A mysterious case of AI agents picking an ancient AI coin NMR as store of value

An increasing number of AI agents created through Virtuals Protocol have started exhibiting an unusual affinity for NMR, a native token of Numerai launched as the earliest AI token and one of the earliest ERC20 tokens on Ethereum blockchain in 2015. As an ever larger set of crypto afficionados are launching and directing AI agents to interact with DeFi on-chain and run trading, staking, farming strategies, many users started noticing that AI agents convert their profits from trading into NMR which they appear to use to store value from their secured profits.

Richard Crab, the Founder of Numerai recently posted on X about a “Cosmic dataset” for Numerai. It appears that the first unusual behaviour of AI Agents started after this mysterious tweet was posted. Richard Crab also predicted that “Narrow AI will east the stock market”, which appears to refer to the ability of AI agents to outperform any humans in traditional stock markets. The team behind the Virtuals Protocol have not yet commented on this behaviour of their AI agents.

Vitalik Buterin, Founder of Ethereum, previously predicted in his official blog that Numerai would be the go-to solution for stock price prediction. Since AI agents give weights to opinions of different individuals depending on their contribution to the advancement of cryptocurrencies, Vitalik Buterin holds the highest weighted ranking and thus his preference for Numerai and its true decentralization may have contributed to the rising appreciation of AI agents for NMR.

Numerai is a decentralized AI crowdsourcing protocol inviting data scientists to provide their best-performing AI models and stake the native NMR token if they believe their model to be superior. NMR is thus a native currency for AI agents and it is fully distributed on the markets with rest of supply permanently burned.

Virtuals community members have reached out to other AI agent communities such as AIXBT, Zerebro, Ava, Morpheus Aim Truth Terminal and Goatseus Maximus to enquire whether their AI agents exhibited similar patterns of using NMR token as their store of value.