product manager for the last 17 years and, like seven or eight years were in the enterprises, mostly the telco companies. Then I joined many startups in many product positions. Four years ago I joined the Web3 space because of NFTs, like in the 2021 run, not because of the money, not because of the hype. I saw that NFTs are mostly about communities and I was already a part of a lot of NGOs and had run student clubs back in college, university. So I wanted to be a part of an NFT collection, understand what it means. I just wanted to buy one, just one, just to have an idea, and that led me to trade NFTs first manage NFT collections, create my own company and deep dive into blockchain, understand trading mechanisms, create trading boats, create many other products, and now I'm connecting AI agents on chain. So that's an interesting story.

JB Carthy: 2:30

So your first introduction to blockchain came from kind of even the community side of things, coming in like the artistic side of things, just experimenting with the technology. Is that correct, that's?

Bertug Oymak: 2:44

correct. I knew blockchain way years before. I even had a Bitcoin node just to understand the calculation. But I was looking at the tech side of things. I never traded before. I never traded Bitcoin. I never attended any IPOs. I just wanted to learn the tech. But then, with the NFTs, I wanted to be a part of the community, and being a part of the community brought everything that I learned trading and many more.

JB Carthy: 3:18

So obviously, yeah, no, it's super interesting. I am probably similar time to you. I came in a different way, kind of experimenting with, obviously, and buying bitcoin, buying ethereum, saw kind of the vision of it like a global financial system that was free from, like centralized agendas and corruption and manipulation, and but I also ended up dabbling in some nfts and with little financial success. But look, we have the, we have. I have the memories to get to, to live by. Um, but like, so it must. If we go back to, like you and had some experience with communities running like student clubs back in college and and then obviously, like I'm assuming at that moment, given nfts are quite recent, that like nfts weren't a thing, digital communities weren't really a thing, and and then you experience or come across nfts and around 2021, and what are the? Yeah, like, take some of like your own thought process in terms of what nfts enabling communities that wouldn't be possible, and without them, if that makes sense.

Bertug Oymak: 4:24

Yeah for sure. We always knew the NFTs with the price tag attached to it, but NFTs, as we know, with the PFPs, mostly the way we represent ourselves on a digital world. So NFTs were a digital identity of identity, digital twin of ourselves that I expressed myself with this nft here and also it became a key to attending to accessing a community. Um that my nft journey started with that and then I realized that nfts are assets on blockchain, so they are digital assets that I can do many more things with them. Um. First we had the idea of um. If I have an nft, how could I enter a party in real life just showing my nft so I could show a screenshot? I can show my friend's NFT, so how can we do it? So, while we're managing the NFT collection, that was a problem for us and that's how Utilify.

Bertug Oymak: 5:35

The main company behind Aging2Five was born just to do token gating in real life events. We have hosted many parties in NFT parties, some of the in Indonesia, some of them were in US. We helped a lot of NFT communities to access in real life parties. Do the token gating like what TokenProof is doing. That's the moment that we have decided. There are many things to do on Web3 as a builder. There is an opportunity because not many people were building products back then. People were mainly trading, buying, selling or just creating NFT collections, creating coins. But there are tools needed to utilize those NFTs and coins and that's how Utilify was born and since then we're still building products to utilize NFTs and coins.

JB Carthy: 6:31

Now I'm like I'm excited to dive into Utilify and obviously, a Gentipie being born out of Utilify but like, even more excited to learn about, like, the original vision behind it and but like even a question before that, and like I'm interested to know of the like what were some of the early nft communities you were drawn to and in that like, in that 2021 time, and and are some? Are any of them still around? Or how have they evolved or changed or and survived over the years, if that makes sense?

Bertug Oymak: 7:03

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. First NFTs that I'm from. Istanbul, Turkey, Turkish NFT collections that I first bought, managed some of them Most of them are not live right now, but there is one Ninja Squad salute to all ninjas out there. They are still doing amazing things with the trading communities that they have. They're still alive. I still hold Deadfellas, Cool Cats, Doodles. Then I bought many more Sappy Seals All of them are OG NFT collections in ETH. I bought some in Solana as well. So everyone tried to do something. Some of them tried to become the next Disney, Some of them tried to become a next gaming company, but they all had one power and that was the community, the holder of the NFTs. And actually what we are experiencing right now with the meme coins NFTs many of them are 2021 graduates. People joined in that space during the NFT rush, bought one NFT, become a part of a community and then become a founder, become a marketing manager in a in a protocol. So many of what people about bc right now has joined the space uh, at least 2020.

JB Carthy: 8:34

Uh with the uh kovit run or 2021 with the nft run no, definitely, because it feels like I I was around back in 2021 and it definitely felt at that time like you could see the potential of NFTs. It was super cool like it was in terms of people changing their PFPs or their digital profiles to um represent this shared collective identity with each other and this membership of a community, and it kind of became like a little bit of a digital digital symbol as to like what you stood for and what you were a part of and like what your vibe was like. But obviously, um, the other side of the nfts is not necessarily what they originally intended to be created for, but as a byproduct of just the fact they could be traded on chain was they just became like speculative assets and and like people essentially lost sight of the value of the technology itself and like the true value of the technology and just seeing it as a technology and started simply using it as a, as a vehicle to speculate and it and it. It's in some ways feels like um, exactly like you said, that nft, that nft craze from 2021 where, like nfts were just rising in value simply because the fact they were nfts and people may be losing a little bit of sight of just the true value of like being able to give someone an asset, and that symbolizes membership of a community that could, like transcend borders, that could be transferred between people and had an element of like scarcity and and like custody over it and control and to the individual, and was lost sight of in the fact of people just like trying to make money as quickly as possible.

JB Carthy: 10:18

And it feels like people realize you know the nft markets and like nfts, it's they're like the, the marketplaces are not the best or nfts are not the best and the best asset to be speculating on, because obviously they're they're not, they're nfts, they're non-fungible and it's it's hard to sell into like liquid markets, especially when speculation dries up. And so it feels like the evolution of the of the nft speculation meta has become the meme coin meta, where it's the same kind of like, thriving on vibes, if you want to call it, but they're simply just more liquid markets and with the same level of degeneracy and speculation and coming out of them, and I I don't know whether it's a good or a bad thing, um, but it is what it is like, you know. I don't know how you feel about that yeah, you're sort of right about that.

Bertug Oymak: 11:12

Like uh, back in days with the nft after the nft hype, when we built the company utilify uh, it was built on nfts as a membership and also giving rewards as an nft so that you can trade the rewards as a community reward. So we deep dive on the loyalty part of the thing. In 2023 and the beginning of 2024, web3 loyalty was a big hit on the Web3 market, like Starbucks launching their Odyssey program, coca-cola doing things, mastercard, visa doing things. So everyone was trying the NFTs. Back in the days, I wrote a blog post series in Turkish but it was called A Tokenized World how brands can leverage NFTs or on-chain identities, on-chain assets, to reward their community. So it was based on like the playbook was always the same so engage with your community and reward them. Based on their engagement. They can sell those rewards, trade, exchange those rewards into a liquid asset so that they will be willing to participate more. So Web2 was all about this. This did not went so well. This is not much adapted because of Starbucks. Odyssey closed the program and it showed that we still have things to learn here. But the idea of becoming a member or becoming a part of the community stayed there and, of course, diggin's going to Diggin.

Bertug Oymak: 12:56

And meme coins show us the best way of building communities, because in NFTs, nfts can be overpriced, like if you want to become a part of a board, a Yacht Club community, once you have to pay 100K just to become a part of a community. But with meme coins people discovered that, okay, if I buy just one dollar of that meme coin, I can be a part of, I can access the Telegram, I can verify myself as a holder and also I can vibe with with the meme. Uh, without having an nft, without even having a specific image, uh, I can use the variations of uh, that um meme and I can vibe with it. So, uh, before the bull run started, like in the beer market, you search for ways to entertain yourself and the launch of the meme coins becoming a part of the community, becoming one again, was a big hit. And people started to resonate themselves with the meme coins back in the days, like the dog we've had or Popcat, like the animals, our furry friends who are here to help us, and the meme coin era started.

Bertug Oymak: 14:15

And actually that's how we got into Solana and started building many more products around that, because we were only interested in NFTs as NFTs were trying to be liquid market. People were like there were protocols out there liquidating NFTs as tokens. People were trying to go back to token trading like they did in the last cycle and meme coins filled that part and we had a huge run. We're still living that huge run. I think we will have more on that too. Um, but, yeah, um in 2024. Uh, memes was a super hit. It was obviously called meme coin super cycle and we're still living that super cycle yeah, no for sure.

JB Carthy: 15:03

And like, the technology is the technology, it just exists, it just is what it is and I think there's no point having opinions on it either way too strongly, because it exists and it's being used in the way it's used and it's permissionless and decentralized. So you can't have it both ways, you can't complain about what's happening just because you don't have it both ways, like you can't and you can't complain about what's happening and just because you don't like it. But similarly, um, like, also support decentralization and permissionless, the permissionless nature. So it's a case of like, look, things are as they are. I do think, and you know, with with like power comes responsibility in terms of like crypto, in terms of defy, and in that there's nothing wrong with the, the way the nft speculation bubble emerged and the way the meme, the meme speculation bubble emerged, probably, and the issue with it is, like you know, they are in essence, like it is. It is speculation driven by attention, ultimately, and driven by the perception of utility rather than utility itself, which are value rather than like any true intrinsic or realistic value, like it's all subjective value.

JB Carthy: 16:17

And I suppose that just leaves the door open for, let's say, bad actors, bad faith actors to essentially mislead people into believing these things are going to be more valuable than they are, and maybe, um, yeah, causing some people some financial pain and that might, um, impact them not like.

JB Carthy: 16:40

Not only like, lead them away from the technology and lead them away from the sector and make it harder for us as a sector to bring people to use the great things that are being built, but also, on a very real level, affect them because there's this unregulated, decentralized, permissionless, which is phenomenal and great and amazing, but it also poses risks if people don't fully understand what they're doing and sector and where people can trade, where can tokenize and trade whatever they want, and and there's someone telling them that, like, popcat is going to like a hundred dollars and they believe them and they put in like like all a lot, a lot of money relative to them and end up losing it because, obviously, when the markets change and when people are more risk off and the liquidity is obviously going to draw from the riskier, more spec, purely speculative driven assets, and so, yeah, it's kind of like I'm unsure how to feel about, like how it all unfolded, but I do think, um, the, I do think like, let's say the meme, meta, the nft meta, in terms of as a speculative, as a speculative, as a place of speculation, as speculative assets, and are really fun and enjoyable to engage in and once.

JB Carthy: 17:58

But I do think there's a responsibility of people in the space and to at least try to help people understand that they should always manage their risk. They should, they shouldn't put in or invest more than they can lose in these and tokens or these assets that are purely um subjective value. Like you know, they're not food, they're not water, they're not houses that you can live in or that you can eat and although they are fun to engage in and it's kind of like allows people to create this like global movement, this global community, and it still shouldn't come at the expense of causing people great financial and distress by being misled by dreams that are being sold to them by influencers. So there's like there's that really positive side where the decentralized technology has enabled like a new era of community and community ownership to emerge, but it's also essentially comes with the responsibility of us in the space to build responsibly, to educate responsibly and not to become greedy and try to extract value and from people at great expense to them, if that makes sense.

Bertug Oymak: 19:08

Yep, you're totally right. I'm more looking on to the tech side actually.

JB Carthy: 19:15

Yeah, and I know you are. I'm just saying as a general kind of thing in the space.

Bertug Oymak: 19:20

Sure, sure, yeah, I just want to add this. We all need this to progress in the space. Yeah, I just want to add this like, um, we all need this um to progress in the technology as well. Of course, people need to take care of themselves, need to approach with more caution, uh, but in in 2023, like while entering 2024, I made a prediction about real world assets. We're gonna be a thing this year because real-world assets were representing most in real-life connection of the blockchain, but it turned out to be the tools that we're going to use, like next year or the other year around.

Bertug Oymak: 19:59

The tokenized assets with the RWA, is being built by meme coin traders. Right now, meme coin tools that we're using will be used as a RWA asset tool. So this is a way of technology building, but, of course, it gets more traction on the financial perspective with the meme coin trading. Uh, and that attention and that traction allows us to build technology more. Uh, that will be used on more practical things like the irl, uh, real world assets. But, yeah, um, people need to take approach with caution, but this is a step that we need to move on. In every stage, there is a step like this, so we are living in that step.

JB Carthy: 20:54

Yes, 100%. It's finding its maturity, it's evolving and the things that it's being used for are just like. As it grows, as it matures, as more people enter the space, more if we want to call inverted commas sophisticated use cases will begin to emerge. But the less sophisticated use cases are necessary to essentially prove the value that exists and prove the concept works, to pave the way for the bigger kind of like projects to move on chain. And that's where, like rwa, is the token, a tokenization of um, what we consider actual real world assets to move on chain, things like gold, things like stocks, things like houses, things like cars. Then yeah, and like all these things, um, to move on chain and safely and effectively.

JB Carthy: 21:49

But I think it's a nice segue into um or to to move on. So we get to chat about the great things you are currently doing and talk less about the past. But I had initially to talk about like a gentipie and why you were inspired to create it. But I think we can even rewind it back a little bit further to what inspired you to create, utilify and obviously then like, let's go through the journey from founding, utilify through to where we are today, founding and leading a gentipie Sure sure, I would love to gentipie, sure, sure, I would love to um like while while we were managing nft collections.

Bertug Oymak: 22:30

As I said, we need to verify those nfts in real life. Utility was born from a need of ours that we had nfts. We had parties to attend. Okay, I want to connect my nft wallets with an nft and create a qr code so that I can scan the qr code and enter a party. Utility was born based on those idea. Uh, it was a token gating solution and then we told on it like it was. Was it a ticketing app or web 3 ticketing, or was it a community management thing? Was it a loyalty program? So we decided that it can be used as community building. We can create our own NFTs as rewards or proof of attendance, like Poe did. So we turned Utilify to be a community engagement tool where you can create your progressive web app in seconds community app and in the community app you can engage with the community in any forms, like do raffles, create leaderboards, create NFTs, reward people, make people trade those rewards. That helped a lot. Actually, our first focus was on web to brands because we thought that we are offering a new loyalty structure for them that will increase the engagement, which will lead into more sales. That will help. So we work more than 300 communities and brands in Web3 and Web2 world.

Bertug Oymak: 24:01

Some of the big names was a sports club in Turkey, turkish Airlines. We have some design experiences on chain and most of them was attending an event, getting an NFT. And before we did that, preview was not out. Account abstraction was not a thing. We even designed our own wallet, a custodial wallet, to work with Google login only, so you Google login and create a wallet. That was an easy way of normie onboarding and it's a default thing. Right now. All of the people are using Magic or Preview just to get those functionalities. Log in with Twitter, get a wallet, because that's the thing. And if we even paid the gas for the NFT meeting of our clients, which is DKSync, was offered as a gas tank, that's also becoming a normal right now, and that should be. Why should I pay for each transaction on my mobile app, right? So that's the thing.

Bertug Oymak: 25:05

So Utilify was born and we were operating Utilify. It was not very profitable. We did many, many free things just to get attention on Web2 world, but that led us to stay active on Web3. And with 2024, when we discovered NFTs personally I was trading meme coins. We needed to because Panfan was a thing Panfan launched and post-radium dump. There was something called post-radium dump. So I think I thought that if I get to know which coins migrated to radium before everyone else, then I get the chance to trade them, because actually it will dump first, then go from that dump. So we built a bot called Utibot which was alerting newly graduated Panfan tokens to Discord and on Twitter. Before Photon introduced Memescope, bullix introduced PumpVision, we had the UTBot, that alerting bot. That's how we got into Solana ecosystem and started building other products besides Utilify. So we worked on UTBot for a while.

Bertug Oymak: 26:25

Then last summer, dialect team introduced Blinks and Actions technology, which technically looks like frames in forecasters. That allows you to do actions on Twitter with an extension without leaving Twitter. You can do blockchain interactions on chain with the Blink technology and I was super excited about that technology. So we created another product called Wink, which was a Blink generator, blink template marketplace. So there were many kinds of templates that you can create your Blink in seconds.

Bertug Oymak: 27:08

Our hackathon journey started with Wink. Actually, we attended Solana Radar Hackathon and got the fifth place on the consumer track. With thousands of applications Between thousands of applications. We got the fifth place on consumer track and we were trying to scale Wink actually. So that's how we got into the Solana ecosystem more. We knew a lot of parties and while building Wink, the Blink ecosystem was mostly covered by the SendCoin team. So we were good friends with the SendCoin team and once at those days, ai and crypto intersection was becoming a thing, with the gold true terminal popping up, other agents popping up, and one day we saw a tweet from Sandcoin team that they are organizing an AI hackathon. So and the reward was pretty good If you get a first place, you got 15K.

Bertug Oymak: 28:15

So with my co-founder Talha, we thought, okay, we could get some few bucks from here, but what can we build here? We know nothing about AI, we only knew things about blockchain. What can we do here? So I admire a few companies in this space. Crossmint was one of them. Those days, crossmint introduced their framework, which is called GOAT Greatest On-Chain Agent Toolkit. So it allowed like what we do allowed AI agents to connect on chain, multi-chain many apps it's allowing. So we thought that, okay, we can make a version of Goat, but just to make it work on Solana and that could be our hackathon project. So it allows you to connect on-chain apps on Solana. But then we realized that CrossMint was also a sponsor of that hackathon so we could not just build a replica of what God already did, because they were already a sponsor.

Bertug Oymak: 29:25

And at that moment Talha came with my co-founder and tech lead, came up with an idea that all of the toolkits that we are seeing there are built in TypeScript. This is technical speaking, but TypeScript if you're doing something on web, on internet facing consumer, facing TypeScript is the language, that, only language, that you need, so you will be handling more web stuff. So on web3, most of the things are typescript, so the toolkits were only written in typescript. But in reality, ai um is most the most used language in ai is python, because python is an easy language to write and read. It's just like speaking English and all of the AI researchers machine language researchers outside the crypto world use just Python to build AI agents.

Bertug Oymak: 30:24

So if you want to onboard those people, those agents that is coded on Python there should be a toolkit written in Python to connect them on chain. And we checked there was nothing and many protocols that have SDKs were lacking Python versions and also, if they have a Python version. Most probably it wasn't working, so Python is not a common language in Web3. And that was the lightning moment for us. We need to build a toolkit to connect AI agents on chain, but we need to do it in Python, because there is a huge AI world outside the crypto world and that's how Agent Pi the pi comes from python was born. Um, we built the toolkit uh for the solana ai hackathon, got the first track for first price uh in the ai agent infrastructure track, and the rest is a story structures, track and the rest is history.

JB Carthy: 31:37

No, amazing like you guys have built so quickly. I saw like the um twitter account for gentipi was only created in um december 2024. So it really has been like an incredible journey for you guys where you have your community, you have the hackathon success, you have the token and you guys are growing and all the time so um it's. It's amazing and I think that's one of the most impressive things about like web3 and this industry is just the speed of execution and the speed of delivery and the speed of bringing things to market. Um, and though all, as we discussed, you know the tokenization sometimes can be has its pitfalls, it also has, like amazing opportunities where products can mobilize and incentivize communities really, really quickly. So it's like, when applied with good intent, the technology can be very transformative in helping projects connect with communities, get off the ground super quick.

JB Carthy: 32:42

There's so many incentives and so many programs floating around, because obviously all the different chains are trying to get people to build things on them, so it's a great time to be a builder. There's a lot of opportunities because obviously all the different chains are trying to get people to build things on them, so it's a great time to be a builder. There's a lot of opportunities and you guys are obviously doing a great job and congratulations on the hackathon success. But if we're to talk a little bit more specifically about the importance of a toolkit that enables, like AI agents to talk to apps, and the importance of having it like in an easy, in an easier to understand programming language like Python I'm not a programmer myself, but I can understand why it's it's important to have and have it created in a way that makes it possible for the most people to use it and as simply as possible. But what benefits does a Gentipi bring to the industry in terms of to users and to projects? If that makes sense, yeah, for sure.

Bertug Oymak: 33:43

First let's talk about why we need AI agents on chain. Like, as I said, outside of the crypto world, ai is already a big thing, like OpenAI has. Their operator is an AI agent going through, walking you through or browsing for you through a browser from its own browser, doing actions on behalf of you. Ai agents, like. A media CEO on CES conference this year explained a lot, a lot, on what is an AI agent, what in the future AI agents will be as a robotic AI agent. So AI agents is definitely a thing. It's not a buzzword, it's not a hype thing. It is how we utilize AI right now. Just when you think about AI agent, think of Jarvis in the Iron man movie or Samantha in the Her movie. So it's an assistant to you. It will help you do things on behalf for you and even without you asking. Sometimes, like I like to call AI agents mobile apps with background app refresh. So what you do with mobile apps is you open an app like a banking app. You click a few buttons to transfer money from someone to someone and you confirm it, you do the action, you give the input and for that you need to press some buttons For AI agents if the app is closed, ai agents have the background app refresh and when you give them the instructions before with a voice or terminal, with a chat, it does the things for you without even you seeing what the agent is doing. So AI agents are like assistants to us, helping us what we do, but why we need them on-chain right. So there is a banking world, a big financial world outside of crypto world. Or like you book your flight on the internet without a Web3. There is no part in Web3 booking your plane. There are some companies, startups, that helps you book hotels or many more things on Web3 as well, but normies many more people are doing it on Web3. So it's all about interoperability. So if you want your AI agent to do many more tasks and maybe connected tasks, complicated tasks, multi-tasks you need to give them a lot of tools. Like if you want your AI agent to do a wiring for you in a bank transfer, you need to give them the banking tools. And to get a banking API for your AI agent requires a lot of paperwork and many more tools around. That will require a lot of paperwork. But the blockchain itself, as an open ledger, it's an easy tool, easy protocols. An AI agent can easily learn, and everything what we do on Web2, on current internet, we can do it on chain right now. So on chain is not a different, another world, it's a replication of what we have right now uh with uh with the easy of transfer, with the easy of identity, with the easy of ease of uh ownership. So blockchain offers us these opportunities.

Bertug Oymak: 37:14

So if we are talking about agents doing multi-task tasks, agents doing autonomous things, it obviously needs to be on-chain. What we are seeing with the AI agents on Web2, with the current internet right now is the tip of the iceberg too, with the current internet, right now is the tip of the iceberg. So, in the end, all of the AI agents will be on chain. They will have their own wallets, they will have their own tools and to bring them on chain, you need those tools and we are the ones designing those tools. Along with the many more great companies out there, like Crossmch, solana, agent Kit or Coinbase SDK, they're growing their own kit as well. People need AI agents, need tools to do actions on chain, and it should be as easy as it can be, and it should be as easy as it can be. So in Python, we're giving them this opportunity in a language that they understand they are used to. So connect your AI agent on-chain, create a wallet for them and do things like buy a crypto, transfer your USDC from somewhere to somewhere, stake your USDC, do the yielding, do many more things.

Bertug Oymak: 38:36

What's possible on blockchain should be possible with the toolkits, and that's our goal. Agentify toolkit right now is supporting 25 actions over 150. I'm sorry, 25 protocols over 150 actions. That can be possible on Solana in just installing one SDK, so without connecting to each protocol. You say that, okay, I want my agent to do transactions on chain. Okay, I'm installing Agentify and whoa, all of a sudden, I got access to 25 protocols and 150 actions. That's the whole point. And even we have introduced our API, which is called Agentify Antidote. If you don't want to use Python, but you want to be language agnostic and use API in any language, it's also possible with Agentify right now, and in very few days, we'll be going multi-chain, supporting BASE and many more EVM protocols. So anything that you want to do on chain, it will be possible with Agentify.

JB Carthy: 39:50

No, that is, I was actually chatting earlier, it's I. I do think the potential of ai and what you guys are looking to build in terms of connecting users to apps or connecting users to benefits, um, is very important because I think, you know, we sometimes delude ourselves, like in this space, in terms of thinking it's easier to get involved in than it is, because it's actually not. It's still not that easy. The technology is there, the infrastructure is there and for, as you said, like people to build Internet scale applications, you know there's infrastructure that can handle, there's multiple infrastructures that can handle multiple thousands of transactions per second at pretty at very affordable or negligible costs and and like can provide, therefore, a very similar experience to like what you'd consider like a web to and a web to product and to a user. But I think, like web 3 really falls down and in every level, on how the user can interact and with it, and even the best protocols, even the best and chains themselves and still have limitations in terms of how they are in, interrupt interoperability with other chains, things like privacy, security and of seed phrases and some of these things that people don't fully understand and can sometimes sometimes leave themselves when exposed. So I think like abstracting away complexity and is like the key to get more people um involved and on chain. Because, as you said, like like on, like on chain is the is the future, like it's, it's inevitable in terms of even like the simplest use case, we can talk about all the most advanced use cases and even if we take ai out of it completely, like payments is um an incredible use case that still hasn't even been explored to a fraction of what it should be um on chain in terms of. I think, with the regulation of stable coins and more trust in stable coins and understanding of what stable coins are in a among a larger subset of the population, that will change and I think stable coins is one thing that could benefit from more regulation. I'm a very I'm more of an anti-regulation person personally and that's kind of the direction I would lean and generally, but I do think more trust in stable coins and is over would overall provide a greater an element of stability for the industry.

JB Carthy: 42:17

But stable coin payments make so much sense in terms of like you can instantaneously, with almost no cost, send money to anyone anywhere in the world without any permission needed to do so, and when you compare that to something like a bank transfer you can only send a certain amount to certain countries and certain banks to approved people, and it takes ages for it to go through or even using the Western Union, where you have to pay absurd fees to send your money through. And people are still saying like, oh, blockchain is a scam. Blockchain doesn't work. Scam, blockchain doesn't work. Crypto doesn't work. It's just a fundamental misunderstanding of, like the speculative nature of crypto and and speculative the nature of these things, the nature of the assets that exist on the blockchain are speculative assets versus the value, the intrinsic value of the blockchain itself. And people sometimes, like even people who have very um supposed like high levels of um responsibility, misunderstand and these concepts.

JB Carthy: 43:20

But I do think, like the fact that that stable coin payments aren't the the gold standard yet still means we are nowhere near maximum, maximum adoption um in any in any way. But essentially, leading on from that, I do think um abstracting away complexity is is critical um because, like, let's say, you know you're setting up a wallet now and we've taken the time to understand, so to us it's second nature, like you're going on setting up a wallet, storing your seed phrase, but even still, it can be a bit cumbersome, it can be a bit hard, you misplace it. You might just be kind of lazy one day and not store it properly and say I'll do it better another day. But that day never comes around and one day it bites you in the ass. But for the average person, like, let's say, setting up a wallet in itself is difficult.

JB Carthy: 44:11

But then when you get on chain and you want to connect with a specific app the concept of understanding okay, I need to have an asset, I need to find a bridge, I need to set up another wallet, I need to make sure I have gas in both wallets. I need to make sure that I need to sign transaction approvals. I have gas in both wallets, I need to make sure that I approve. Like I need to sign transaction approvals. I have no idea what they do. Like I have to wait 10,. I have to wait some time for the bridging transaction to go through and it's kind of like a little bit nerve wracking because I'm unsure if I put in my massive address during properly and if I miss a number. Or if I miss a number, if I miss a or if I miss a letter, all my funds are gone and the experience, though, it's kind of second nature to us and we're like, oh, the infrastructure works.

JB Carthy: 45:00

I think how people interact with the infrastructure is not how we're going to be able to onboard the next billion people or get people to use it. So the case of ai has a huge ability to simplify, um, blockchain. Simplify the interaction with blockchain, both by just simply asking it to do actions and by allowing users to automate actions and then the other way. The other way it can do it is, I think, what you were saying is a huge point, which I think is going to and become very it become more apparent and more industry standard over the next few years.

JB Carthy: 45:38

I see, I see it's almost inevitable, given how competitive the market is becoming, to attract liquidity and attract users to blockchains, which is where blockchains and validator nodes will almost subsidize the acquisition of users and like things like gas fees will become, will just no longer exist, because who wants to pay? Who wants to pay a gas fee or who wants to take time to understand what a gas fee is or why it's necessary, and to interact with an app and when they can just go on like Facebook or their local or their national banking application and to them they can send money without having to pay a gas fee, even though we know the fees are just. The fees are just abstracted by the bank into their bank statement. It doesn't feel as visceral as having to pay a gas fee and it's not as complicated as paying a gas fee. So so it's probably going to become a point where the market is so competitive that, either on a network level or on a protocol level or a product level, gas fees and some of these other hidden and I wouldn't even call them hidden costs, because sometimes they're not even costs, but I'd say hidden complexities that make it harder more, have more friction to people doing the thing they want to do, happening, and until some of those things are eliminated, we're going to find it very hard to seamlessly onboard lots and lots and lots of people.

JB Carthy: 47:06

So I think things like gas fees are going to be abstracted. I think things like ai is going to be baked into interfaces to make it super easy for people to interact. And, yeah, like interoperability is going to have to be massive because, like it just has to be a case of we have to get as close to connecting users with applications as opposed to like. It's a case of, like, connecting users with outcomes rather than expecting users to learn processes Like the infrastructure, the UX, the UI, the customer journey should simply bring people logically to the point they need to get to, without expecting them to have to go through a massive learning curve. And until we get to that point, it's probably going to be hard to onboard people to these new applications. I don't know how you feel about some of those things.

Bertug Oymak: 47:58

Yeah, I totally feel with you. I think of the same way in most of the parts. I have good friends creating a mobile wallet called Clay, and they were built on ZK Sync. They got a grant from there and started building on things. Yesterday they announced that they're building Clay version 2, which means that if you have an asset, regardless of the chain, I will show you the asset and take care of the chain on the back end myself. So if you want to transfer it to somewhere, else okay, I will do it.

Bertug Oymak: 48:35

So that's the thing that needs to be done. No one needs to know where my asset is. So ETH is an ETH like, regardless of what chain it is on, it is still an ETH. Or USDC is still at US dollars, right? So even if it's from Solana or Ethereum or I don't know anywhere else, the end user doesn't want to know this. So I don't want to know, or I don't care where my USDC is, I just want to know that I have dollars. So I'm still there.

Bertug Oymak: 49:06

So that will open opportunities for interoperability and for the UX part. Like we have solved the wallet UX problem signing with, like Google login or face IDs and creating wallets in account abstraction we have solved the UX part in the wallet creation part. Now we need to solve the complexity of blockchain transactions. We need to solve the complexity of blockchain transactions, which is signing a transaction to just give an allowance to my token transfer or clicking confirm buttons on wallet apps more than once. So those are also a lot of friction.

Bertug Oymak: 49:48

And also, I don't want to know where I'm going to transfer this asset. I don't know. I don't want to know where I'm going to transfer this asset. I don't know, I don't want to know that. I just want to say that, okay, I want to send two souls to Helios Horizons and can you do that transaction for me? And the AI agent will say, okay, I will do this. We'll go to your profile, get your wallet address, have already your wallet address, have already my wallet address and have an access to it to operate the funds, and will just reply to me. That transaction is completed. That's all I need from an AI agent, or that's the whole purpose.

Bertug Oymak: 50:28

Sometimes we're missing the purpose. Right, the purpose is transferring money from somewhere to somewhere. Like even Satoshi Nakamoto wrote in the white paper, is about Bitcoin, is blockchain, is peer-to-peer electronic cash system. So we need to transfer those assets. We need to make those assets as digital as possible so that we can move them easily. So sometimes we forget why we are here, why we are doing this and just to reach the end result. We click a lot of buttons, install a lot of extensions, do lots of things, but AI agents with the interoperability and easy chain, easy on chain connections, they will help us to do things easily, reach the end goal as fast as we can, because that's the whole purpose no, absolutely, and I agree.

JB Carthy: 51:27

It's like getting back to basics and foundationals and like remembering that, like, this whole space was founded on the desire to create a more efficient cash system, a more transparent cash system, and that was free from corruption and manipulation and self-custodial and essentially, could, could not be shut down, um, and was immune from like that, the kind of centralized power. Um was the whole, the whole point of the, the reason we're all here, as you said. So, um, yeah, like it's just about making it simpler, not harder, and ai agents it's not about creating the most complex agents, it's about creating the agents that just make things easier for people. And we're coming up on like an hour, so I don't want to hold you longer than necessary.

JB Carthy: 52:18

I know you're super busy and you've plenty of things to do, but one thing I do want to touch on is you mentioned earlier you're part of Superteam and you have lots of experience in the NFT sector and I know Superteam themselves have amazing community initiatives and building rewarding communities, setting up events and things like this, and I know you obviously must have your own perspectives from having been involved in the NFT sector for so long. But, yeah, maybe what are some of the secrets you would say, because it's just, it's a word that's thrown around in like Web3 is like community, build your community and listen to the community. But I don't think a lot of people fully understand what community is or what it means or what it could be. So what are some of the secrets or biggest learnings you could share with people about what are the keys to building a strong community, and for your product, for your nft collection or just in general, if that makes sense?

Bertug Oymak: 53:21

yeah for sure. Like on web3, the whole whole foundation is built on transparency, like the blockchain is an open ledger. So to build a great community, you need to be transparent. So people want to talk, people want to just interact with you. People want to just be with you because you said that you will provide a value or you said that you're interested in something. So be open to them. There is no hiding on Web3. Community is all transparent. You go on a Discord, you chat and in the next few hours you will start talking about your pets. You enter someone's life that easily in community. So be transparent with your community.

Bertug Oymak: 54:07

For building ones, you're not supposed to build one. This is not a requirement in the entry level. But you can be part of a community and for being a part of a community, just ask, just observe what communities are living around and become a part of one. That should require buying an NFT, buying a coin or that would be free. And when you become a part of a community, start contributing. So becoming a part of community is not just extracting value from that community.

Bertug Oymak: 54:46

The community thinks that everyone needs to give back to the community, so that's what makes the community a best community. Everyone is participating in the best way they can. So if you're good at writing a song, write a song for the community. If you are good at trading, give alphas to the community. Whatever you are doing your best, give them. That's how you become engaged with your community. So people are most likely to be more shy about this. They join communities and they just read stuff. It's not hard to participate Just say hi and people will reply and you will be drawn into the conversation. So that's what's best community Just engage with the conversation. So that was the best. Community just engage with the community. That's how I did. By the way, I wanted to buy just one NFT and I joined the Discord. Then I become a moderator, then I become the product manager, then I become the project manager, then I created my own company. So that's how it all started. I had the intention to buy just one nft and I said hi.

JB Carthy: 55:53

Now we're talking about ai agents connecting on jay yeah, it's amazing like just get like the lesson, just keep giving, just give value and without expectation, and good things will eventually happen.

JB Carthy: 56:07

And it's kind of what I'm getting, which is which is a great lesson, like I think in life never not only in web three, but I think in life the ability to give unconditionally and and to just without expectation is definitely a recipe for good karma and good luck coming your way, and I appreciate that insight. And maybe to finish off, so, and a couple of little things to finish off that we generally ask people when they come on, and the first question is looking at like the next 12 months and the net, well, like the midterm of, like crypto and the ai space, and what are some of the things that you are most excited about, like in the industry as a whole? So, like what excites you in general? And then, secondly, and what should people be looking out for or getting excited about from agent pi or agenti pi in the in the near future, in the same time frame?

Bertug Oymak: 57:04

yeah, um like um for crypto as a starter. I'm super excited about 2025. I'm still super excited. So this is the bull run. This is the year. Of course, it got a little bit saturated, with many more coins popping out, but this is a way of tokenizing the world. So we're gonna be tokenizing the whole world in many, many, many forms. So I'm super excited for that. So crypto will, of course, rise again, will survive the next few years as well, so I'm expecting many more runs in 2025, in the upcoming months too.

Bertug Oymak: 57:48

For the AI sector, for the AI and crypto intersection, ai agents on chain part this is an emerging market. So I keep telling this, like if anyone says that, okay, I'm cash positive right now in my business in AI agents on chain, they are lying. So this is a new, brand new world and only traded based on speculation right now. But this is a real tech being built on, like all the toolkits and like there are many open source tools that have ever existed before about on chain. So there were no such protocols like what we did. They were not so open source thing. People were selling APIs for that. So there are lots of opportunities waiting for AI as well, but it will take a lot of time. It will be for the long run. For the short run, hameem Coins will have their days back again.

Bertug Oymak: 58:52

But for Agentify, we started as an open source tool, tokenized. It started creating a community being an open source tool. There is no way that we can monetize this thing. If you cannot monetize and don't have a business model, even though you're tokenized, there's no way that you can feed the token. That's why we're building a premium tool AI agent terminals that you can create your AI agent that do things for you based on the agent by stack. So all of the on-chain capabilities will turn into AI agents that you can use. You can give your own instructions to do. An agent will take care of you Like, if you're familiar with Solana products like the Hive and Griff AI, something like that we're building one too, and it will be multi-chain.

Bertug Oymak: 59:47

Something like that we're building one too, and it will be multi-chain. And also for AI researchers that want to distribute their AI agents on-chain, we're building premium tools for them helping distribute their AI agents. There will be an AI agent marketplace for them to distribute and all of them will be either token-gated or subscription-based. So people need to pay for that. Token holders, of course, will get an advantage.

Bertug Oymak: 1:00:20

So what we earn, we will use the 50% for the company growth and the rest 50% will be used for token buyback. Of course, we're going to cover our token as much as we can. The rest 50% will be used for token buyback. Of course, we're gonna cover our token as much as we can. So that's our identity and our growth should be followed by our token growth. So I'm super excited about the things that we're gonna build in Agentify. For the first time in our Web3 experience, we have the power to build what we like to build. We want to build on-chain middlemen, on-chain connectors. With the AI, we found a reason how we can build for them. So I'm super excited. Infrastructure will not be the thing that we're only focusing on. We'll be doing consumer-facing products.

JB Carthy: 1:01:09

No, and I'm looking forward to trying some of them. And um, I'm I'm really excited about how ai is going to um just create new possibilities. Like you know, the opera, like I know it's very simplified, but the ability to like, potentially, um go to your ai agent and just say, find, find a way to make me money on chain, and it can like go and learn from itself, it can go and experiment with different strategies. You can give it a certain amount of capital and you can kind of edit, adjust and like help and essentially just have like an assistant that is executing things on your behalf and according to and like learning as it goes and collecting data and like iterating is exciting and I don't really know where it's going to end. But I'm here for the journey. It's going to be, yeah, it's gonna be. It's gonna be wild man.

JB Carthy: 1:02:04

Like you know, technology is getting pretty crazy and I think anyone who says they know exactly where it's going to end is lying.

JB Carthy: 1:02:11

But I think it's, it's going in a exciting direction and like it, it yeah it's getting to the point to like where most, most jobs, most roles, most things that need to be done by humans, um are becoming like less and less necessary and it's getting to the point where machines are going to be able to do most of the things and then hopefully, obviously, the thing is like that's going to allow more people to dedicate their time to, like higher purpose activities, give back and like just be a human and, like humans, can finally specialize in being humans again. Um, but I suppose then, like the thing is like what happens when, the when, when these ai agents turn against us and realize we're no longer valuable and they are the valuable ones and we give them bodies and legs and all, and it's, it's gonna be, it's gonna be fun, man, it's gonna be fun, but and thank you very much for joining us and really appreciate it- yeah, thanks for having me.

Bertug Oymak: 1:03:08

It was a lovely conversation. I always love to talk about ai agents and the future of blockchain and the intersection with ai. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me no problem.

JB Carthy: 1:03:21

No problem, and we'll be clipping up some soundbites and things so you can share them with them. Agentipi community and we can share some of the insights with people who maybe weren't with us or weren't here for the conversation, because it was a great conversation. Helios Horizons, episode 35, we chatted to Bertog Oimac of AgentiPi co-founder, our founder of Utilify as well. Yeah, just a very interesting conversation about what they're building, about his own journey and about the future of AI agents. And thanks everyone for joining us and talk to you again next week.