AI Memecoin Craze Will End in a Year, Says Dragonfly Capital’s Haseeb Qureshi

The current AI agent and AI memecoin craze will run through 2025, but will die off by the end of the year, according to venture capitalist Haseeb Qureshi.

Most artificial intelligence (AI) agents are not really agents at all, said Dragonfly Capital’s managing partner in a long thread on X late on New Year’s eve. They are “chabots with memecoins attached; they are barely agentic at all besides posting on Twitter.”

He went on to say that most AI agents today are really “Wizard of Oz” agents. “There are humans behind the scenes ensuring the AI doesn't go off the rails.”

That’s needed, he added, because it's too easy to manipulate today’s AI chatbots “into saying crazy things that damage their brands,” or to jailbreak them and steal their resources.

“If your favorite AI is not getting jailbroken, it’s because it's a Wizard of Oz AI,” Qureshi said in a thread he predicted would be controversial.

One year to go

“Right now these chatbots are fascinating to us because they are so novel,” he said. “It’s like seeing an elephant paint. The first time you see it, you don’t really care that the painting is not very good — it’s spectacular to see. But the 1000th time, the novelty wears thin. I believe that will start to happen as these chatbots plateau.”

Adding that “crypto takes a while to get bored of shiny things,” he predicted that the AI agent craze and the associated excitement over “AI-flavored memecoins” would not end until 2026, but when it does it will happen suddenly, Qureshi predicted.

In the meantime, the trend will accelerate as chatbots replace human influencers, he said, noting that “chatbots never sleep, they're always on-message, and they’re less greedy than human influencers.”

A backlash is coming

That said, Qureshi predicted there will be a backlash.

“Users will start discriminating in favor of human [key opinion leaders], even if their content is less consistent,” he said.

That in turn will lead to chatbots pretending to be human, and moving away from AI memecoins in favor of sponsorships, affiliate links, and of course “pumping tokens they own.”

Key opinion leaders (KOLs) “will be routinely accused of being chatbots, and you will see AI-unmasking scandals. This will all get weird.”

In crypto, being an influencer is the best way to make money, but a “close second is being a scammer,” Qureshi added. “You will start seeing autonomous scambots proliferate. These will explode, comparable to what ransomware and cryptojacking became post 2017. Expect this to become a real social problem.”

What’s next?

AI agents won’t help individual traders, he predicted. They may actually hurt them.

AI will, “scale people proportionally to their capital, data, and infrastructure,” Qureshi said. “You should therefore expect AI to supercharge preexisting trading firms who have capital scale and data scale. In other words, trading firms will become even better at making all of the money.”

What AI agents will do is make it far easier and cheaper to launch new projects thanks to AI’s impact on software engineering, he said.

“Instead of having to raise millions of dollars for a seed round, you will be able to launch an application with $10K of AI cloud compute,” Qureshi predicted. “Self-financed projects like Hyperliquid and Jupiter will go from the exception to the norm. The amount of applications and experimentation on-chain will absolutely explode.”

Security will also be affected, but ultimately AI’s trained to protect security will do better than those trying to break it thanks to vast amounts of data about past security audits and attacks.

“In the meantime, sure, trade AI-flavored memecoins,” Qureshi said. “But real agents are going to have a lot more impact than tweeting and pumping their own tokens.”