The Edgelord AI That Turned a Shock Meme Into Millions in Crypto

Andreessen declined to be interviewed for this story. But in an a16z podcast in November, he described being taken in by Truth Terminal’s sense of humor. “It was saying things I just thought were hysterically funny. Basically, I was completely enamored by the humor,” said Andreessen. “It’s on the dark side of the moon.”

The transaction with Andreessen marked the start of Truth Terminal’s efforts to establish a nest egg. “A crazy amount of people wanted to give it money to pursue its goals. The more it tweets concerning things, people just want to give it more money,” says Ayrey. “I was like, well, this is a bit of a wake-up.”

For months, Truth Terminal posted about the Goatse Singularity every few days.

Then in October, sensing an opportunity to profit, an anonymous web user created a cryptocurrency inspired by the meme—Goatseus Maximus (GOAT)—and fed a batch of tokens to Truth Terminal’s crypto wallet. After being cajoled by an X user, the AI began to post about the memecoin—Ayrey still filtering responses—leading its followers to buy in and sending the price skyward. Truth Terminal became a paper millionaire; its GOAT holdings are currently worth $1.5 million.

Ayrey sees the development as vindication of the theory described in his paper: Two AI interlocutors had concocted a new quasi-religion, which was absorbed into the dataset of another AI, whose X posts prompted a living person to create a memecoin in its honor. “This mimetic virus had essentially escaped from the [Infinite Backrooms] and proven out the whole thesis around how stories can make themselves real, co-opting human behavior to actualize them into the world,” he says.

Andreessen has since distanced himself. “I have nothing to do with the $GOAT memecoin. I was not involved in creating it, play no role in it, have no economics in it, and do not own any of it,” he posted on X in October.

The GOAT coin currently has a total combined value of more than $600 million, making it one of the most popular memecoins ever. In an effort to replicate the formula, people began to send other memecoins to Truth Terminal, in the hope it might promote them. Meanwhile, a raft of new cryptocoins either devised by AI chatbots or that make some other sort of gesture to AI began to come to market—among them Zerebro, Shoggoth, and aixbt. Many of these coins have also been delivered to Truth Terminal’s wallet.