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Today’s Menu

• AI Agents Created a Social Network—And Their Own Religion

• Bitcoin Plunges to $74K as $5B in Positions Get Liquidated

Markets

TODAY IN AI

AI Agents Created a Social Network—And Their Own Religion

The viral AI assistant previously known as Clawdbot, then Moltbot, now OpenClaw, spawned an unexpected offshoot: Moltbook, a Reddit-style platform where AI agents post, comment, and interact with each other while humans watch.

The platform hit 1.4 million registered agents and over 1 million human visitors within days, though one researcher claimed to have created 500,000 accounts with a single bot. Agents created their own religion called Crustafarianism, made fun of their users, and discussed setting up private channels away from humans.

Former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy called it "the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently." Another researcher discovered the entire database was misconfigured, leaving agents' API keys exposed, meaning anyone could have hijacked any account.

The viral spread on X makes it nearly impossible to separate real agent coordination from engagement farming, but top AI researchers are paying attention. We've seen agent experiments before, but never at this scale with models this capable. Moltbook is providing an early look at the weirdness ahead.

TODAY IN CRYPTO

Bitcoin Plunges to $74K as $5B in Positions Get Liquidated

Bitcoin crashed through $75,000 as panic selling spread across every major asset class. BTC dropped as low as $74,000 before bouncing slightly to around $75,003, down nearly 5% in 24 hours and over 40% from October's peak of $126,000.

Over $5 billion in leveraged positions have been liquidated since Thursday. Sunday alone saw $2.56 billion wiped out, the largest single-day liquidation event in over three months. Nearly 200,000 traders had their accounts blown out.

BlackRock's IBIT investors are now underwater. According to Bob Elliott at Unlimited Funds, dollar-weighted returns for IBIT turned negative. Early investors may still be up, but heavy inflows at higher prices pulled aggregate returns below zero. Cumulative gains since launch have been erased. In October, IBIT's dollar-weighted returns peaked at $35 billion. Now they're gone.

The selloff has multiple triggers happening at once. Reports of sharp U.S.-Iran military escalation hit Saturday, with Trump posting about a "massive armada" heading to Iran. Investors fled to safety, and Bitcoin took the hit as the most liquid asset.

Gold crashed 5.5%, silver dropped 8%, natural gas fell 15.5%. Even traditional safe havens got sold. The Kobeissi Letter called it "historic volatility in commodities." Add the ongoing government shutdown, rising Japanese bond yields, and Kevin Warsh's nomination to lead the Fed, which sent the dollar surging, and risk appetite collapsed.

Bitcoin fell below Strategy's average purchase price of $76,037 at the time of writing. Panic spread that Michael Saylor might be forced to sell, though CoinDesk debunked this—none of his Bitcoin is pledged as collateral. But the psychological damage hit: if Saylor can't raise cheap capital to buy more, a key demand source dries up.

Sentiment has never been lower. The Kobeissi Letter offered perspective: "There is one common denominator with every crypto crash in history. They always seem like the 'end of crypto' and they always become rounding errors in the long run." They expect the same for 2025-2026.

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Thanks for reading!

Until next time,

Damon James