🤖 Trading on autopilot

Hey frens!

It’s Wednesday. If you opened today’s edition, you’ve been blessed with good luck for the next week. Congratulations!

Those who didn’t open the newsletter got back luck — and they’ll have to forward The Drop to five of their closest friends to get the magic curse lifted.

Just kidding. I miss those chain email and chain message days of the early internet. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re lucky, because you probably never got a scary internet curse!

— Kate Irwin

Axal’s Autopilot automates crypto trades

US-based startup Axal is combining crypto trading with AI agents. They’re starting with automated trades through their Autopilot tool, which lets users set a risk tolerance level and other restrictions to automate trading with crypto and stablecoins.

The team told me in an interview that the tool currently uses Ethereum L2 chains Base, Optimism and Arbitrum on the backend, with plans to add Solana in the coming weeks.

Autopilot users can fund their accounts via crypto wallets, or by using an email and funding with Venmo. Once personal trading preferences and settings are set up, Autopilot’s AI agents can get to work.

There’s a wide range of functionality with Autopilot, but it’s more newbie-friendly and ideal for non-technical crypto fans who like crypto but aren’t day-traders or DeFi experts. Autopilot can collect stablecoin yields, engage with DeFi tools, and trade BTC, ETH, memecoins and other tokens. Users can also make a custom index of specific tokens for the AI agents to trade. 

It’s not an intimidating tool, and it seems like there are enough parameters that can be set to ensure there will be no major surprises. But like with any AI tool, hallucinations are still possible.

Axal’s team is aware of this flaw, but they see the blockchain as one way to verify that requested tasks are actually completed per instructions. 

“You can literally look onchain that this thing that you wanted this agent to do, it actually did,” Axal Head of Strategy and Operations Ari Santos said.

Under the hood, Axal’s also using zero-knowledge co-processors and Optimistic oracles to verify information.

“If a model hallucinates, it still has collateral at stake and it gets slashed. Whoever’s running the model, or the model itself, if it has very low accuracy, it’s just taking that risk,” Axal founder Ashlan Ahmed told Blockworks, explaining that hallucinating models are essentially punished for mistakes.

The team has plans for future AI tools, including one that can automate more daily tasks such as ordering food for delivery based on a general request or booking travel when given travel dates and preferences.

“There’s a lot of different people in the agentic space,” Axal Head of Growth Jacob Kozhipatt acknowledged. “What we believe is that in order for the agentic feature to happen, people need some form of guarantee that it'll actually be done the way that you asked to be done.”

Interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Solana Game Pass?

Little scoop: A game pass for the Solana crypto gaming ecosystem is coming. That’s according to Jorge Jiminez, who’s working for Solana’s gaming division through his marketing agency The Gaming Strategist.

Jimenez broke (leaked?) the news during an X Space on Tuesday. It could be an NFT that grants access to exclusive in-game content, according to a tweet from the Solana Gaming account, but exact details haven’t been confirmed just yet.

A game pass could also reward players for engaging with games across Solana via airdrops or other NFTs to strengthen player loyalty.

Crypto firm Sweet plots reward token

NHL and MLS-licensed digital platform Sweet has launched a Telegram mini-app game called Scor on Sweet.

Users play sports games for “gems,” which will eventually convert into SCOR tokens after the TGE, or token generation event. The Scor Foundation will manage the development and creation of SCOR tokens to support blockchain gaming systems like Sweet, according to a press release. 

The SCOR token is being deployed on the TON blockchain. The exact date of the token launch is currently unknown.

After its launch, SCOR tokens may be used to complete challenges and maintain streaks in Sweet games, as well as to claim exclusive sports-based collectibles and get in-app upgrades, the team said.

Sweet previously launched a dedicated NFT marketplace for the NHL called NHL Breakaway, an NFT game platform for the MLS called MLS Quest, and NFT collections using Macy’s, Old Navy and the American Red Cross branding, to name a few. 

A number of folks I’ve chatted with in crypto gaming believe the Telegram play-to-earn bubble has absolutely popped, but I predict there will still be at least a small cohort of users who want to keep farming for what’s essentially a bit of free cash.