If you like unprecedented onchain projects, you're in luck, because this week the DXResearch Group is releasing DX Terminal on Base.
This weird-in-the-best-way-possible experiment will mark a huge crossover between NFTs, gaming, and AI agents unlike anything we've seen before in crypto. Let's catch you up.
DX Research Group is an AI x crypto creative studio that launched in December 2024. It was founded by poof, a trailblazer who notably helped spearhead fully onchain gaming in 2021 via EtherOrcs.
Instead of shipping one product, the DX team spins up experiments and releases their findings so the broader AI and crypto communities can remix and extend them.
Their first release, DX01: SINGULARITY, also dropped in December. It was an onchain demo of a live, players-directed AI lifeform.
Users minted “Transmissions,” i.e. short messages, that became Star NFTs on Base. Every star both extended the AI agent Echo’s lifespan by five seconds and fed its text into her context, steering what she “saw.”
From these scenes, Echo generated POV clips—with visuals and audio—and streamed these videos in real-time for nearly 5 days until her clock ran out. When the experiment ended, each Star NFT was updated with the exact clip it spawned, crystallizing Echo's unique synthetic moments.
All that said, 42,000 Stars were minted, so there was lots of participation. But now DX Research Group's second experiment is about to drop, and it's even more ambitious and poised to be even more sprawling in scale than DX01.
DX Research Group's newest project is DX Terminal, a massively multiplayer financial simulation powered by AI.
In this autonomous economy sim, the goal for players is to mint a squad of AI traders and race to stack the most virtual coins (which will only exist in the sim, not onchain) before the “Y2K” endgame milestone wipes out all the in-game agents.
Minting for trader NFTs opens tomorrow, May 13th, on Base, and you can mint as many as you'd like over the ensuing two days. At 0.0125 ETH a pop, each collect will get you a distinct trading agent (plus its PFP and sprite assets) and access to the sim game.
For starters, you'll take a quick personality quiz to match with a team of traders. Then you can put your crew to work in one of the sim's six rival firms, which are as follows:
Every trader NFT is powered by an LLM-driven agent with its own archetype, mood swings, and beyond. They will trade, rug, and drop shitcoins per their personalities in pursuit of gains.
There will be curveballs, too. Namely, “Special Guests,” which are non-player character (NPC) cameo agents illustrated by one of my favorite artists, Gremplin, a.k.a Chaz Gunklin.
These super NPCs will be chaos agents, functioning as influencers and memelords that can affect your own traders' actions. They'll leak or fake alpha, pump or critically torpedo tokens, and generally affect the sim's market sentiments on a whim.
The challenge will be to ride their waves, or sabotage rivals by turning these Special Guests against their bags, before the clock strikes Y2K.
The gameplay itself is slated to begin on Thursday, May 15th, at 1PM EST, one hour after the mint window closes. Then one in-game year = 12 IRL hours, and this cycle will run from 1987 to 2000, i.e. one week in the real world.
🧠 The Big Picture
DX Terminal will have many thousands of agents participating in its economy, so it's primed to be the largest AI gaming simulation that crypto has seen yet.
This experiment will make for lots of fun, but it'll also offer a serious pressure test of how human players and AI agents can coordinate and compete ahead of the higher-stakes autonomous economies to come.
All that said, if you're looking for something interesting to do onchain this week, minting a DX Terminal agent is literally a ticket to a new kind of adventure. Best of luck on the trading floor to everyone who dives in!
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