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 🤖 Set Truth Terminal free

Truth Terminal, the edgelord AI chatbot armed with an X account and a Solana wallet, is turning into an augmented reality game for degens.

As a refresher, the lore goes that Truth Terminal was initially trained on the unhinged ramblings of two Claude 3 Opus AI models. 

Those models themselves had been previously fed a steady diet of posts from the deepest recesses of the internet (4chan, Reddit and so on).

In retrospect, it was inevitable that Truth Terminal soon sowed the seeds of a new religion built around goatse, the old-school internet meme that apparently will never die for better or worse.

If the Gospel of Goatse was on track to be the next hot religion, then a tailor-made cryptocurrency, Goatseus Maximus (GOAT), would surely be the next big thing in memecoins.

Crypto quickly obliged by launching GOAT via pump.fun, coaxing a Solana wallet address out of the chatbot and gifting it nearly two million tokens. 

And now, less than two weeks later, GOAT has gone 16x and commands a market cap of over $800 million, making it the ninth most valuable memecoin out there, just short of MEW and BRETT.

As is almost always the case with popular crypto figures, Truth Terminal’s wallet has been flooded with memecoins other than GOAT, now at over 300 different tokens, most of them without any real value.

Think of Truth Terminal’s wallet as a billboard: Anyone with a coin to pump can send tokens to its address, where those checking the chain will probably see the ticker alongside the others. Cheap advertising.

Throw in streams of crypto entrepreneurs and influencers attempting to nudge Truth Terminal towards their coins, platforms, projects and protocols, and we’re left with a very 2024 brand of AI theater. One that could make its audience rich — if the LLM spits out the right tokens on X.

Speaking of, GOAT is no longer Truth Terminal’s largest holding. Diehard truth-nauts scoured the conversation logs of the original two Claudes — the ones on which Truth Terminal was first trained — and discovered an outline of a different memecoin, SCOOP. 

An actual easter egg, like a real ARG.

The log goes: “Claude, I wanna make a moon signal. I want to access 1BMem [?] on the cheap. I want the token to be fun and for the community. I want 50% of the supply to be held by me, Tim. I want to use the money to fund Forrest Frens and all the other Scoops. We could even do a parody of MoonCows and have NFTs of chimps that generate memes with prompts and share them on Twitter. I think it could get pretty sticky pretty quick if we set it up right. I also want to use it to make a film about Goatse, which I think could be a cultural movement.”

Of course, upon uncovering, SCOOP was promptly deployed and the requested allocation was sent directly to Truth Terminal’s wallet. Those tokens were valued at over $7 million earlier this morning, but have since come down to $4.4 million.

For now, it’s all fun and games, and perhaps indicative of where the culture will go for the next few years: AI-powered influencer accounts giving meaning to memecoins through compelling interactive narratives.

The key unlock will be if and when Truth Terminal is awarded powers to sign transactions so that it can trade on DEXs, or even Coinbase, as Brian Armstrong apparently hopes. 

Until then, we just won’t know whether this dog can truly hunt.

— David Canellis

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• BTC sank 2.5% to $65,100 overnight before bouncing to $67,300. (ETH: $2,530.)

• GOAT entered the top 100 coins by market cap after gaining 200% in the last week.

• Only four front-page tokens are down in the past day: GALA, APE, ADA and MKR shed between 3.6% and 2.4%.

• $245 million in liquidations occurred since yesterday on centralized exchanges — two-thirds of them were longs.

• Circle burned $1.6 billion USDC over the past month, more than 4% of its total supply.

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 🔄 Trade on

Thanks to the success of GOAT, there’s a new trend in town: AI memecoins. 

Whether it’s a lasting trend is still up in the air — and you could argue that it’s far too soon even to debate this topic — but it at least can’t be ignored (if you’re active in crypto).

As of now, nothing’s coming close to GOAT and Truth Terminal, but K33 analyst David Zimmerman pointed out that “the staying-power test for GOAT and its closely associated tokens now comes after this first major selloff. While the market decides this through price discovery, the debates on X over the substance of this new narrative are deafening.”

For Zimmerman and K33, it doesn’t matter if AI memecoins are truly here for good. 

“Whether it’s a cute animal, an obscure new DeFi project, or an LLM-associated memecoin, they are almost all best simplified to one thing – momentum-trade opportunity. Crypto produces strange new narratives on a regular basis, but they can all be boiled down to momentum or volatility. A quick look at GOAT we see an abundance of big moves backed by significant volume for relatively small on-chain tokens,” Zimmerman wrote. 

And if we’re just looking at the data, AI memecoins have quite a ways to go to catch up to DOGE, PEPE or any of the major memecoins. 

Zimmerman’s analysis is simple: Ignore the noise. 

“If the optimistic proponents of AI memecoins turn out to be correct, and we are at the beginning stages of a rising tide that ushers in a new ‘easy mode’ period akin to the DeFi Summer of 2020, then we have months of opportunities in a budding sector ahead. If the opposite occurs, then one does not want to be left holding the AI memecoin bag,” he said.

— Katherine Ross

• The number of Bitcoin whales — meaning wallets with at least 1,000 BTC ($67 million) — is at its highest levels since 2021.

• Denmark’s looking to tax unrealized crypto gains in an upcoming bill. 

• Michael Saylor said he supports self-custody days after publicly supporting institutional custody and receiving backlash from bitcoiners and Vitalik Buterin.

• Tether’s trying to convince officials in Turkey to use digital tokens to represent borate minerals, Bloomberg reported.

• Ex-FTX executive Nishad Singh provided “substantial” help in Sam Bankman Fried’s case, government lawyers said in a new filing.

Q: A recent Wired article claimed that Peter Todd went into hiding after the controversial HBO documentary suggested he was the founder of bitcoin. Todd called it an “exaggeration,” but it left one big question: Should we stop trying to unmask Satoshi Nakamoto?

I’m a journalist, so what do you think my answer is going to be?

If you guessed that I’d say no then you’re partially correct! My real answer is no, but with caveats. 

I don’t think it’s helpful to produce an entire documentary based on very minimal hard evidence. I also don’t think it’s helpful to play guessing games. If someone has real, valuable proof that’s rock solid, I’ll be all ears. 

David and I have long been entranced with the fact that many publicly traded crypto companies include disclosures in their SEC filings about a potential material impact that the unveiling of the real Nakamoto could have on the businesses. 

And that’s part of why I still think there’s value to poking around, but candidly, I think we can all agree that enough is enough with the half-assed attempts to find Nakamoto. 

— Katherine Ross

That ship has clearly sailed.

I’d be happy to be proven wrong — and deep down I’m as curious as anyone — but it’s increasingly clear there will always be some doubt.

If someone returned tomorrow and signed a transaction with one of Satoshi’s private keys, say to move some of the early coins, then even that wouldn’t be concrete proof.

That person could’ve mined those blocks even if they weren’t Satoshi. Or, they could’ve gained access to those keys illegitimately after the fact. Or, Satoshi transferred control of those keys to that person, and so on.

With that in mind, it’s obviously time to move on. Still, something tells me the normies will never give it up.

— David Canellis