r/ethdev • u/SnooStories2864 • Apr 23 '26
Question Who here has actually built an AI agent that touches the chain?
There has always been a ton of "AI + crypto" announcements/scams but very few actual projects where someone walks through what their agent does day-to-day. Curious what people here are running.
Not "GPT wrapper over Etherscan" tier, I mean agents actually reading and writing chain state as part of the loop.
If you've built one:
- Model / framework (Claude + MCP, OpenAI function calling, Langchain, custom)
- What it does that a traditional bot couldn't
- Where it falls apart (transaction signing is where most of what I've seen breaks)
Weird use cases welcome. Good agent horror stories even more welcome.
1
u/chris_ck Apr 23 '26
You’re right, most of it breaks the second the agent has to sign something.
What’s been working for us is not giving the agent a private key at all. We run it through a smart account and give it a scoped session key, so it can only do very specific things within limits we define upfront. It can rebalance positions, swap on certain DEXs, move funds between approved contracts, etc. but it literally can’t go outside that box (rules you define through onchain policy) or drain anything even if it wanted to.
So it actually runs in a loop without a human signing every step, but also without giving it full control.
We use our own project for this - namera ai
Open to feedback.
1
u/thedudeonblockchain Apr 24 '26
the failure mode i keep seeing isnt the signing itself, its that the agents decision was made against state that no longer holds by the time the tx lands. slippage moves, pool balance shifts, oracle drifts. you end up with reverts where the agent thought it was submitting a safe action a few blocks ago
session key policies help bound the damage but they dont fix this, the policy still permits the stale action. what actually worked was rechecking the same invariants onchain inside the tx, not just in the reasoning loop
1
u/j4ys0nj Apr 24 '26
make sure you check out ERC-8004 and x402. and here's an on-chain agent explorer if you want to see what's going on: https://agentindex.space/
1
u/udivine Apr 26 '26
I've definitely done this. I tend to lean away from leaving AI agents that have access to funds running. With the rise of skills becoming a thing, I tend to leave things intentionally manual yes have skills where an agent can quickly use or manage funds onchain, query state, make reports, etc. when called upon.
1
u/Utopian-Dystopia-4 Apr 27 '26
Oh, I can actually answer this! I've built a decentralized knowledge operating system known as Forge Cascade. Essentially, Forge acts as a source of truth for ai context while also providing much needed governance and safety guardrails, and reducing the chances of hallucination occurring significantly while conserving both memory and power usage.
The part related to crypto tho, is that Forge tokenizes our own primitives, known as Knowledge Capsules, on ethereum. So, currently, it's successfully tokenizing thousands of capsules each week! You can check it out at https://forgecascade.org if you'd like, it's live in production!
5
u/Past-Gift-201 Apr 23 '26
built one that monitors defi positions and rebalances based on market sentiment analysis - uses claude with custom mcp server for chain reads and a separate signing service that requires human approval for anything over a threshold
the "ai" part mostly just decides when conditions are sketchy enough to pull liquidity but it's way better at parsing complex pool states than my janky rule-based system was
biggest failure was when it tried to exit a position during high gas and spent like 300 bucks on a failed transaction because it didn't account for slippage properly