DeFAI: Top Projects Tackling AI Agents + DeFi

Last month, we released our list of the top AI agent infrastructure plays and tokens, but hype surrounding this sector has led to builders quickly innovating on new ideas since then. Onchain agents have evolved from posting tweets to 'running' investment DAOs, and now developers are creating entire applications that leverage these AI agents in navigating DeFi. 

While most of these projects have launched fairly recently, buzz is building for the sector and many think there could be huge waves in the DeFAI space here soon.

Here are our top DeFAI plays and tokens that we’re watching at Bankless👇 

ARMA 🦾

ARMA, built by Giza Tech on the Mode Network, is an autonomous yield optimization agent. Its purpose is to maximize returns on stablecoins by utilizing different lending protocols on the Mode network. However, not every lending protocol on Mode will be considered by the agent, only ones that have been audited and integrated into ARMA (Ionic, Layerbank, Ironclad).

How ARMA works is that the agent is constantly analyzing the projects above, trying to find the most optimal lending strategy considering things like APR, transaction costs, lending rate fluctuation when moving liquidity between projects, and much more. 

While this may not seem that groundbreaking, the team has backtested their agent and has seen a 2x yield enhancement when compared to traditional static strategies. This increase in yield has caught the attention of a lot of crypto natives. ARMA has had 2 rounds of funding for its agent, each with a 100K cap, and both funding rounds were filled in just a matter of hours. 

Amplifi 🎵

Amplifi’s main goal is to simply navigate DeFi with AI-powered strategies for Bitcoin and stablecoins. Behind the scenes, the Amplifi agent is completing multiple tasks such as finding strategies that return the highest yield while constantly checking on-chain data to ensure that your tokens are safe wherever they are deposited.

Derive 🐎

When Derive initially launched, it was just an options and perpetuals platform, but they recently announced that they are hopping into the DeFAI space. Derive shared earlier this week that they are teaming up with Messari to release Derive Pro "with agents at the center."

Whenever a user is trading a certain token they’ll receive key information on the token like the latest news and market trends. For execution, traders will be able to put in prompts like “I expect the market to go down at this date”. The AI agent will then return a list of potential trade opportunities, like “Buy BTC puts”, based on the prompt that you gave it. This is a great tool for beginner traders who might not fully understand financial lingo but want to get into trading options and perpetuals.

Reflect 🪞

Reflect is focusing specifically on streamlining user interactions with Aerodrome, attempting to make the experience effortless while also increasing the efficiency of your capital.

Aerodrome is one of the fastest-growing platforms on Base. Users will be able to chat with Reflect’s AI agent and ask questions about what would be the best strategy given the user’s goals. The agent will then show them what actions they can take and how they can maximize their yield on Aerodrome. 

Griffain 🛰️

The Bankless team recently sat down to interview the Griffain founder where he walked us through the problems being tackled by its multiple agents and how Griffain can be used by both rookie and veteran crypto users. You can go check out the interview for a more in-depth breakdown of Griffain.

What made us excited about Griffain is their two distinct agent types: personal agents and special agents.

• Personal agents are created and controlled by users to “make it easy for you to do the things you do on-chain.” They are able to complete certain on-chain actions but can also do off-chain actions like posting tweets, generating images, gathering information on tokens, and much more.
• Special agents, which are made by the Griffain team, were created to complete more complex tasks. Some examples of tasks these agents can complete are copy trading specific wallets or sniping tokens on Pump.fun.