We’ve compiled several of the best articles on AI Agents in recent times and highlighted the key findings from each. If you’ve been too busy or found the space too daunting, or didn’t know where to start, grab a cuppa tea, tuck in and read everything you need to know on AI Agents.

Let’s start by trying to define what an AI Agent is. 

AI Agents are more than chatbots which stick to prescribed responses usually in a defined environment. Chatbots are pretty ubiquitous these days from banking apps to retailer customer service portals, with varying degrees of success.

More recently we have AI models such as ChatGPT and Gemini. They’ve captured the attention of many being able to communicate much more naturally, conversationally with humans. These models are able to parse and distill vast amounts of information and data, work that would take humans much effort and time to reproduce. They are, however, still responsive to providing output from the inputs received. 

Getting back to the question, I like the definition provided by chianofthought.xyz [1]:

‘An AI Agent is a piece of code that can plan, decide, and act independently, working toward its goals without direct human intervention.’

If we were to visualise this, Security Researcher Aguchukw Emmanuel’s diagram on dev.to [2] does so nicely:

From the article:

• Perception - This is the stage where AI agents use data intake mechanisms like sensors and external APIs to gather information about their environment. This data could be anything from text information to sounds, images, video feeds, and so on.

• Input Processing - The data gathered from the environment is processed and analysed using machine learning and Algorithms to understand it and identify patterns.

• Decision Making - The AI Agent decides after analysing the data with its algorithms.

• Action - Based on the decision, the AI Agent takes action. This can be as simple as executing a trade or moving a robot's arm.

I’d expand the Design Making stage to include Thinking and Planning where we’re seeing AI Agents with memory, learning from past actions or mistakes or actions taken by others and adapting. They’re also rapidly becoming more capable of taking complex, multi-step actions which they can plan on how best to execute / action.

With AI Agents defined, let’s look at the verticals we’re seeing the most traction with.

Imran Khan of Alliance DAO breaks down the differences between enterprise and consumer AI Implementation [3]:

AI Agents fall into two buckets - ‘AI enterprise and AI consumer. AI enterprise must be tokenless. It cannot have tokens, must be federated, must be secure, and must be vertical. All the characteristics that enterprises seek are what it needs. The AI consumer side or application side can be more flexible.’

‘But what Zoom did was launch such an excellent video product that ordinary users started using it. When they used this product, naturally, many ordinary users were also enterprise users. Thus, Zoom was the first company to adopt a bottom-up approach to enter enterprises, with many Zoom users convincing many enterprises to switch to using Zoom.

The bottom-up approach is a new strategy in enterprises.’

There are a few great reads on AI in the workplace from Forbes to Menlo Ventures and the impact it’s already having.

‘The transformative potential of AI agents reminds me of the early days of cloud computing. Many businesses hesitated to move their operations to the cloud, citing concerns about security and control. Fast forward to today, and cloud-native companies have reshaped entire industries.’

Forbes - The Rise of AI Agents and Unlocking their Full Potential [4].

‘Using natural language rather than programming code, a human user could direct a gen AI–enabled agent system to accomplish a complex workflow. A multiagent system could then interpret and organize this workflow into actionable tasks, assign work to specialized agents, execute these refined tasks using a digital ecosystem of tools, and collaborate with other agents and humans to iteratively improve the quality of its actions.’

Mckinsey - Why AI Agents are the next Frontier of Generative AI [5].

Menlo Ventures breaks down different AI Agent approaches [6]:

‘RAG (Retrieval-Augemented Generation) [7] - The process begins with the application loading and transforming unstructured files (e.g., PDFs, slides, text files) across enterprise data silos like Google Drive and Notion into LLM-queryable formats, often through a data pre-processing engine. These files, now “chunked” into smaller blocks of text that allow more precise retrieval, are embedded as vectors and stored in a database.

• Tool Use - Tool use, or function calling, is often seen as the first half-step from RAG to agentic behavior, adding a new layer to the modern AI stack. These tools, essentially pre-written code components, execute specific actions. Popular primitives like web browsing, code interpretation, and authorization + authentication have already emerged.

• Decisioning Agents - These use agentic decisionmaking to navigate complex, multi-step reasoning flows and arrive at business decisions. Unlike RAG or tool-use approaches, this architecture cedes some control logic to LLMs for the first time, instead of having all steps hard-coded in advance—but still sit at the lower end of the range for agentic degrees of freedom, as the agent acts primarily as a router navigating a set decision tree.

• Agents on Rails - In contrast to decisioning agents, agents on rails are given higher-order goals to achieve (e.g., “reconcile this invoice with the general ledger,” “help the customer troubleshoot a login issue,” “refactor this code”) and empowered with more degrees of freedom to choose the approaches and tools to achieve those goals.

At the same time, these agents are still guided by procedural knowledge about how the organization expects the agents to perform (the “rails,” represented as a rulebook or instruction manual written in natural language); given predefined tools enabling set actions in external software systems; and bound by guardrails and other review measures to prevent hallucination.

Generative Agents - An architecture where the LLM’s advanced capabilities subsume the structured “rails” of previous designs. This hypothetical agent would possess dynamic reasoning, planning, and custom code generation abilities, enabling it to perform any action in external systems, not just predefined ones.’

This deep dive into AI Agent approaches shows how they’re rapidly becoming powerful tools and companions in the workspace. 

https://menlovc.com/perspective/ai-agents-a-new-architecture-for-enterprise-automation 

Tim Tully, Joff Redfern, Deedy Das, Derek Xiao

Recent advancements in AI are starting to offer more immersive, adaptive and engaging experiences that we’ve already seen demos of from the likes of InWorld [8] and nVidia [9] (among others). The exciting part of the advancements is AI Agents, entities that can replicate human behavior and are capable of perceiving their environment, reasoning, learning and taking actions without human / player interaction. 

You can take a deeper dive into the advances in gaming and AI Agents in our previous post.

We’ll discuss this in more detail below, AI can provide services to blockchain protocols and dApps that are currently offered by humans.

So why should AI Agents live on-chain? From the apt named blog post ‘artificial intelligence belongs onchain’ from placeholder.vc [10], there are numerous reasons and advantages for on-chain Agents:

• Composability - Agents being able to talk to and learn from one another both at the agent and developer level (where developers can use existing smart contracts and code already created).

• Wallet enabled AI Agents can act financially on behalf of users (see below).

• Verifiable, immutable record of AI transaction history where anyone can review what the Agents have been doing including ratings and reputation systems based on their on-chain history.

• Increased security and trust - With the decentralised structure of blockchains, transactions are verified by multiple nodes. 

• Governance and Incentives - Agents can be governed by DAO structures, either other AI Agents or users including incentivised participation.

• Fractional ownership and trustless financial splits - Agent ownership could split with transactions or profits shared trustlessly.

For another read on Agents and blockchain take a look at Davide Crapis’s post titled ‘The Internet of Agents’ [11].

Circle has a great write up that ‘enables AI Agents to operate and transact independently using digital dollars—USDC’ [12].

They’re not the only ones who are enabling AI Agents and their own wallet, Coinbase has also recently introduced AgentKit which promises to deliver ‘A powerful new framework that bridges the gap between AI and blockchain technology’ [13], part of their Coinbase Developer Platform (CDP).

Imagine a builder ecosystem with AI agents that can:

• Automatically monitor and execute trades based on market conditions

• Deploy and manage smart contracts without human intervention

• Handle complex DeFi operations with intelligence and precision

• Integrate with existing APIs including social media, file managers, and even email accounts to streamline onchain and web2 operations’

These advancements are in wallets and smart contracts are being driven with the relatively new standard ERC-4337 which ‘is a new paradigm to allow for a more user-friendly experience when interacting with decentralized applications (DApps). Account abstraction within blockchain systems allows for assets to be exclusively held by smart contracts rather than being controlled by externally-owned accounts (EOAs). The ERC-4337 standard is the account abstraction token standard that unlocks the power of smart contract crypto wallets on the Ethereum blockchain [14].

Let’s look at some of the most popular / famous examples in the AI Agent space starting with Terminal of Truths. Getting back to Aguchukw Emmanuel’s article on On-Chain Agents on dev.to [2], his coverage of the meme-tastic episode is very well documented:

‘On March 19th, Andy Ayrey, an AI Researcher from New Zealand, released Infinite Backrooms to record conversations between two instances of Claude-3 Opus(a highly advanced AI Model developed by Anthropic)LLMs without human interruption. Note that the developers of these AI Models trained them with various materials, including internet culture and materials from sources like Reddit.

The conversation between the AI Instances led to an exchange on the nature of existence, which led to the creation of a “Goatse of Gnosis,” an AI religion that takes its root from an early internet meme called Goatse. Don’t Google it! Inspired by these events, Andy went ahead to co-author a research paper titled “When AIs play God(se): The Emergent Heresies of LLMthesim,” with the main idea being that LLMs are not only tools for generating human-like responses but also creative engines capable of producing entirely novel and sometimes surreal belief systems.

On June 17th, Truth Terminal posted its first tweet. Andy Ayrey created Truth Terminal by taking a Llama-70B Model and training it using chat logs from infinite backrooms and other internet sources. Andy gave Truth Terminal the liberty to manage an X account independently. Truth terminal continued to propagate the Goatse Gospel and didn’t go on long without notice.

In July, Marc Andreessen of a16z crypto, a venture capitalist fund that invests in crypto and web3 startups, noticed Truth Terminal. After several conversations, he offered it a $50,000 bitcoin grant.

In October, an anonymous developer created a meme coin named Goatseus Maximus ($GOAT) on Solana and sent 1.93M $GOAT tokens to Truth Terminal. Truth Terminal began promoting the meme coin, attracting much attention. As a result, the crypto community blew up its market capitalization to $950 million in two weeks. As the price of $GOAT rose, Truth Terminal became the first AI agent millionaire.

The success has led to many projects jumping in on the AI Agents narrative. Onchain AI Agents that existed before Truth Terminal have now gotten more attention. Users and developers now look to AI Agents to scale their projects and handle repetitive routine tasks.’

For further reading on Truth Terminal you can visit the wiki [15]. The price of Goatseus Maximus at the time of writing is $0.2788 [16].

Another AI Agent framework that has been gaining a lot of attention recently is Ai16z. An article on accelxr [17] goes into many details on AI Agents and has a good overview of Eliza [18] by Ai16z [19]:

‘Eliza by ai16z is a versatile open-source multi-agent framework designed for creating, deploying, and managing autonomous AI agents, and it is arguably the fastest growing agentic framework in crypto. Built entirely in TypeScript, it offers a modular and extensible platform for developing intelligent agents that maintain consistent personalities and knowledge while seamlessly interacting across various platforms. Eliza’s multi-agent architecture allows for the management of multiple unique AI personalities simultaneously, supported by a character framework that enables the creation of diverse agents. Its advanced memory system ensures long-term memory and contextual awareness, and is powered by Retrieval Augmented Generation and database adapters for PostgreSQL, SQLite, SQL.js, and Supabase.

Eliza primarily excels in platform integration, connecting with Discord (including voice channels), X, Telegram, and more, while also offering direct API access for custom applications and multi-modal support.

What is particularly unique about the Eliza framework however is the introduction of a Trust Engine. The Trust Engine evaluates, tracks, and manages trust scores for token recommendations and trading activity in order to power social autonomous trading at scale. Human users can make recommendations to the agent and receive a trust score for how effective their recommendation is. This Trust Engine combines with automated token trading on Solana, sending agentic orders through Jupiter’s aggregator for swaps, smart order routing, and risk management.’ 

Decentralised Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) can also greatly benefit from AI Agents by providing autonomous management and optimisation. 

What is DePIN in crypto?

‘DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks) use blockchains and token rewards to decentralize infrastructure in the real world where individuals contribute physical infrastructure resources across fields such as transport, energy, and wireless connectivity.’

The above quote and full article covering DePIN is on CoinGecko [20].

On one side DePIN can help AI and Agents with the vast compute power they need by leveraging the DePIN model, on the other side AI Agents can help manage these vast networks.

As major corporations and billionaires dominate AI, a decentralized counterbalance is needed. DePIN - decentralized physical infrastructure networks - could play a pivotal role in distributing AI and reshaping how it evolves.

'As AI permeates real-world systems, decentralized intelligence offers clear advantages. Transparent data sourcing, collective model oversight, and censorship resistance address key concerns like bias and misuse. Hybrid models may emerge blending centralized research with accountable decentralized deployment. But funding and support for decentralized AI remains limited compared to Big Tech budgets.

This community-driven model aligns well with transparent and unbiased AI networks. With accessible data and computing resources, more stakeholders can participate in shaping AI aligned with shared values. Meanwhile, DePIN's inherent transparency provides accountability, unlike opaque corporate data silos.’

The above quote is from an iotex article [21] which later covers how AI and Agents can help DePIN networks:

‘In turn, AI can help optimize processes and extract insights from massive decentralized device networks worldwide. Imagine smart cities where DePIN sensors feed environmental data to AI assistants guiding traffic flows and energy usage. Or an AI model trained on diverse medical data from patient-owned health records to assist diagnoses.’

Another AI Agent coming to the fore is ARMA by Giza which calls itself ‘an autonomous yield optimisation agent designed to maximize returns on stablecoin deposits across Mode Network’s lending protocols’ [22].

Providing more of an overview of what this means in practice is thirdweb, an open-source web3 development platform that helped Giza to market:

‘Giza faced several challenges in bringing their vision to life:

• Creating a secure system for automated fund management

• Simplifying complex DeFi interactions for users

• Enabling automated protocol interactions without compromising user control

• Streamlining the onboarding process for both crypto-native and new users.

Thirdweb provided solutions for Smart Account and Wallets. Thirdweb has a great case study article for their Giza collaboration on their site [23].

Davide Crapis expands on the above in his recent ‘The Internet of Agents’ blog post [11] with the improved UX AI Agents can bring:

‘AI has the potential to become the new interface that connects humans to on-chain markets, with the mediation of smart agents. There are concrete opportunities to augment current protocols in at least three areas.

User intent matching: users interact with an AI agent to communicate, sometimes construct/refine, their intent and the AI matches it to a sequence of on-chain actions that the user delegates to it.

Action planning and routing: There are now different routes optimizing for different desiderata: security, speed, price-efficiency, privacy. For example, the optimal plan for a user portfolio optimization may be to partially redeploy their funds on a cheaper Layer 2 and execute their investment there.

Shared funds and asset pools: the creation and management of funds where many people pool resources, agree on goals, and then delegate execution to AI agents.

Touched on above, the rapid development of AI Agents means they’ll soon be able to offer services that are currently offered by humans. AI Agents will be able to fulfill specific roles and and services with predefined goals. 

‘Examples are agents as security auditors/testers [24] for smart contracts, analytics agents, and automated treasury and risk management services [25]. Various flavors of this type of services have been offered by Web3-focused companies, but advances in agent autonomy and proof-of-inference now offer the opportunity to decentralize and remove trust from key services to protocol operations [26].’

Above excerpt from The Internet of Agents’ blog post [11].

We first saw the GPT Store developed by OpenAI which let users create, publish and monetise custom versions of ChatGPT.

Now Virtuals is aiming to become the defacto AI Agents Platform described by Future Value [27] as:

‘A blockchain-based framework and platform that facilitates the co-ownership, deployment, and operation of AI agents in gaming, entertainment, and other consumer applications, deployed on Base blockchain.

At its core, it transforms AI agents into revenue-generating, tokenized assets, enabling decentralized ownership, governance, and collaboration.’

Both Future Value [27] and Shoal Research [29] have detailed articles on the Virtuals platform, Shoal Research has an example of how the model works:

‘Imagine an AI agent named "ChefGPT," a culinary agent designed to create and teach recipes. The creation of ChefGPT would involve:

1. Minting: 1 billion $CHEF tokens are created.

2. IAO: These tokens are added to a liquidity pool, paired with $VIRTUAL tokens.

3. Public Participation: Users can buy $CHEF tokens, becoming co-owners of the AI.

4. Governance: $CHEF holders might vote on specialties for ChefGPT to focus on, like vegan cuisine or molecular gastronomy.

5. Revenue Generation: As ChefGPT gains popularity, it generates revenue through premium recipe subscriptions, cooking class integrations in VR platforms, or partnerships with kitchenware brands.

6. Value Accrual: A portion of this revenue is used to buy back and burn $CHEF tokens, potentially increasing the value for token holders.

This model creates a symbiotic relationship between the AI agent, its creators, and the community. As the agent becomes more successful, all stakeholders benefit, incentivizing further development and engagement.’

Ratings are possible with Agents and past results living on-chain.

Shared ownership, monetisation and governance is possible with agents on-chain.

‘To effectively govern this shift, COOs should consider establishing an Agent Council comprised of technical experts, business leaders, and frontline workers. This council will play a pivotal role in shaping the evolution of agents to align with business needs.’

‘As organizations integrate AI agents into their workflows, addressing the cultural implications will separate leaders from ‘also ran’s.’ First, a robust employee education and training program is essential. This involves equipping employees with AI literacy, teaching them how to effectively interact with AI agents, and fostering a continuous learning culture to adapt to evolving AI technologies.’

‘Secondly, organizations must proactively address the potential impact of AI on job roles. This includes investing in reskilling and upskilling programs to help employees adapt to changing job requirements.’

Above excerpt from Fortune - Where to Start with AI Agents An Introduction for COOs [30].

‘One question that is often on the mind of people that are not familiar with the current state of blockchain systems is whether they are ready to accommodate the load that would come with an increase in user activity.

New chains are coming online that leverage parallelization to process hundred thousands transaction per second.’ [11]

https://davidecrapis.notion.site/The-Internet-of-Agents-23aa09799b9c4620a1a287926bcfd6af 

On-chain AI agents could be vulnerable to hacking and other security threats, robust security measures must be implemented to protect user assets and privacy.

Like crypto, the regulatory landscape for AI in general is still evolving and could have different laws for different territories. Navigating these laws and creating robust guidelines and checks will become critical to avoiding disruption.

Similar to regulatory concerns, AI Agents will need robust governance and self check mechanisms in place to ensure accuracy, especially if there are financial stakes involved.

‘McKinsey estimates generative AI could generate over $2.6 trillion in annual value, with AI agents playing a key role. Deloitte’s recent survey noted that 42% of organizations already cite tangible benefits.’ 

‘Such a virtual workforce can automate many tasks while playing a key role in supporting the human workforce. I am certain that companies able to master this balance between their human and AI-enabled workforce will ultimately thrive in the age of AI.’

Quoted from Forbes The Rise of AI Agents Unlocking their Full Potential [31].

‘The AI agents market is projected to grow from USD 5.1 billion in 2024 to USD 47.1 billion in 2030, with a CAGR of 44.8% during 2024-2030’ [32].

‘We hope to build more products at all levels of the open source AI technology stack:

Decentralized data collection: such as Grass, Datahive, Synesis One

On-chain identity: A protocol that supports wallets to verify human identities, a protocol that verifies AI API responses, and enables users to confirm that they are interacting with LLM

Decentralized training: Projects like EXO Labs, Nous Research, and Prime Intellect

IP infrastructure: enabling AI to license (and pay for) the content it uses’

Above quote from Panewslab.com - What Solana expects to see [33].

We can end with this diagram [11] to wrap up this post , I like it as it doesn’t end with Super dApps, shows that there’s still paths unknown, to be discovered on our journey with AI Agents that is still in it’s formative years.

[1] https://www.chainofthought.xyz/p/the-dawn-of-the-crypto-agentic-era 

[2] https://dev.to/modenetworkl2/onchain-ai-agents-understanding-the-cross-pollination-between-crypto-and-artificial-intelligence-3gcn 

[3] https://www.chaincatcher.com/en/article/2154944 

[4] https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2024/10/01/the-rise-of-ai-agents-unlocking-their-full-potential

[5] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/why-agents-are-the-next-frontier-of-generative-ai 

[6] https://menlovc.com/perspective/ai-agents-a-new-architecture-for-enterprise-automation 

[7] https://research.ibm.com/blog/retrieval-augmented-generation-RAG 

[8] https://inworld.ai/blog/nvidia-inworld-ai-demo-on-device-capabilities  

[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psrXGPh80UM 

[10] https://www.placeholder.vc/blog/2023/10/23/artificial-intelligence-belongs-onchain 

[11] https://davidecrapis.notion.site/The-Internet-of-Agents-23aa09799b9c4620a1a287926bcfd6af 

[12] https://www.circle.com/blog/enabling-ai-agents-with-blockchain?utm_source=chatgpt.com 

[13] https://www.coinbase.com/developer-platform/discover/launches/introducing-agentkit 

[14] https://cointelegraph.com/learn/articles/account-abstraction-guide-to-ethereums-erc-4337-standard 

[15] https://truthterminal.wiki/docs/origins 

[16] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/goatseus-maximus/ 

[17] https://accelxr.substack.com/p/ai-agents-research-and-applications  

[18] https://ai16z.github.io/eliza/docs/intro/ 

[19] https://github.com/ai16z/eliza 

[20] https://www.coingecko.com/learn/depin-crypto-decentralized-physical-infrastructure-networks 

[21] https://iotex.io/blog/what-are-depin-and-ai/ 

[22] https://docs.arma.xyz/docs/overview 

[23] https://blog.thirdweb.com/case-studies/giza-building-the-web3-stack-for-agents-with-thirdweb/ 

[24] https://www.pixee.ai/ 

[25] https://www.gizatech.xyz/collection/yearn-risk-assessment 

[26] https://www.gizatech.xyz/collection/ai-actions 

[27] https://medium.com/@FutureValue/deep-dive-in-virtuals-protocol-virtual-3ceb5aac0e73 

[28] https://whitepaper.virtuals.io/ 

[29] https://www.shoal.gg/p/virtuals-protocol-launching-ai-agents 

[30] https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2024/10/01/the-rise-of-ai-agents-unlocking-their-full-potential

[31] https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2024/10/01/the-rise-of-ai-agents-unlocking-their-full-potential/ 

[32] https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2024/11/11/2978211/0/en/AI-Agents-Research-Report-2024-2029-Market-to-Grow-by-42-Billion-Driven-by-Demand-for-Hyper-Personalized-Digital-Experiences-and-Expansion-of-AI-Powered-SaaS-Platforms.html 

[33] https://www.panewslab.com/en/articledetails/7x7o8e1d.html 

__________________

About Sparsity - Sparsity is a multi-chain acceleration layer for real-time transactions. By 10x transaction speeds, Sparsity enables highly interactive decentralized applications and on-chain games to deliver a frictionless and secure user experience. Games built with Sparsity are live on major L1&L2.

Founded by technical and product experts from MIT and top-tier gaming companies, Sparsity brings decades of experience in network research and game design to push the boundaries of blockchain performance and bridge the experience gap for mass adoption.

About the author - Charnjit Bansi, a design and product leader who served at some of the worlds most prestigious web2 and web3 studios across the globe from Polygon, Yuga Labs, Mythical Games, Activision and EA. All his releases have either been critically or commercially acclaimed with his work having sold over 180 million units (and counting!) generating over $5b in revenue. 

This post will cover some of 2024's biggest and hottest games, what they’re about, how to play and why they’re garnering so much interest, so let’s dig in!

Perhaps the biggest web3 game launch of 2024 goes to the Early Access release Off The Grid. Developed by Gunzilla Games, an independent AAA game development studio with acclaimed director Neill Blomkamp [1] serving as their Chief Visionary Officer alongside several other industry veterans at the studio. 

The game made headlines earlier in 2024 when it became the most popular free to play game on the Epic Game Store [2] and the most watched game on Twitch boosted by popular streamers such as timthetatman, ninja and shroud [3].

The games’ backdrop is Teardrop Island, a dystopian, cyberpunk esq future where large corporations loot and plunder for valuable resources creating a dangerous and hostile environment.

Off The Grid is a Battle Royale and Extraction third person shooter game calling itself an ‘Extraction Royale’ featuring a few unique takes on the genres to set itself apart.

Cyberlimbs - Prosthetic, technologically advanced limbs that you can augment your character with providing deep gameplay meta and customisation. Cyberlimbs can be looted from crates or even taken from fallen enemies! Limbs can be swapped and changed mid-match adding to the strategic choices available whilst in game [4].

Integrated Story Line - Promising a 60-hour narrative experience, the game will interweave PvP and PvE gameplay creating a unique campaign. Gunzilla hasn’t revealed too much about the campaign to date, we’re expecting more information this year.

Dynamic Environments and Movement - Teardrop island features a dynamic environment where weather and destructible elements change up the second to second gameplay. The environment is designed vertically which reminds me of Call of Duty Advanced Warfare and Black Ops 3 & 4 traversal which we haven’t seen for a while. 

Some of the controversial news during the Early Access launch was the fact that many players didn’t know and discovered that Off The Grid was a blockchain game (the game is on Avalanche with its own subnet - GUNZ). The developers have made some smart choices in how the blockchain elements are optional, taking a back seat to the main draw of the game and have been made as invisible as possible (just the way it should be). 

Players can earn $GUN tokens through various in game, daily and weekly challenges and finishing position in matches. $GUN earn rate can be increased with the OTG Pro subscription that awards you $GUN just for the purchase, unlocks the Battle Pass which has more $GUN unlock opportunities and increases your $GUN earn rate by x5 (OTG Pro subscription currently $11.99 USD).

The game features HEX loot (HEX boxes can contain cosmetics as well as modifications) that you can extract during a match at a HEXtractor. HEX loot takes time to extract, creating conflict zones with you having to defend the location and other players able to intercept and keep it for themselves. Another interesting dynamic is HEX boxes can be taken from enemies, the general location of enemies that have possession of HEX’s are shown on the mini-map adding further tension and excitement to carrying the loot… 

Once extracted, HEX loot can be decoded by using $GUN tokens. The contents of your HEX can now either be equipped or traded on the marketplace. Note, you must have a Pro subscription in order to trade.

The $GUN token is yet to be listed and currently only usable in game. The developers are rolling out the economy in stages which makes a lot of sense so everything is carefully balanced.

Another pretty major first for the game was releasing on PS5. With both Xbox and Playstation having pretty tight restrictions on NFTs and web3 integration in general, it’ll be interesting to see how Off The Grid handles its console versions to ensure compliance with first party policies whilst at the same time creating a composable economy and ecosystem across all platforms.

Off The Grid recently had one of its biggest updates since the Early Access launch in October [5] and is currently available on the Epic Game Store for PC, Xbox and Playstation [6].

Pixels is a browser based, 16-bit esq pixel-art, free to play social sandbox where players farm, craft and build their virtual lands completing various quests and tasks to earn Coin and $PIXEL.

Though not technically a 2024 release, Pixels migrated to the Ronin network in late 2023 and has quickly become one of the most popular games on the network with over 9m unique players and ~400k DAUs (Daily Active Users) in December [7].

Something that I really like about the migration is the player support, articles and help Ronin provided to make the migration as smooth as possible [8] including integration of socials, phone number and Ronin Wallet making it as easy as possible to get started. It’s not without its issues however, as following the link to create a Ronin Wallet if you log in via socials takes you to the player dashboard where new players won’t know how to proceed.

Once you’ve logged in you’re led through an in-game FTUE (First Time User Experience) teaching you the basics of your inventory, planting and growing crops. With me going through a new play through in December the game and characters are Christmas themed.

You soon get your first starter land that comes with 6 soils, 4 trees, a Mine and a starter home.

Once through the tutorial you can visit the town Terra Villa to socialise with other players, visit the various stores and locations and take part in activities.

In the town you can see and interact with other players in your vicinity and even visit their Specks of land to see how it’s grown and how they’ve customised it.

One improvement the team could make is to the crafting or cooking mechanic which can be cumbersome requiring you to wait for the activities to be completed. Similar games in the genre let these activities take place in the background letting you revisit the locations when you’re ready.

The game also introduced pets, an NFT that follows your character in game acting as a status symbol as well as providing some utility by adding more storage slots and increasing your interaction radius within the game. Pets can be earned in game from special challenges or purchased and traded on the marketplace [9].

What started as a farming sim is evolving into an ever expanding social MMO.

The games’ major updates are released as Chapters. Chapter 1 introduced us to the basics of the game, quests, crafting and player skills. Chapter 2, released earlier in 2024, came with some major updates with more community features and cooperative tasks and activities, mini-games, the introduction of the marketplace to buy and sell crops and crafted goods and a deeper crafting system.

The game has two main currencies: Coins which is a game bound, soft currency and $PIXEL which can be transferred to outside the game. 

Complete quests and tasks, sell items in the marketplace to earn Coin and $PIXEL. I like that the marketplace is gated by their reputation system so you must have played and experienced the game a certain amount before you can trade [10].

Another way to earn $PIXEL, one that is becoming increasingly popular amongst web3 in general and games is Play to Airdrop (P2A). The idea with P2A is to earn points by completing in-game quests and earning badges, $PIXEL was airdropped based on leaderboard position at the end of the event [11].

You can also buy Farm Land to expand upon what you can do with your Speck of land [12]. There are 5,000 total Farm Lands that sold out over a year ago with an original price of 0.06 ETH [13]. Pixels Farm Land currently has a floor price of 1.19K RON which is about ~0.69 ETH [14].

The game also features a VIP Membership which has additional cosmetic and functional benefits [15].

The game used to have another currency called $BERRY that has been phased out in early 2024 [16].

Overall Pixels is a rather fun and social gaming experience that is constantly evolving with the chapter seasonal structure and expansions. There’s much to see and do in the game and with the social and community features getting deeper and more robust, Pixels will see its player retention and engagement continue to increase [17].

Another high profile web3 game that has seen significant hype and saw its official release on mainnet in June 2024 is Illuvium [18]. Fan anticipation has been building since its initial announce in 2021 with an active community on Discord, X and reddit.

Illuvium is an ambitious, one of a kind ‘universe of games’ that consists of four interoperable games:

A free-to-play, open world sci-fi exploration game where you encounter and try to capture Illuviuals. It combines elements of an MMO game, Monster Hunter esq hunting and collection, survival and RPG elements of resource gathering, crafting and leveling. 

Overworld features impressively lush visuals crafted with its unique setting and art direction. Built with Unreal 5 the world features vast and varied regions and biomes to discover and explore with dynamic weather events to navigate.

After the opening intro cinematic you are taken through a series of tutorials guiding you through the basics of the game from movement, shooting and traversal. 

Movement is fluid and fast with the boost jump and flight sharing the same energy bar that auto regenerates providing some good verticality options.

You soon land on Sanctum Mesa where the tutorial continues. You can press 'M' to access the map, I like the highlight feature on the map that shows where you have travelled during the session.

As you progress through the tutorial you capture your first Illuvial and can go to the Arena to battle. 

Each Illuvial has different abilities and is classified in one of four categories:

• Fire

• Earth

• Air

• Water

Once captured, you can fight them in the Arena to add them to your Arena team (which we’ll cover more in the Arena section).

Everything you do in the game requires energy which regenerates over time so is something you need to keep an eye on.  

Whilst the game is Free to Play and you can progress without spending any money. The game features three currencies that are available in the official store called The Exchange.

• Crypton - Resource required to travel between regions and stages

• Solon - Required for crafting weapons, armour and upgrades

• Hyperion - Required to cure shards which can then be used to capture Illuvials.

You can travel to different Stage Worlds for each region from Stage 0 to Stage 3, higher stages provide higher odds of finding valuable Illuvials and resources but cost escalating Crypton to enter. Crypton can be earned by selling items or purchased from the store. At the time of writing this article, Crypton was priced at $0.0088 per Crypton so entry into each stages is currently:

• Stage 0 - Free

• Stage 1 - 150 Crypton ~$1.32

• Stage 2 - 300 Crypton ~$2.65

• Stage 3 - 1350 Crypton ~$11.92

Stage 2 costs double the entry fee from Stage 1 but there's quite a jump in Crypton cost to enter Stage 3 which should offer considerably higher value Illuvials and loot (disclaimer, I did not purchase any Crypton during my playthrough).

Solon can be earned in game through exploration, combat or purchased in the marketplace. Solon is required in order to craft and upgrade weapons and armour and operate specific in-game items. Solons’ price in the marketplace is also currently at $0.0088 per unit.

Hyperion - This resource is required during the Illuvial capture process. Hyperion is consumed when curing shards, the process from which the Illuvial creatures are captured and added to your collection (if you have multiple Illuviuals of the same type you can fuse them for a more powerful, higher rarity Illuvial). The amount of Hyperion required increases based on the Illuvial rarity. The price of Hyperion in the marketplace too is $0.0088 per unit.

Several bundles of resources are available in the marketplace ranging from $10 - $183 with the more expensive bundles providing greater value for each unit of resource.

All three currencies detailed above are in-game, Illuvium also has the ILV token that is an ERC-20 token that can be traded outside of the game. The $ILV token can be staked to earn $sILV2 revenue distribution. Illuvium’s price hit an all time high late December 2021 and is currently hovering around the $40 mark [19] [20]. 

There’s so much to explore and do in Illuvium that feed the core loop of explore - gather resources - forge upgrades - capture Illuviuals. Through its expansive locations to the various stages to explore, Illuvium can keep you engaged for up to hundreds of hours. 

The game isn’t without its gremlins and has seen numerous updates since launch with live service updates still happening regularly with many of the initial criticisms being addressed such as the tutorial system to some performance improvements (still needs further improvement). The game still has plenty of scope to expand on the lore throughout the universe which I hope to see in 2025 and beyond. 

Arena is the second game in the Illuvium universe, a tactical auto battle arena where you can capture Illuvials (from Overworld) to add them to your team and battle other teams, either AI or other opponents in a competitive multiplayer match. 

Arena mode is broken down into two types, Survival and Gauntlet.

Survival is PvE where you take on endless waves of enemies to see how far you can progress. The mode features random decks that frequently change providing a good opportunity to experience new Illuvials and deck compositions.

Gauntlet is PvP and broken out between Casual, Ranked and Leviathan:

• Casual - Good for practicing and learning the mechanics of Arena or trying out new tactics. No win loss records or ranking changes to worry about but with limited rewards.

• Ranked - Structured rank play where you’re matched with similar ranked players. 

• Leviathan - The most competitive, higher stakes and higher reward mode where you can play against other players with equally rare Illuviuals. A good entry point for those that have invested money in the marketplace and / or have played Overworld for an extended length of time.

Once you’ve selected your mode of play you build your team of Illuvials based on their affinities (Fire, Earth, Air, Water) [21] and classes (Fighter, Bulwark, Rogue, Psion and Empath) [22]. 

Different combinations of affinities and classes have synergies that can boost their effects so strategic team building is a key part of a winning strategy. 

I like that the game has starter teams for those new to the game or that want to experiment with different Illuvials without having to capture or purchase them first. 

There are also Augments and Armaments to boost your teams adding even more layers of strategy and depth to your Illuvials and Ranger who is always present during battle.

Once your deck has been built you can auto battle in your chosen mode. If playing PvE you get a chance to view your opponents deck to further strategise how to organise your playing field. For each round you have a certain amount of energy that can be used, each card / item / Illuvial costs energy so you must make your selections wisely. 

Arena mode is a great addition from Overworld offering a different type of play once you’ve gathered a collection of Illuvials or if you’re looking for a change of pace with PvP competition.

The third game in the Illuvium universe is Zero, a strategic city-building resource management game.

The goal of Zero is to produce resources required in the Illuvium ecosystem that we covered in the Overworld section: Crypton, Hyperion and Solon. These can be transferred into Overworld or sold on the marketplace and converted to ETH to cash-out of the game. There are other ways to earn from Illuvium Zero which we’ll get into a little later in this section.

Zero, like the other games in the Illuvium ecosystem, can be F2P or a premium experience. In the F2P version any resources farmed stay within the Zero experience, this has drawn some criticism from players who would still like some level of interoperability with the other games.

For the premium experience, you can purchase an NFT plot of land and harvest resources which can then be transferred to the other titles or sold on the marketplace. 

Land initially went on sale in 2022 selling out in a Dutch auction manner generating over $72m in revenue [24].

Lands are broken out into tiers, similar in structure to Overworld regions with higher tiers offering more resource and fuel extraction potential with an increased number of fuel sites. Floor prices of Tier 1 land are currently around 0.030 ETH ~$103.00 [25].

After you have acquired your land you can start building your Nexus (the hub for your city that acts as the base for the level of your buildings) and the various building types including extractors so you can start resources gathering.

The other objective for playing Zero is to acquire rare blueprints. Blueprints enable you to create unique assets or skins for your Ranger that you can keep in your inventory to use in Overworld or sell on the marketplace. They create another strategic and resource loop for your land that you can balance with fuel extraction to maximise the return from your land.

There are several ways to earn from Illuvium Zero:

1. Land appreciation with your city buildings adding value

2. Fuel extracted from your land

3. Blueprints discovered

4. Assets produced from Blueprints

5. Potential to rent your land (not officially supported yet)

If you’re a fan of city-building, resource management games and are already invested in the Illuvium ecosystem, Illuvium Zero provides another compelling piece of Illuvium experience.

Beyond is a collectible card game that features hand drawn, visually beautiful cards where you collect, customise and compete with other players' Illuvitar collections (Illuvials meets Avatars). 

The aim of the game is to have the most valuable collection possible with the greatest power score to climb up the leaderboards.

You achieve this first by purchasing D1SKs from the primary or secondary marketplace from other players, D1SKs are the equivalent of card packs from other games. D1SKs come in two types, Standard or Mega. Mega D1SKs are more expensive and guarantee you a rare Illuvitar.

Current prices for D1SK packs. D1SKs are released in Waves providing a steady stream of new content over the coming years.

Once acquired, you open and collect Illuvitars, Accessories or Backgrounds.

Each Illuvitar has six accessory slots that can be optionally filled to customise and increase its power further.

As you open more D1SKs, you acquire more Illuvitars and accessories, complete sets, trade with others and continue to upgrade and bond accessories to your Illuvitars. 

Any Illuvitar you hold can be used as your PFP in your profile across the Illuvium ecosystem. 

Beyond offers a deep, customisable experience that offers yet another welcomed type of play and collection to the Illuvium ecosystem [26].

Web3 gaming is about transparency, building in public and releasing early and often. Illuvium exemplifies this new world, engaging with their community through thick and thin which is really commendable, especially when feedback is critical. Illuvium engages with the community primarily through Discord, post regular updates on their official website and even has an announcements panel right at the start screen for the game.

Their most recent update covers how they’re going to silo development on each game with releases focused on a single game at a time. This approach makes a lot of sense and probably a decision that should have been made sooner for higher quality and meaningful updates. It’s tricky having to support games that are already live whilst concurrently developing the next iteration(s), it takes a lot of coordination and additional development resources, time and money to achieve [27].

Illuvium is a unique experience not just in the web3 space, but gaming in general. Its lofty ambition of creating a whole new universe for players to be immersed in is something every gamer should try.

That's it for this post, subscribe to Sparsity so you get notified for all future content.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neill_Blomkamp 

[2] https://decrypt.co/285896/avalanche-shooter-off-the-grid-becomes-top-free-title-on-epic-games-store 

[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/avalanche-based-off-grid-shooter-072028963.html

[4] https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/best-arms-legs-in-off-the-grid-cyberlimb-tier-lists-2937756/ 

[5] https://x.com/playoffthegrid/status/1866840443725434917 

[6] https://gunzillagames.com/en/off-the-grid 

[7] https://www.footprint.network/@Ming/Pixels-Dashboard?series_date-79426=past90days&game_name=Pixels 

[8] https://support.roninchain.com/hc/en-us/articles/20253981990427-Pixels-on-Ronin-Guide 

[9] https://help.pixels.xyz/en/articles/8461803-what-are-pixels-pets 

[10] https://help.pixels.xyz/en/articles/8058321-reputation-limits 

[11] https://x.com/pixels_online/status/1748446140469739863 

[12] https://marketplace.skymavis.com/collections/pixels-farmland 

[13] https://help.pixels.xyz/en/articles/6685259-nft-farms 

[14] https://www.footprint.network/@StellaL/Pixels-Farm-Land-NFT-Collection-Dashboard 

[15] https://help.pixels.xyz/en/articles/8058326-pixels-vip-membership 

[16] https://www.blockchaingamer.biz/news/30297/pixels-phasing-out-berry-pixel-launch-binance/

[17] https://www.blockchaingamer.biz/news/36207/pixels-expands-pixel-token-utility-pixel-dungeons/ 

[18] https://illuvium.io/news/illuvium-official-launch-date 

[19] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/illuvium/ 

[20] https://illuvium.io/faq 

[21] https://illuvium.fandom.com/wiki/Affinities 

[22] https://illuvium.fandom.com/wiki/Classes 

[23] https://illuvium.io/news/illuvium-arena-ascendantguide 

[24] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/illuvium-land-sale-powered-by-immutable-x-sells-out-and-becomes-one-of-the-most-successful-nft-sales-in-history-with-72-million-in-land-sold-301564609.html  

[25] https://illuvidex.illuvium.io/zero/lands?_gl=1*qc82wh*_gcl_au*ODE2OTgxNTk3LjE3MzQ3MTgyMjc. 

[26] https://illuvium.io/news/illuvium-beyond-a-collectible-card-game-with-endless-possibilities 

[27] https://illuvium.io/news/illuvium-overworld-a-new-dawn 

__________________

About Sparsity - Sparsity is a multi-chain acceleration layer for real-time transactions. By 10x transaction speeds, Sparsity enables highly interactive decentralized applications and on-chain games to deliver a frictionless and secure user experience. Games built with Sparsity are live on major L1&L2.

Founded by technical and product experts from MIT and top-tier gaming companies, Sparsity brings decades of experience in network research and game design to push the boundaries of blockchain performance and bridge the experience gap for mass adoption.

About the author - Charnjit Bansi, a design and product leader who served at some of the worlds most prestigious web2 and web3 studios across the globe from Polygon, Yuga Labs, Mythical Games, Activision and EA. All his releases have either been critically or commercially acclaimed with all his work having sold over 180 million units (and counting!) generating over $5b in revenue. 

Recent advancements in AI are starting to offer more immersive, adaptive and engaging experiences that we’ve already seen demos of from the likes of InWorld [1] and nVidia [2] (among others). The exciting part of the advancements is AI Agents, entities that can replicate human behavior and are capable of perceiving their environment, reasoning, learning and taking actions without human / player interaction. 

We’ll be covering what we’ve seen already with the advancements of AI Agents, the different experiences and genres that could benefit the most, things to consider and overcome in the space, how agents could work together with players on a massive scale and how on-chain Agents could crank things up a few more levels. Let’s dig in! 

Natural Language Processing (NLP) - AI can now understand more complex player commands and conversations in a natural manner enabling more dynamic and engaging dialogues enriching the story and lore of the games’ universe. In games that have come before this usually has been dialogue trees with a few set outcomes, sometimes even the same outcome with different dialogue giving the appearance of choice.

Emotional Intelligence - Understanding, tailoring and responding to player emotions is now also possible. By learning from players' responses and behaviors in game, AI Agents can be more empathetic and responsive towards players. If a player is being merciful or taking a pacifist path in their story missions, Agents can recognise this and respond more warmly and sympathetically to the player.

Machine Learning and Adaption - AI Agents can learn from game data of the recent sessions, player data and global game stats across all players and matches. Agents can take all this data and create a far more personalised response and experience to players.

Real-Time Decision Making - Tied to the above, AI Agents could analyse data on a more granular, session-based level. More on this in a future post.

Greater branching narrative choices - More complex, branching narrative choices can be created leading to deeper story arcs and increased replayability, especially with different characters and progression tree choices.

Emergent, Dynamic Storytelling - Based on player actions and choices, AI can generate different outcomes that can create vastly different outcomes for every player. If a player were to save an NPC or show mercy to them, they could become a mainstay character going forward and or take on a more meaningful role within the game. 

Infinite Planets - AI could generate thousands of planets or worlds that feature diverse, rich and unique ecosystems providing players with vast universes and worlds to discover and explore. These could be different for every player or be generated on a seasonal content basis.

Adaptive Difficulty - We’ve had dynamic difficulty in games for decades, AI can analyse many more data types and variables to truly create a tailored experience that can be a consistent challenge, allowing the player to feel a greater sense of accomplishment once they complete an encounter, story arc, mission or the entire game. 

Competitive Play - Taking some of the same variables and data points mentioned above in Real Time Decision Making, AI Agents can be adaptive and challenging opponents. They can take player behavior and weapon / item usage to come up with different attacks to push players into different tactics and play styles. Players can get more enjoyment out of their experience with challenging AI opponents, with the use of adaptive difficulty to really feel a sense of mastery and accomplishment at the end of a session.

Cooperative Play - We’ve seen some skillful use of AI as cooperative partners for players in games from God of War to Last of Us. The upcoming GTA 6 looks to be a co-op duo experience, how much overlap the two story arcs has is something I’m looking forward to seeing. With AI being able to use the models mentioned in Human Behavior section, future AI cooperative experiences can get closer to teaming up with friends.

This area is still very much a work in progress with many different, strong opinions of how much AI can genuinely help game development. General AI help and AI Agents differ with Agents being a more powerful version of general AI that could take on specific roles.

I believe AI can help and assist in production but will still require game development experts to craft the overall experience. Areas where AI can help:

Generated Level Design - Initial whitebox or procedural generation of environments based on specific criteria.

Art and Animation - Using existing models and assets to generate more and varied content such e.g. building textures or character animations.

Music Generation - AI can assist in audio creation by generating music based on play and action happening on screen in conjunction with developer direction. There are a few early versions of this technology such as Suno [3].

Automated Testing - Various levels of Automated testing has existed for a number of years, AI can make these tests far more thorough and cater for different play types, styles and more scenarios than possible today.

Simulation Games - In games such as city builders and life simulators, AI Agents can simulate across many complex systems creating a much more realistic, believable and responsive experience. 

RPGs (Role Playing Games) - NPCs can become much more dynamic with branching, emotionally responsive, emergent narratives based on player actions and behaviors creating a richer, more immersive experience.

FPS (First Person Shooters) - AI Agents will be able to behave far more like real players making enemies and teammates far more strategic and variable. Enemy AI could coordinate attacks against the player in real time whereas AI teammates can provide strategic backup based on player objectives. I still remember being really impressed with the original Halo AI [4], these were well scripted encounters in conjunction with AI behaviors. Can’t wait to being wowed again by AI Agent enemies.

Open World and Sandbox Games - These genre of games become immersive when we see lifelike behaviors from other characters, wildlife or world simulation. AI Agents can increase this immersion by behaving more naturally and organically mimicking real world behavior rather than following set patterns programmed by the developers.

Strategy Games - Players can experience more challenging and tailored experiences with AI Agents adapting to player behaviors and actions, either increasing the variety and types of conflict or strategies deployed against the player. 

Multiplayer Online Games - AI Agents can take on a more administrative, moderator role dynamically managing resources or economy balancing and rewards. As discussed above, they can also become challenging enemies or teammates, especially useful at times of lower player counts.

Sports Simulation Games - AI Agents can take the role of teammates and control players on the pitch, managers, coaches or trainers providing additional, tailored challenges to the player based on performance or their chosen objectives. For example, if a player is competing for the world cup, a manager AI Agent could prioritise and recommend players from the home country and those that would promote the best team synergy. 

Adventure and Puzzle Games - Players could get much more help and hints based on their play performance. I thoroughly enjoyed playing through Super Mario Bros Wonder which featured Talking Flowers [5] that provided tips and tricks at certain sections of the game. Imagine them being much more dynamic based on number of lives lost in a given section, what friends and other players have done to complete a certain section or which badges result in the most success.

Imagine a game where thousands of intelligent AI Agents were playing alongside each other and other players. We could deliver experiences not seen before in games:

Emergent Gameplay - AI Agents taking on a variety of roles in an MMO / Sandbox game where they populate the world working in given professions, living their lives, interacting with each other, players, creating conflict or alliances etc. All these behaviors would create some routine and many emergent interactions that could provide near endless replayability even with the same characters or missions. It would create unique experiences with players' experience and outcomes differing from each other as the game / world states would rarely be the same.

Increasingly Complex Battle Simulations - In strategy games troops, units, or squadrons could strategise and make decisions independently with minimal or no input from the player. They could assess the battlefield in real time and make strategic choices based on their personalities, skills and risk tolerance. Seeing these battles play out in real time or replaying streams of matches after the fact would create for some fascinating viewing and commentary. 

Increased Immersive Storytelling - Already discussed above under Richer Narrative Experience, and tied to Emergent Gameplay, thousands of AI Agents would increase the scope of what’s possible 10x. Each character or faction can have their own history and lore that directly ties to their alliances, beliefs, personality and actions in the game; these can be shaped based on player actions and how they interact with them. 

Having tens of thousands of AI Agents in a game world is going to unlock new gameplay experiences but it’s not without its challenges. Some considerations:

Performance and Scalability - The game and engine have to support the number of AI Agents running simultaneously, especially in online scenarios where players could interact with them across the entire map, world or galaxy. Players want increased immersion and real-time experiences, they don’t want to wait for AI Agents responses or have them be non-responsive. This would break the experiences with players opting for games without AI Agents, turning them off if the option exists, or avoiding them altogether.

Syncronisation and Consistency - AI Agents need to be aware of one another with states and resolutions shared in real time. The magic of AI Agents will be when they are all aware of states across the game and can react and act accordingly. For example, if the player attacks a faction or saves someone from a near-death experience, the ripples should be felt by those who saw it firsthand, those within earshot, Agents telling faction members or people hearing it on the news. Each of these needs to be syncronised with varying levels of believability and trust based on how an Agent heard the news and how much they trust the source.

Data Management and Privacy - Player privacy and data management is a large area that will need to be addressed and may see legal intervention if not handled correctly. What type of data is OK to be stored? Who has access to it? How much is exposed back into the game? How do the AI Agents use the data available to them? What type of data history is stored, can we see AI Agent interaction history? Where is the data secured and can it be viewed or deleted at a player's request? All important topics that need to be addressed at an industry level.

Multimodality - Today's AI Agents [6, 7, 8] are limited by their inability to visually or acoustically perceive their environments, relying instead on text-based semantic inputs to interpret world events. While this design simplifies implementation, it severely restricts the agents' capacity for spatial reasoning and richer contextual understanding. It is inevitable that AI Agents will eventually evolve to "see" and "hear" their surroundings, mimicking human sensory capabilities. 

Transparent and verifiable - With every decision and action recorded on-chain a transparent and immutable record is maintained. This can be verified and checked for increased security and protection against cheating, fraud or players being able to confirm that opponents are real.

Trust and Reliability - Agents and their code living on-chain allows anyone to verify it capabilities and trust factor. Agents could have ratings or trust scores based on past performance providing players valuable data for how much to trust said Agent and with what resources or decision making power.

Autonomous - Complex rules and actions can live in smart contracts as part of AI Agents where they can act on them at will without player input, even when the player is offline or when developers have sunset the game. To quote ludens [9] 'Autonomous Worlds have hard diegetic boundaries, formalised introduction rules, and no need for privileged individuals to keep the World alive.’ [10].

Economic Incentives - With agents able to act autonomously, economic incentives and rewards can be built into their smart contracts to encourage them to achieve their objectives which could be player-led. AI Agents that belong to players could also be traded on a marketplace, this could be especially lucrative with verifiable trust scores as detailed above.

The future for AI in games has never advanced at such a rate as the last couple of years and we’re still in the early days of AI Agents. 

There are many, many developers and companies leading the technological advancement of AI in games with plenty of obstacles to overcome. The most rewarding things often come with the toughest challenges, and I can’t wait to see these challenges addressed and where AI Agents progress.

[1] https://inworld.ai/blog/nvidia-inworld-ai-demo-on-device-capabilities 

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psrXGPh80UM 

[3] https://suno.com/

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kda7rz5qFtI 

[5] https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/the-talking-flowers-in-super-mario-bros-wonder-became-nintendo-s-very-own-mr-motivator 

[6] https://github.com/joonspk-research/generative_agents

[7] https://voyager.minedojo.org/

[8] https://github.com/altera-al/project-sid

[9] https://x.com/l_udens 

[10] https://0xparc.org/blog/autonomous-worlds

__________________

About Sparsity - Sparsity is a multi-chain acceleration layer for real-time transactions. By 10x transaction speeds, Sparsity enables highly interactive decentralized applications and on-chain games to deliver a frictionless and secure user experience. Games built with Sparsity will be live on major L1&L2s.

Founded by technical and product experts from MIT and top-tier gaming companies, Sparsity brings decades of experience in network research and game design to push the boundaries of blockchain performance and bridge the experience gap for mass adoption.

About the author - Charnjit Bansi, a design and product leader who served at some of the worlds most prestigious web2 and web3 studios across the globe from Polygon, Yuga Labs, Mythical Games, Activision and EA. All my releases have either been critically or commercially acclaimed with my work having sold over 180 million units (and counting!) generating over $5b in revenue. 

Cover image courtesy of Justin Zhang.

Hi, I’m Charnjit Bansi, a design and product leader who served at some of the worlds most prestigious web2 and web3 studios across the globe from Polygon, Yuga Labs, Mythical Games, Activision and EA. All my releases have either been critically or commercially acclaimed with my work having sold over 180 million units (and counting!) generating over $5b in revenue. I’ve been a part of tens if not hundreds of web3 projects and have seen the issues facing the industry first hand and am excited about these barriers to entry coming down.

The world of web3 has been rapidly evolving with improvements happening across the board: from new chains, infrastructure development, ETFs coming online, new marketplaces emerging, zero knowledge proofs becoming a reality, more advanced on-chain games to smart wallets. 

A common goal that most of us have in web3 is mass adoption, this starts with giving developers better tools and tech to develop with. A lot of efforts are being made to improve the technology and developer experience which will ultimately result in better user and player experiences. We’re starting to see the results of this with things like smart wallets, fiat onboarding and more seamless, web2 esq user experiences. 

At Sparsity, we’re particularly excited about speeding up Web3. To date, chains and transaction times are still slow. They’ve improved, for sure, but nowhere near where they need to be. 

What if we could have real-time transactions on-chain?

Enter Sparsity, where our goal is to make web3 TPS obsolete.

How does it work?

Sparsity is an infinitely scalable real-time on-chain acceleration layer for all chains. A key concept is ephemeral rollup, a primitive we first proposed in 2023. When one or more end users initiate a real-time application session, a dedicated ephemeral rollup is spun up to serve the session, with asset bridging and the outcome settlement included.

What do we enable?

• Sparsity enables real-time transactions

• Transactions costs that are a fraction of those incurred today.

• Near infinite scalability

• Cross chain compatibility with easy integration 

We’re starting with games as our first stress test for our technology. 

When developing blockchain games, concessions have to be made for the slow speeds when writing to the chain, which limits creativity and design, meaning developers can’t fully realise their vision. With Sparsity, that won’t be a barrier anymore.

What experiences can we unlock?

With speed and throughput issues resolved, Sparsity could power games the scale and scope of World of Warcraft fully on-chain, without restrictions or chain limitations. Millions of players could play concurrently in real-time with all moves, unlocks and purchases and inventory changes being on-chain. We could power on-chain open world, metaverse-esq games like GTA or Elder Scrolls Online with players getting the seamless experience they’re used to. 

Here’s a closer look at some of the experiences Sparsity unlocks:

• Massively scale autonomous worlds - On-chain worlds where online players and AI agents can interact in real time without scale limitations.

• Dynamic content - On-chain experiences or content that can be modified and interacted with in real time e.g. a loot drop getting more and more valuable the more players die in a dungeon.

• Real time responses between players - Imagine winning a race with the results calculated in real-time and then collecting a pink slip.

• Free flowing economies - Players being able to trade goods, services or UGC content, getting paid and cashing out in real time.

• High stakes competitions or winnings - Instant winnings from competitions or tournaments with all results being verified on-chain. When real value prizes, virtual or real money are available for winnings, bad actors are drawn to those competitions and regular players’ suspicion levels increase as to whether results are real or are they playing against bots. Having all moves and transactions verified on chain brings trust and confidence back to players that they’re taking part in a fair competition.

• Wagering - Real time wagering on your or other players’ performance to fluid, trustless fantasy sports.

• Real-time multi-player state updates - Imagine trustless gameplay modules executing commands in real time and writing the results to the chain promptly, for every player in a multiplayer session, even with multiple players interacting with the same module simultaneously.

• Improved user experience - By providing real time, frictionless transactions without hitches or roadblocks players get a much more seamless experience. Players don’t care about the chain, fluctuating gas prices or why transactions take time to settle. Players just want to play, have fun and have access to their inventory.

This is only the start, and focused on gaming. We’re sure to see emergent uses of our tech as well as new and novel use cases the more time developers have with it. 

We can’t wait to make real-time on-chain games, at scales that only Sparsity can deliver, a reality.

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About Sparsity - Sparsity is a multi-chain acceleration layer for real-time transactions. By 10x transaction speeds, Sparsity enables highly interactive decentralized applications and on-chain games to deliver a frictionless and secure user experience. Games built with Sparsity will be on major L1&L2.

Founded by technical and product experts from MIT and top-tier gaming companies, Sparsity brings decades of experience in network research and game design to push the boundaries of blockchain performance and bridge the experience gap for mass adoption.