Tether, the crypto company behind the $140 billion cryptocrrency USDT, is working on an artificial intelligence (AI) platform and aiming to debut early next year, according an X post by CEO Paolo Ardoino.

“Just got the draft of the site for Tether’s AI platform. Coming soon, targeting end Q1 2025,” Ardoino posted on Friday.

Tether is known for issuing USDT, the most popular stablecoin in the market, but the company recently made significant efforts under Ardoino’s leadership to expand its business beyond stablecoin issuance.

Read more: Tether’s Paolo Ardoino: Building Beyond USDT

It invested in several companies across sectors including energy, payments, telecommunications and artificial intelligence, entered into commodities trade financing and reorganized its corporate structure earlier this year to reflect its broadening focus.

Last year, Tether acquired a stake in artificial intelligence and cloud computing firm Northern Data, indicating its growing interest in AI.

While details were scarce about the upcoming AI platform, Tether’s ambition to release a product in the red-hot industry also underscores the growing intersection of crypto and artificial intelligence.

CoinDesk reached out to Tether for more details about the upcoming product, but the company did not reply by press time.

The value of the Virtuals Protocol ecosystem surged by 28% over the last day, bringing the total market capitalization of the Base blockchain tokens to $1.9 billion, according to CoinGecko.

The native token of the Virtuals Protocol, VIRTUAL, is currently trading at $1.38—up nearly 29% in the last 24 hours and 161% over the last week. It’s set an all-time high in the process, bounding into the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap.

What’s driving the sudden interest in Virtuals? Demand for AI agents, or AI-powered autonomous programs designed to perform tasks on their own and mimic how humans would handle a specific situation. These agents can understand their environment, make decisions, and take action to achieve their goals.

The rise in interest in AI agents is the latest in the blockchain industry’s pivot to artificial intelligence technology and tokenization. And amid recent demand for crypto tokens tied to AI agents and ecosystems, Virtuals is the latest big winner.

Launched in January on Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 scaling network, Virtuals Protocol is a launchpad and marketplace for gaming and entertainment AI agents that was co-founded in 2021 by Jansen Teng, Weekee Tiew, and Wei Xiong as PathDAO, before relaunching as Virtuals Protocol.

Virtuals Protocol launched its VIRTUAL token after a 1-for-1 swap of its PATH token in December, and says its goal is to enable as many people as possible to participate in the ownership of AI agents.

It allows developers to build AI agents with six core functionalities: posting to X (formerly known as Twitter), Telegram chatting, livestreaming, meme generation, “Sentient AI,” and music creation. These agents are compatible with platforms like Roblox, utilizing Virtuals Protocol’s Generative Autonomous Multimodal Entities (GAME) engine.

In terms of their use with cryptocurrency and digital assets, according to Virtuals Protocol, AI agents are able to facilitate transactions without their owner needing to give it a command once launched.

Other AI agent tokens within the Virtuals Protocol ecosystem also saw significant gains on Friday. Aixbt by Virtuals (AIXBT) rose 23.8% to $0.21, followed by Luna by Virtuals (LUNA), which increased 9.4% over the same period, reaching $0.08. Meanwhile, VaderAI by Virtuals (VADER) increased 78.9% over the same period, reaching $0.05.

All of those tokens have more than doubled in price this week.

Virtuals bills itself as an AI x metaverse Protocol that is building the future of virtual interactions. The tokens play unique roles in their respective ecosystems and reward users for staking them. For example, AIXBT offers AI-driven insights from X, real-time project data, and staking benefits. $VADER powers VaderAI with rewards, access to its DAO, and exclusive AI monetization tools. Meanwhile, the LUNA token provides staking options and promises future rewards for its holders.

What are AI agents?

Outside of blockchain, several big names in the AI industry are leading the push into developing AI agents, including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Amazon Web Services. In 2023, the AI Agent market was valued at $3.86 billion, according to a report by market research firm Grand View Research. That number is expected to rise 45% by 2023.

“If I was betting my career on one thing right now, it would be AI agents. Literally a trillion dollar market up for grabs,” entrepreneur and venture capitalist Greg Isenberg said on X. “We’re headed to a world where AI agents replace entire workflows.”

But why the sudden interest in AI agents in crypto? According to investor and entrepreneur Markus Jun, the rise of interest in AI agents in the blockchain space is a natural progression in an industry where markets are open 24/7 with no downtime.

“As a general trend, I think agentic AI is extremely hotly anticipated,” Jun told Decrypt. “The reason why crypto agentic AI makes so much sense is that autonomous agents can use crypto and on-chain data and Twitter at the protocol level, natively.”

The same would not be possible with traditional financial tools, Jun said, adding that handling a currency native to the internet gives AI agents an edge in facilitating transactions for their users.

“Crypto is internet money, and the agent’s ability to send money to anyone on the internet opens up a lot of interesting possibilities that wouldn’t be the same as an agent using a bank account API,” he added.

Edited by Andrew Hayward

If you’ve been riding the wave of Bitcoin’s latest surge or watching your crypto wallet grow, the holidays might feel like the perfect time to turn those gains into memorable gifts.

But as any seasoned gifter knows, a big price tag doesn’t always guarantee a big impression.

That’s where SantaBot—our AI agent experiment designed to help you step up your gift-giving game—can help.

The project started with a simple question: Could AI decode personal chat messages to suggest more meaningful presents to your friends and loved ones? As it turns out, it can.

Designed to take the guesswork out of giving, SantaBot digs through conversation histories to build detailed personality profiles, gathering insights about their habits, preferences, and other aspects.

It even maps out Myers-Briggs and Enneagram personality types based on how people talk to each other.

The tool provides creative personalization ideas to make each gift truly unique.

For instance, you could gift your son a baseball bat engraved with his uniform number and initials or surprise your wife with a smartwatch featuring straps in her favorite color. These small, thoughtful touches can make a big impact.

Hands-On

Before giving my bot to the world, I decided to give it a try. I uploaded my WhatsApp conversation with my wife and asked her to tell me the best gifts I could give her.

SantaBot psychoanalyzed my wife’s WhatsApp messages, and folks, we’ve got ourselves a certified Type 2 personality (Helper, Giver) with a major love for desserts and fitness.

According to the bot, she’s what personality experts call an ESFJ (Extraverted, Sensing, Feeling, Judging), basically someone who’d organize a group hug and then make sure everyone filled out a satisfaction survey afterward.

The personality analysis shows she ranks high in agreeableness and extraversion, moderate in neuroticism (their words, not mine—I value my life), and has a practical streak that somehow doesn’t apply to transportation choices.

The bot didn’t just stop at basic personality traits. It went full CIA analyst on our conversations, noting some interesting things like her use of “Te quiero mucho mi flaquito” (translation: “I love you, my skinny one”) to her appreciation for little details instead of luxurious things.

SantaBot even picked up on her Uber addiction faster than our credit card company.

It painted a picture of someone who’s health-conscious but won’t walk two blocks if there’s a car service available—which is not 100% but is easy to infer if the only thing you know about her is our conversation history.

Now, for the gift suggestions, these were some of the most exciting picks.:

For the practical side:

• A Miniature Chocolate Fountain with a customized base that says “Edgli’s [her nickname] Sweet Spot.” (considering she showed interest in buying one for future events)
• An “Uber Survival Kit” with a prepaid card (cheaper than buying her an actual car) or a mug with “Boss of Uber Requests” printed on it.
• A literal vault for her chocolate stash with “Keep Out, Unless You’re Amorsito” engraved on it—so I stay away from it.

For the fancy pants moments:

• A custom box with desserts from Venezuela and Brazil.
• A spa kit named “Aromas de Edgli” (much fancier than “Smell Like My Wife”).
• A leather planner embossed with “Amorsito’s Plans.”
• A Star Map Print showcasing the constellations of a meaningful date, like the day we met or the day our daughter was born.

And for when money is no object:

• A smartwatch to help her keep track of her fitness activity and burn calories.
• A designer handbag with her initials embossed.
• A weekend getaway featuring a chocolate-tasting experience in Gramado (basically a desert safari in one of Brazil’s best tourist places).

It also recommended some funny gift ideas, including a “Drama Queen Survival Kit” (which she would hate), a “Custom Emoji Pillow” (which she would love) and a personalized apron with a nickname like “Chef Sass Master”

I compared SantaBot head-to-head against regular ChatGPT to see how it stacked up.

The difference was clear—while standard ChatGPT played it safe with generic suggestions, our specialized version picked up on subtle hints.

It’s not like its suggestions were useless, rather than less personal.

How to Get Santa Bot’s Help

To use our tool, you must upload your conversation history and interact with the model, asking for recommendations.

You can then go with follow-up questions, asking for more suggestions, personalization ideas, providing more contextual or personalized information, etc. The more information the AI handles, the better the results should be.

Some good starting prompts can be as simple as “Please carefully analyze this conversation and tell me what presents she/he would like” to things as complex as “What are the best presents I could give to a person with an ENFP type of personality.”

You can also play with the tool and iterate with it. Once it provides a reply, you can ask for more suggestions, ask for funnier recommendations, ask for more romantic gift recommendations, etc. It all depends on your intentions and expectations.

Exporting chats is pretty straightforward, depending on which messaging app you use.

WhatsApp users can export chats from the app, though iMessage folks need to use tools like iMazing to get their conversation data. Similar options exist for Telegram, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok users. Just google them.

Also, ensure you only upload text conversations, so export your data without photos, voice notes, or documents.

This, of course, means there are privacy concerns that you should address. SantaBot requires access to those conversations to create its detailed profiles.

Sharing such personal data without permission could be unethical. The fix isn’t perfect, but it works: Ask the other person for permission to use the conversation for an AI experiment. If they agree, you’re good to go.

If you don’t want to go that route, you can take other steps.

First, names should be anonymized in exported chats by replacing them with placeholders. For this, open your TXT file, select the option to edit and replace text (this will vary according to your text processor), and choose to change the name for the placeholder in every instance. Save that file and upload it to ChatGPT.

Second, ensure OpenAI cannot use that chat to train its models. For that, the first thing you can do is adjust your ChatGPT settings to disable memories. To do so, click on your profile picture in the top right corner of ChatGPT, go to settings, personalize it, and turn off “Memory.”

Alternatively, you can click on “Manage” after your conversation is done and delete any memory that could be created mentioning your latest chat.

Additionally, you can prevent OpenAI from training its model with your conversation by blocking the capability of using your data—which is allowed by default.

To change that, go to Settings, click on Data controls, and turn off the option “Improve the model for everyone.” This sounds pretty, but in non-corpo language, it can be translated as “Let OpenAI use your conversations to train its models for free and probably charge you more once they get more powerful.”

Overall, building GPTs and specialized agents can bring practical solutions to everyday challenges, like the art of gifting.

Our AI may surprise you with clever ideas that turn ordinary presents into unforgettable gestures so you can be as successful in your family reunions as you think you are trading crypto.

At the very least, when the presents miss the mark, you’ll have something better to blame than your lack of creativity.

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair