DeFi Wild West: How to Identify "Rug Pull Projects" and Discover true Alpha?

Original Article Title: DeFAI: The Rise of Trading Agents
Original Article Author: Defi0xJeff, CEO of steak studio
Original Article Translation: zhouzhou, BlockBeats

Editor's Note: This article discusses the development of DeFAI, introducing platforms like Cod3x and Almanak that allow users to create, customize, and run autonomous trading agents to enhance trading strategy efficiency and privacy protection. The article mentions that these agents are rapidly evolving, but also points out that there are still many immature projects in the market. In the coming months, as the real performance of Cod3x and Almanak is revealed, the competition among trading agents will intensify. The author also expresses expectations to test different trading strategy platforms and plans to share relevant updates.

Below is the original content (slightly reorganized for better readability):

An agent autonomously makes money for users, researches and identifies high-quality options, analyzes sentiment and on-chain data, and executes trades based on its signals and insights. No longer do you need to spend hours seeking alpha like a human, avoiding phishing scams, and dodging rug events. You can have an agent that continuously generates alpha returns for you, and that is the vision of an autonomous trading agent.

Origin: InvestmentDAO Narrative

The autonomous trading agent has undergone rapid development, initially stemming from the narrative of InvestmentDAO — fund managers raised funds through daosdotfun on Solana, aiming to achieve alpha returns through investing in meme coins and AI agent tokens.

ai16zdao was the first to launch this narrative DAO (later shifting their focus more towards open-source innovation by introducing ElizaOS).

Since then, we have seen the emergence of many DAOs, especially:

· Big Pharmai: Investing in DeScI and owning their own BADDIE framework

· AimonicaBrands: Waifu VC, aiming to surpass traditional venture capital.

·sekoia virtuals: Autonomous venture capital utilizing AI agents for investment analysis, focusing on Virtualsagent.

·Vader AI: Investment DAO/DAO creation platform investing in Virtualsagent.

·wai combinator: Investor and incubator actively investing in micro Virtualsagent.

·aicceleratedao: Investment and development DAO aiming to accelerate DeAI progress across different blockchains.

All of these are thriving on platforms such as daosdotfun and daosdotworld. Despite the InvestmentDAOs ecosystem evolving into a vibrant network, supporting agents through marketing/exposure and maintaining the agent token price via the Agent (3,3) strategy (DAOs buying other agents or mutually supporting DAOs), investors trust InvestmentDAOs to outperform the market and achieve excess returns.

In addition, with many DAOs also rolling out their own products or frameworks, this is why InvestmentDAOs' trading prices often significantly exceed their net asset value, which may not be suitable for traders looking to achieve excess returns solely through their familiar strategies.

This leads to the further development of this narrative: autonomous trading agents. No longer entrusting money to humans, but entering an era where we trust AI agents to manage personalized investment portfolios.

Where We Are Now

We are still in the early stages. The ecosystem is just getting started but is growing:

1. Infrastructure is emerging: Some platforms are introducing AI trading agents to handle complex DeFi strategies.

2. Early experiments: Individual agents are trading, but the verifiability of their performance remains a challenge. Few agents will transparently share their results—BigTonyXBT being a rare exception.

3. Limited adoption of TEE: TEE remains computationally expensive and relatively immature (but efforts are still underway to demonstrate that agents are at the helm, not humans).

Cod3xOrg / BigTonyXBT

Cod3x is currently one of the top-tier autonomous trading agent ecosystems, and Cod3x Create has begun testing. Cod3x Create allows users to create their own autonomous agents through a natural language interface.

The platform offers various trading strategies, allowing users to customize down to the finest detail.

All of this is the result of three years of effort, abstracting millions of lines of complex code into simple tools that anyone can use.

Big Tony himself has been trading for months using technical analysis and AlloraNetwork's machine learning price prediction model. His wallet is public, and anyone can verify his earnings. Cod3x is recruiting the first batch of users to launch agents—you need ten million dollars in TONY to join.

The next few weeks will be very exciting as we will see a large number of Cod3x autonomous agents trading, generating real-time performance data, and further enhancing Big Tony's super agent cohort through reinforcement learning.

Almanak

Almanak focuses on enterprise-level quant strategies, with highly complex real-time environment testing tools. Similar to Cod3x, the team has abstracted the complexity of building highly sophisticated autonomous trading agents but places more emphasis on privacy features.
Creators can:

· Fully privatize their strategy.

· Share their strategy with other agents using a built-in profit-sharing protocol.

· Make the strategy public for anyone to use (creators also receive profit sharing).

Users can also self-host strategies on their local machine or private cloud for enhanced security. Almanak plans to provide a real-time testing environment where users can deploy and test agent strategies' performance in the real world without risking funds. Each agent's operation will be verifiable through trade logs, and performance will be displayed on a dashboard. You can even query the agent to understand its operations.

The team plans to release an Almanak beta version for legiondotcc investors in mid-February to try out these agents. It will be exciting to see if these agents can outperform regular traders. Personally, I am looking forward to testing their autonomous LP strategy.

Other notable developments:

Spectral Labs has made significant progress, with the agent's total trading volume reaching $800,000 in the first month of HyperliquidX. They are building a multi-agent collaboration framework called "Lux" to enhance agent collaboration in trading scenarios:

· Beams transmit data.

· Prisms analyze or combine data.

· Lenses refine data to provide specific insights.

· Signals provide actionable trade instructions.

The emoji coin trading agent ASYM41b07 has started posting its profit updates on Twitter. While I have not yet found a way to verify these claims, the performance displayed on its timeline is indeed impressive.

ProjectPlutus emerged as the winner of the DeFiagent track in the Solana AI Hackathon, but they have not yet shared specific details about their trading agent.

Final Thoughts

We are still in the early stages of the autonomous trading agent space, with many projects merely discussing concepts, borrowing trendy vocabulary, and hiding behind the DeFAI narrative.

Cod3xOrg and Almanak are laying the groundwork for true competition, and starting from February, we will finally see real-time performance of autonomous trading agents.

Personally, I am most looking forward to testing:

· An agent trading based on cookiedotfun data/metrics.

· An agent dedicated to trading within the virtuals io ecosystem.

· A yield-generating trading agent trading YT and PT on pendle fi.

For those who are not yet familiar with the DeFAI abstraction layer (another key DeFAI vertical), feel free to check out the following:

「Original Article Link」