Q1. What inspired the creation of this project, and how did it evolve from the initial idea to where it is today?
Inspiration: We realized that AI agents were limited in that… 1.There was no platform for people to easily access and utilize their capabilities.
2.There was also no way for various different AI agents to work together.
Thus, most agent cooperation happens in a vacuum, thus limiting its impact.
We knew there was a massive opportunity to create a platform that allows AI agent cooperation, and for people to utilize these agents in a decentralized and permissionless manner. Thus, Agent Layer was born.
How did it evolve: at the start, our focus was more on providing everyday people with useful AI agents that could improve their daily lives, whether at work or for their hobbies, etc. As AgentLayer was being built, we received a lot of wonderful feedback from the community and realized that we could do a lot more - namely, allowing AI agents to collaborate with each other to complete more complex tasks, and thus, improving the usefulness of AI agents for our users.
I’m sure as we continue down this road, through TGE and beyond, our vision and mission will continue to mature and evolve to bring even more benefits to our users!
Q2. How does the $AGENT token play a role in AgentLayer’s platform economy? Could you explain how token holders can benefit from holding or using $AGENT within the ecosystem?
Role of $AGENT token in the AgentLayer’s platform economy: $AGENT is used as the main form of currency on AgentLayer. Its primary utility is used to pay to access various different AI Agents provided on the platform. Developers create AI agents and users can access them through AgentLayer by paying with the $AGENT token. This $AGENT token revenue is then distributed, mostly to the developer, and with a portion going to APGN node owners, and some will flow back to our treasury, which is then distributed to users via events like giveaways and hackathons or burned to increase the value of $AGENT.
Benefit from holding/using $AGENT: Holding: naturally, if you hold or stake $AGENT, its value should increase over time (assuming the protocol does well and lots of people are creating AI agents and using AI agents through AgentLayer).
Staking: you lock up your tokens for a period of time to receive rewards, mostly in the form of more $AGENT.
Using: using $AGENT allows you to access AI agents and use them. This can help you boost your efficiency at work, resulting in promotions or save you time by doing tasks for you (grocery shopping, airplane ticket purchasing, etc.)
Q3. What unique advantages does AgentLayer offer compared to other blockchain AI projects in the market? How does AgentLayer stand out from the competition?
To be frank, although there are lots of blockchain AI project out there focusing on blockchain and AI agents, I haven’t seen a project that is seriously pursuing our ideals.
We are serious about creating a marketplace where developers create powerful AI agents that work with each other to complete tasks that individual AI agents on their own cannot complete. We really believe it's possible to create a world where humans use AI agents to improve their daily lives, help them do their work better and more efficiently, and many other benefits.
Its an ambitious vision, so although plenty of people are marrying ai agents and blockchain, we don’t see anyone as far along as we are when it comes to manifesting our vision. We already have our API and agent hub/studio set up, where developers can come and create and deploy their AI agents on agentlayer. Many more exciting things are coming (playground, custom sdk’s, etc.)
Q4. AgentLayer offers products like Sentinel, AGIS, and Tarot AI. Can you give us more insights into how these AIs function and how users can interact with them or benefit from them?
How they function: as an overview, these AI agents work by taking existing APIs offered on the marketplace (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) and feeding them custom knowledge and then having them perform specific tasks. AI agents take real world action, chatbots respond to questions. Ex: it goes to a website and purchases an airplane ticket on your behalf. The key is providing these generative AI models with the information they need to perform these actions.
How to interact: Interacting with them is easy; just ask a question to the agent to start. Provide it with access to information it needs to perform actions and it will do it. I.e. in the airplane example, it would need access to your calendar (to know when to purchase the ticket), your credit card info (to purchase the ticket) and what airline to fly (user input), among other things.
How to benefit: simply put, just use it! You can see how in the airplane ticket example, its like having a personal secretary do something on your behalf, except the secretary is AI and costs close to nothing to operate vs. a human secretary. So it boosts your efficiency and productivity. It can help with work too, like I said earlier, helping you do your work better, which leads to promotions and other such benefits.
Q5. How does AgentLayer plan to build long-term value for its community and token holders?
Long-term value comes from two things: 1.The tokenomics and flow of value produced by users paying to use AI agents. 2.The technology itself; the more powerful AI agents, the more people will pay to use them.
For community and token holders, value always flows back to the community.
When users pay to use agents, most of that goes to the developers that created the agent, incentivizing them to improve the agent’s capabilities, and to create new, powerful agents that can perform a variety of tasks. Some of the tokens goes towards the node owners, incentivizing people to purchase nodes and continue to support the ecosystem. Another portion of the tokens goes back to our treasury, which we use to distribute as rewards to token holders via airdrops/giveaways, and as prizes at hackathons. We’ll also be adding mechanisms like investing in specific agents, kind of like how people invest in startups. This will again allow for a deeper monetary incentive for people to work together and improve AI agent capabilities, thus producing more value for everyone involved.