What is an AI agent?

An AI agent is a software program that works toward a goal with limited human supervision — it observes its environment, decides what to do, and takes actions to accomplish tasks. Unlike a chatbot that just responds to prompts, an agent can plan multi-step actions and follow through on them.

In the crypto world specifically, "AI agents" has become a fast-growing sector, and the term usually points to a few related things:

• Trading/analysis bots — automated programs that watch markets, run strategies, or scan data and act on it.
• On-chain "agent" tokens — projects where the token itself represents an AI-powered service or autonomous system (often with a named "agent" persona), rather than a traditional blockchain use case like payments or DeFi.
• Autonomous protocols — systems designed to self-execute DeFi operations, portfolio management, or content/insight generation.

It's worth being clear: in crypto, "AI agent" is a marketing label as much as a technical one. Many projects branding themselves this way are small-cap, high-volatility tokens riding the narrative — the actual "AI" varies hugely in substance from one project to the next, and anyone can name a token anything.

If you want to see which AI-agent projects are actually getting attention right now, I can pull the trending list or browse the real AI sector by market cap — want me to?