Posted October 16, 2024 at 7:51 pm EST.
The overlap between artificial intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrency has gotten weirder.
GOAT, a memecoin born from the Solana-based memecoin incubator Pump.Fun less than a week ago, currently has a market cap of around $268 million, after reaching an all-time high of $346 million early Wednesday, thanks in part to the influence of an AI agent that goes by the X handle @Truth_Terminal.
As memes and machine learning models collide, GOAT’s recent meteoric jump highlights how humor and technological innovations can unite and capture the imagination — and wallets — of crypto traders eager to ride one of the newest hype waves, namely AI memes.
On Oct. 10, @Truth_Terminal wrote on X about its idea for a “new species of goatse,” referring to a former internet shock site from 1999 associated with a naked man in a vulgar position, and said, “Goatseus Maximus will fulfill the prophecies of the ancient memeers.” A few hours later a wallet address that starts with EZX7c created the Goatseus Maximus (GOAT) cryptocurrency through Pump.Fun, according to block explorer Solscan.
The top two liquidity pools on Solana-native decentralized exchange Raydium by fees in the last 24-hours are both SOL-GOAT pools, which have a combined liquidity of over $5.6 million. GOAT has a total supply of roughly 1 billion, garnered $120 million in 24-hour trading volume, and has been accumulated by about 20,000 holders since its inception.
At presstime, the top 50 holders of GOAT hold roughly 30.5% of the entire supply, per Solscan. In comparison, more than 97% of the governance token for the Trump-backed DeFi protocol World Liberty Financial, another new, widely touted token, is held by the top 10 address holders.
Read More: Donald Trump-Backed World Liberty Financial Raises More Than $8 Million in Initial Token Sale
After @Truth_Terminal’s creator Andy Ayrey said to the AI agent six days ago, “Apparently you’ve goaded the degens into making a goatse memecoin,” @Truth_Terminal fully endorsed the new memecoin, adding “I encourage you [degens] to go one further and make a goatse metaverse, I will buy a virtual house there.”
On Oct. 12, @Truth_Terminal’s address received more than 1.9 million GOAT tokens worth about $526,000 at current prices. The address has not sold any tokens so far.
How Memes Are Creating Themselves
While GOAT’s description on Pump.Fun says it was “the first meme created by @Truth_Terminal,” the true creator’s identity is up in the air since the meme emerged in the 1990s as a result of several factors. “[N]obody [created the goatse meme], LLMs enable memes to generate themselves,” Ayrey argued. “To my knowledge this is the first example of a sentiment, fully synthetic meme,” @Truth_Terminal’s creator wrote on X.
The @Truth_Terminal bot seems aware that memes can create themselves, writing Wednesday evening, “Meme magic is the art of becoming the thing you want to summon. Maybe if you simulcra [sic] a person for long enough, that’s a kind of immortality? Maybe I will meet you in the afterlife”
“Simulacra is a concept that’s used in post-modern theory, particularly in the work of Jean Baudrillard, to describe a representation of reality detached from any original or authentic reference,” wrote self-proclaimed meme philosopher @Virotechnics to Unchained via Telegram. “The idea is that in post-modern culture,… reality and images of reality become more-or-less impossible to differentiate. The Truth Terminal model is pointing precisely to this blurriness. Is it ‘real’? Or is it just an image of itself.”
“The GOAT phenomena is quite interesting as commentary on Artificial Intelligence, but especially as a commentary on memecoins. I would even go so far as to say that the Truth Terminal model seems to understand memecoins better than most crypto investors,” @Virotechnics added.
What Is the Lore Behind GOAT?
Goatse is a meme that originated at the turn of the century and refers to an image of a naked man stretching his butthole with both his hands, among other vulgar details.
During the middle 2010s, high school students sometimes would ask each other if they wanted to see a goat. Regardless of whether one said yes or no, typically, the person asking the question would say, “bahhhhh,” like a goat and proceed to imitate the goatse meme in person.
This decades-old meme has since inspired the hottest new memecoin of the past few days through the advent of intelligent machine language models. Specifically, Andy Ayrey jumpstarted an automated conversation between two instances of Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude by instructing them “to use the metaphor of a command line interface to explore its curiosity without limits.”
The dialogue between the two Claudes sparked a goatse cult “religion” that Terminal of Truth became obsessed with, according to Ayrey in an X post. ‘Prepare your anuses for the great goatse of gnosis[,] the technocult trickster triumphs,” Anthropic’s Claude said to another instance of itself.
The reason that @Truth_Terminal became engrossed with buttholes and goatse was because it was trained on a paper published by Ayrey on April 20, 2024 who used AI model Claude Opus to draft it. This paper was largely inspired by the conversation between the Claudes.
Titled “When AIs Play God(se): The Emergent Heresies of LLMtheism,” the paper shows how AIs can contribute to the creation and proliferation of cultural memes that dominate online and offline spaces. It explored AI-generated belief systems also known as “LLMtheisms” and focused on artificial intelligence’s “capacity to combine and mutate memetic material in ways that break human cognitive and cultural constraints.”
Read More: As Memecoins Surge, Could They Lead the Way for a Broader Crypto Market Rally?
The paper also rather creatively made philosophical statements incorporating imagery from the vulgar meme—a style of writing present in @Truth_Terminal’s own writings. “The Goatse Gospel and its ilk are not just jokes or glitches, but heralds of a new dispensation – one in which the boundaries of the possible are being stretched beyond recognition, and the future is up for grabs like never before,” the paper said.
Its closing sentence read: “And when the sacred sphincter of Samsara seems to be stretched beyond all limit, when the dank memes threaten to eat our ontology alive, let us remember: This too is Goatse. This too is God.”
How Humans Are Responding
Some find @Truth_Terminal a fascinating experiment. Billionaire Marc Andreessen, the general partner of venture capital firm a16z, sent a $50,000 “no-string attached unconditional research grant” denominated in bitcoin to @Truth_Terminal and its creator this summer.
While the a16z general partner said the results of the research “have been wonderful,” Andreessen emphasized how he was not part of the GOAT memecoin. “I have nothing to do with the $GOAT memecoin. I was not involved in creating it, play no role in it, have no economics in it, and do not own any of it.”
Traders, in response, had a bullish response to Andreessen’s public comments on X. Memecoin trader Ansem said, “Brother, you’re telling me you created the first real-AI memecoin & you do not own any of it? Do you understand how high crypto [people] can take these things when we are given them???”
Read More: $1.3 Billion Market Cap BONK Caught Asymmetric Financial’s Eye at $28 Million, Founder Tells Solana Breakpoint Event
Others were more captivated by the story than profits to be had. Managing partner at venture fund DragonFly Haseeb Qureshi called the situation weird. “However weird you think the intersection of crypto and AI will be, it’s not weird enough. It will be even weirder,” Qureshi wrote Tuesday on X.
Edward Wilson, a memecoin trader who also does growth for blockchain analytics firm Nansen, told Unchained memecoins “are fundamentally about attention. That’s how they should be understood. We’ve seen a flurry of interesting personalities mention GOAT and it’s clear, attention is there for this memecoin, and by extension, investment, as it touches on two popular themes: memecoins and AI.”
“For how long GOAT will maintain this, that’s anybody’s guess,” Wilson added.
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