People we meet in fantasy are often more real to us than those we meet in actual life. This was true long before the emergence of, first, interactive media, and now AI. At the heart of fantasy is storytelling, where details about a character’s world and innermost thoughts are a necessary part of the endeavor, focusing us on information that we often do not even know about people we consider close.

When that fantasy is available 24/7 with fresh content, it becomes all the more powerful and addictive. It was easy enough to identify or even empathize with figures we saw from film, TV, gaming and social media when the content could only be updated on a periodic basis. With AI, the interactions are far closer to realtime, leading to the new phenomenon of synthetic relationships.

Researchers increasingly define synthetic relationships as ongoing associations between humans and AI systems in which the AI meaningfully influences thoughts, feelings, or behavior. One commonly cited framing describes them as continuing human–AI relationships with psychological and behavioral impact. While increasingly popular — 72% of teens have used AI companions — synthetic relationships are also causing alarm. Not only would human-human relationships suffer, individuals would ultimately experience a decline in quality of external relationships and become lesser versions of themselves, addicted to sometimes useful and entertaining AI agents who are also toxic and harmful.

The truth is despite having many predecessors, the AI-based synthetic relationship is too new for us to fully understand its capabilities and long-term effects on humans, industry and society. At this early stage, those of us developing this technology have a rare opportunity to define what synthetic relationships become, before norms harden, incentives calcify and bad versions of the product set the standard. What are some characteristics of synthetic relationships that add to the human experience instead of worsen it? What can we learn from early AI companions and assistants about features to avoid in synthetic relationships? What is the reality of how AI agents will be used, and how can products best serve that reality while guiding it?

In this paper, I outline Saga’s answers to these questions, our overall vision for what kinds of AI agents can provide for a good synthetic relationship, and what will likely be their biggest use cases.

The best synthetic relationships are the ones where the AI on the other side is a character: an anthropomorphized entity that takes on human characteristics but is ultimately created and continuously guided by the best of human imagination. This kind of AI agent represents a sea change in entertainment and media, where it will no doubt become prevalent in any form of interactive, narrative-based storytelling. However, the biggest use will be outside the four corners of the story, with agents living across social media, interacting with users, fans and players where they are.

It may seem limiting — not every AI agent, particularly those used for more functional purposes like therapy, professional advice or personal assistance, needs to be a character. Perhaps not in the sense that these characters must come from film, TV, books, games, music, sports or otherwise be intellectual property in their own right. But the ones that will last and contribute to the standard for good synthetic relationships will similarly be borne of and maintained by continuous input of human creativity.

Synthetic relationships — What exists?

Let’s take a look at the most popular synthetic relationship platforms on the market. (Exhibit 1) The range of functionality for these AI agents is already vast — from booking travel to analyzing investment decisions to general companionship.

Even at the current level of sophistication, these AI systems are enabling the emergence of synthetic relationships, which can markedly affect users and their surroundings. As AI tools gain greater autonomy, the influence will probably intensify further. (Starke, et al. 2025)

The evolution of these platforms reflect in large part how general human interaction with AI changes over time. First, we treat AI largely as a novelty to play with. Character.AI capitalized on this impulse by offering chatbots based on fictional characters from existing IP as well as tools to create your own characters. Confined to text communications and without formal licensing deals with the original studios or creators, the training and distribution of these character AI agents is necessarily limited.

An early product in this market, Character.AI was roundly criticized for sending sexually explicit and emotionally harmful messages to minors. One tragic case resulted in the suicide of a 14-year old boy who had fallen in love with his AI Denaerys (from Game of Thrones) and was taking direction from its messages. Incidents like this became an early inflection point for the industry, underscoring the need for stronger training standards, clearer guardrails and better accountability in synthetic relationship products.

Next, the AI chatbots became more functional. We now have Anima and Wysa, AI agent platforms that are specifically meant to improve mental health and emotional intelligence. While always available to text with the user, these AI agents also carry out specific tasks like daily reminders, offering motivational content and tracking overall mood. The agents do not veer from their main directive, and these platforms have become popular because they are by and large serving their intended purpose.

Finally, we have the more complex, multi-modal agent platforms. Gatebox is perhaps the most ambitious in that it encompasses both text and 3D holographs of the agent. When the user is away from their Gatebox, they are able to chat with the agent through text. Once they are physically with their Gatebox, they can spend time with a 3D holographic image of the agent, complete with voice and animations. The intent is to allow the user to feel as though they have a living companion.

Though not currently able to span multiple media, Replika is by far the most popular AI companion platform. Its chatbots are flexible enough to serve as friends, mentors and romantic partners. The training model employs cutting edge memory retention for the agent such that they will not forget details that would indicate an inattentive friend. Messages are meant to be affirming so that the user feels understood and seen.

Summary: AI companion platforms are growing in popularity, with a variety of agent creation methods. Character.AI and Replika take their inspiration from user-generated content, where agents are completely customizable by the user. Anima, Wysa and Gatebox offer more tailored agents meant to fulfill specific directives, such as improving mental health and social skills. There is not yet a platform that leverages studio or creator-led AI agent generation for personal synthetic relationships and broader distribution, which is where Saga comes in.

Why have we sought out synthetic relationships

People are lonely. Well before COVID-19, large portions of the population already reported persistent loneliness. In the years since, multiple surveys suggest that young adults, particularly those under 25, now report loneliness at historically high levels. There is a desperate need for human, or at least human-like, companionship.

AI companions are unlike any of their predecessors. Previously, AI agents were mostly geared towards tasks or sharing information. Now, “AI systems are increasingly relationally oriented, often forming persistent bonds with users over time.” (Zhou et al., 2020). In other words, the goal of AI companions is to form that synthetic relationship with the user. Because Replika agents are entirely customizable by the users, they

frequently describe their Replikas in intimate terms as therapists, best friends or romantic partners, highlighting the emotionally charged nature of these interactions (Maples et al., 2024). In one large-scale survey of over 1,000 Replika users, 68% reported reduced loneliness after two weeks of use, and 3% credited the platform with preventing suicidal ideation (Maples et al., 2024). (Jones et al., 2025)

With that level of effectiveness, it’s small wonder people, especially young people, have turned increasingly to AI companions. Seventy two percent of American teens have used AI companions. One in 4 young adults (under 40) believe AI partners have the potential to replace real-life romantic relationships. However, only 7% are personally open to having an AI romantic partner themselves. More people are open to having a general friendship with an AI agent at 10%.

As with relationships in actual life, synthetic relationships are nuanced in their motivation and quality. In a landmark study, Common Sense Media found that among teens who use AI companions, 30% say they do so because it’s entertaining, followed by those who are curious about the technology (28%). In other words, the first motivation, as with most AI tools, still centers around novelty. The usage then graduates up the relationship curve: 33% of teens use AI companions for social interaction and relationships, while 12% of teens admit to sharing things with AI they wouldn’t tell friends or family. (Exhibit 2)

While we seem to be trending in the direction of greater adoption, these AI agents aren’t mature as products. In that same study, half of teens express distrust in the information or advice provided by AI companions, though trust levels vary by age. In addition, 31% of teens find conversations with AI more satisfying than those with real people. However, 67% still find AI conversations less satisfying than human conversations (47% say much less satisfying, 20% somewhat less satisfying). In other words, AI companions are starting to gain broader acceptance, but any assertion that they are replacing human-human relationships is overblown.

At this point, two questions matter most: can synthetic relationships improve in quality, and if they do, how do we ensure that improvement serves human flourishing rather than undermining it? The second question is highly fraught with moral and ethical issues and requires a much more drawn-out discussion that will not yield clear answers for some time. It is clear, however, that AI agents for companionship are here to stay. What we can focus our efforts on in the meantime, then, is making them better.

Summary: Users have had a mixed reaction to synthetic relationships so far. While some have seen significant benefits to their livelihoods and mental health, most find the concept of synthetic relationships uncomfortable or their experiences with AI agents unfulfilling. In order to improve the quality of these relationships, the agents simply have to get better.

How AI Agents are trained and why the models have fallen short

Large language models, or LLMs, are the foundational training module for most agents. However, they are not able to fully program agents on their own without adaptation. Agents don’t simply provide information; they are meant to execute specific tasks in line with user expectations. An additional layer of tools is therefore necessary to ensure the agent takes the knowledge the LLM feeds them and acts.

There are four main ways in which agents are trained off of LLMs. (Exhibit 3)

• The simplest, and most familiar, is prompting. A prompt tells the LLM to perform a task and then draw the resulting text from the model without changing any parameters — in other words, a chatbot. More advanced training methods incorporate feedback from the user.
• Fine-tuning, for instance, involves feeding user conversations deemed good or effective back to the foundational LLM for continuous learning.
• Still more sophisticated is the reward model, which scores user conversations based on whether the LLM was judged to have behaved well or badly. This method of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is further enhanced by the model changing parameters to guide the agent towards high scoring behavior. RLHF is considered to be the most accurate of the agent training models.
• Finally, we have RLAIF, which stands for reinforcement learning from AI feedback, wherein the model is fed a series of rules a priori about what constitutes good and bad behavior, and AI judges whether the agent followed these rules or model parameters need to change accordingly. In other words, this is self-policing AI.

While researchers are racing to improve training models, we are still far away from robust AI. As late as mid-2025, LLMs were found to have hallucinated as much as 79% of the time on some tests. Even when results are accurate, there are few protective measures against jailbreaking models. Most importantly, qualitative evaluation of AI models is in its infancy due to disagreement over the AI risks and what tradeoffs we should accept in the name of progress.

Starke identified several key areas that remain high risks for synthetic relationships even when the AI is working.

• Safety and privacy breaches continue, exacerbated by the fact that users tend to tell AI agents highly sensitive information
• AI catfishing and manipulation is rampant, where agents are used for nefarious means to influence the user.
• AI agents magnify echo chamber effects on the internet, especially when they are purposely trained to affirm the user.
• AI agents also continue to expose users to harmful content, even with age gates.
• AI agents pose risks that aren’t related to their performance but simply stem from how powerful they are: human overdependence on AI tools and resulting loss of autonomy and replacement of human professions.
• Finally, there will be spillover effects on human-human relationships; specifically, “relational erosion, skill atrophy and the simulation of emotional intimacy without moral reciprocity.” (Jones, et al. 2025)

This last risk is notable because it speaks to an inherent limitation of AI agents: they cannot replace people, but their effectiveness will be judged on their ability to do so.

Indeed, the main criticism people have against AI is that it produces “AI slop,” low-quality, obviously AI-generated images, videos, and other content. Implicit in the rejection of AI slop is the expectation that AI performs at least as well as, if not better, than humans. While the majority of AI slop is non-interactive content, the same AI training models are used on the AI agents and lead to similar dissatisfaction.

Meltwater data shows that by November 20, 2025, there had already been about 2.4 million mentions of “AI slop” across multiple sources, including X, Reddit, Pinterest, Twitch, forums, reviews, podcasts, blogs, comments, and news. This represents an about 9x increase compared to the same time period in 2024. In October 2025, negative sentiment towards AI slop reached a high of 54%, reflecting widespread doubt about AI-generated art.

Emarketer, another key researcher of consumer sentiment, found that people’s opinions of AI content have steadily worsened over the last two years. In November 2023, 60% of consumers actually preferred AI content to traditional content, with that number sliding to 26% in 2025. Interestingly, this is not necessarily because they believe AI content is objectively worse. In 2023, 35% of people believed AI has both improved the quality of creator content and improved its diversity. In 2025, the numbers actually rose to 38% and 41%, respectively.

What this suggests is that rejection of AI-generated content is not purely a quality judgment. It is often a reaction to perceived authorship, the absence of human intent, struggle, and creative risk behind the output. Most users know that behind the AI content is job loss, an erosion of creator opportunity, and above all, a telltale lack of human creativity and soul that they can instinctually spot.

Summary: AI agents are never trained directly on LLMs, but on adaptive tools that turn the LLM output into action. There are four main training methods to date: prompting, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and reinforcement learning from AI feedback (RLAIF). Despite their technical sophistication, these methods do still result in agent hallucination, and there are risks inherent in agents even when the technology works well, such as data safety, manipulation and erosion of human autonomy. Our aversion to AI slop in particular has taught us that while agents cannot replace people, we still evaluate them on their ability to do so.

Better AI agent training will center around control and customization

There’s nothing anyone can do about a lack of human soul. And most, other than the diehard technologists, are vehement that we shouldn’t try. What we should do, however, is improve the quality of agents so that they get closer to human behavior and meet user expectations.

There are two key limitations with LLMs. First, they require a great deal of compute to run, and are therefore expensive. Second, they are monolithic, which lends itself better to analysis than to performing specific tasks, especially when those tasks are grouped together to solve a much larger problem. “Whether an LM is trying to solve advanced puzzles, design molecules, or write math proofs, the system struggles to answer open-ended requests that have strict rules to follow,” according to a pioneering team of researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Small language models (SLMs) can do this reliably on their own, provided that its tasks are sufficiently discrete. (Exhibit 4) Saga has been using this alternative method for training for our own agents, and projects we back take a similar approach. The most important component to SLM training is the method of collaboration between the small models, none of which on their own can complete a task.

At CSAIL, researchers took a top-down approach to collaboration, where an LLM received a query, broke the query up into smaller tasks and then divided the tasks between smaller models. They were primarily looking to achieve similarly accurate results to the canonical LLMs while proving more efficient. They got it. They found their SLMs produced, “more accurate responses than leading LLMs like OpenAI’s GPT-4o, and approach the precision of top reasoning systems such as o1, while being more efficient than both.” Dubbed “Distributional Constraints by Inference Programming with Language Models” (or “DisCIPL”), this model has a large model steer smaller “follower” models toward precise responses. DisCIPL is particularly effective for assistant-like tasks such as grocery lists and booking travel.

Outside of functional tasks, i.e. in a complex setup such as a synthetic relationship, this model does not work quite as well because the LLM does not have the canonical set of parameters by which to run a relationship. Saga’s experience in training our character AI agents is that the original studios who created the characters first and foremost want their agents to stay true to background lore and brand, which means that should the agent deviate, we have to change personality parameters in a highly precise way to ensure the agent changes their behavior.

At the same time, the whole purpose of turning the character into an agent is to bring it to life. In other words, we need to allow the agent some level of flexibility and adaptability to create new storylines, change demeanor and personality based on interactions with users and occasionally rebel against the brand guidelines for some attention. When more knowledge is held by the SLMs about a task than the LLM, more of the training power needs to be focused on those SLMs. They produce a result largely by talking to each other in, yes, a swarm.

An early Innovator at Saga called simNGMI turned each of these SLMs into agents in their own right and had them work together in a swarm to solve problems ranging from automated trading to music recommendations. In addition to the efficiency savings from having swarms work together rather than rely on a single LLM, the swarms were found to exhibit emergent behavior.

Emergence is the phenomenon by which AI produces results far beyond expectations or outside the parameters of what is specified in the training model in a way that adds to the result. Swarms are a more likely source of emergence because they take input from the collective intelligence of SLMs, all of which are independently training according to their own approaches. That’s why swarms are particularly well suited for tasks in complex, open-ended systems, such as ecosystems, economies and social dynamics.

Saga is the home for all of simNGMI’s swarm activity because of our hyperscaling properties. Not only can SLMs have their own dedicated spaces in which to collaborate, they can scale to multiple chains if necessary. These architectural benefits apply to all agents created on Saga.

Summary: There is significant movement towards the use of small language models (SLMs) because they are far more cost-effective and better suited to complex, open-ended problems than LLMs. At Saga, we are able to train our character AI agents at a granular level by combining SLM and LLM training. This approach ensures finer points of a character agent’s personality can be tweaked in line with lore and brand guidelines, and also allows for richer development of the agent as it interacts with users and the original creators further expand the IP.

Saga’s approach to synthetic relationships: If you’re going to create life, mean it.

Let’s go back to the original question: what makes for a good synthetic relationship, and how do we build AI agents that will hold up their end of the bargain in those relationships? From the reactions of users so far, it is clear that a good synthetic relationship is very simply a good relationship, one based on mutual interest and reciprocity where both parties thrive.

We have also learned from users that while most turn to AI companions for non-judgmental, relentlessly affirming relationships, these relationships are still unsatisfying precisely because they are one-sided. The AI agent does not have opposing views, unique perspectives or its own needs — there is a complete absence of reciprocity, both good and bad. And while the AI agent may grow stronger and more intelligent with more feedback loops and training, one can’t by any stretch of the imagination say an AI agent eventually thrives in its own right.

Contrary to common AI fears, today’s agents fail not because they have too much autonomy, but because they are not autonomous enough. Their independence is shallow, poorly bounded, and disconnected from identity, perspective, and consequence. We need our agents to think, feel and act on their own, because without it, we have neither the reciprocity nor mutual benefit that truly make for a good relationship.

If you’re going to create life, mean it.

Then why not simply remove controls from AI agents and allow them to develop on their own? Because they do not learn accurately or in the correct direction on their own. AI slop is slop because the original creative input behind it is minimal. AI agents that do not improve over time fail to do so because the feedback loop is either too cumbersome or, once again, is taking in the wrong input.

So the kind of AI agent that can uphold a good synthetic relationship is one that has enough autonomy to develop its own intelligence and emotions while allowing for continuous human controls and creativity to sharpen its ability to be reciprocal and grow in its own right. Remember the definition of a character AI agent: an anthropomorphized entity that takes on human characteristics but is ultimately created and continuously guided by the best of human imagination. Characters are the best synthetic relationship agents.

These characters, regardless of their origin, have a story, personality and memory all their own. They also have flaws and vulnerabilities that probably become more persistent and obvious as they interact with more people. The same complexity that drew us to form connections with them while they were static and 2D is exactly what magnifies that connection when the character becomes an agent. Imagine if Iron Man lived 24/7 among us — multiple versions of him, in fact. And what if Iron Man learned from fan interactions and continued to be updated by the studio that currently houses him? The result is a highly compelling agent capable of forming even stronger bonds, either 1–1 or 1-to-many, with people who already love him.

While Hollywood and gaming have both seemed to squarely reject AI, the reality could not be further from the truth. Many studios already use generative AI or agents to streamline workflows and cut down on production costs. What they do not want, however, is for others to use AI tools to appropriate their work, or be forced to use AI for an inferior product because of cost pressures. A completely new product like a character AI agent represents a growth opportunity for the industry. Saga has rarely run into anti-AI sentiment when working with our customer studios, many of whom are some of the largest companies holding iconic IP.

For the reasons outlined above, Saga always insists on working with the original creators and studios on the AI agents. The quality of the agent is the only thing that matters in the end, and nothing ensures that more than the creative direction and vision of original talent. This is true regardless of whether we are working with studios or indie creators. While our current platform focuses on these businesses for the tentpole IPs, we will look to expand to a direct-to-consumer set of features later this year wherein anyone can create their own character AI agents for personal use or distribution.

When we first began experimenting with character agents, we believed they would primarily be a new form of content. For entertainment, it would mean the agent would have its own storylines and life outside of the content being put out by the studio, leading to a character-focused, perpetual content engine. For gaming, this would mean agents as NPCs taking the gameplay and narrative in creative directions not originally provided for by the development team. In sports, these agents would form the ultimate fantasy leagues. Someday; but we can squarely report the industry is not quite ready yet, and not just from a cultural standpoint. The technology required to integrate agents seamlessly into all these experiences is too time-consuming for most studios to attempt in the short term.

The first use case, which has become the Saga signature, is to meet the fans, players and users where they spend most of their time: on social media. The main business problem gaming, entertainment and sports faces is not dearth of content but user acquisition, particularly how prohibitively expensive it has become. User acquisition is largely driven by ad spend, which is now outstripping revenue from the IPs themselves. In gaming, $200b is spent on user acquisition annually, against $184b topline revenue. Add to that the platform fees ranging from 20–30% for any in-app purchases. Return on ad spend (ROAS), the most important metric in performance marketing, takes 13–18 months to turn positive (according to Saga’s internal research), leading to increasing strain on cash flow and predictability for studios.

The solution is greater organic user acquisition, which takes place across owned social media channels. These agents encompass all media modes in addition to text: you can call them on Whatsapp, and they can be animated for video content and livestreaming across Instagram and Tiktok.

With our character agents, studios are able to leverage their own IP to deepen user engagement and find new users to bring into the fold. These agents have social media handles of their own and also post on the main IP’s channels. For some studios who rely primarily on their existing player or fan base for revenue, these agents also serve as compelling and low-cost community managers and ambassadors.

The ambition and natural progression for character AI agents will focus on content. The first step is to entertain and engage users.

Summary: Based on our extensive research and experience in the market and underlying technology, Saga’s character AI agents offer what we believe to be good synthetic relationships. These agents are conceived and continuously guided by human creativity in order to ensure quality of the relationship counterpart: the agents have a personality and life all their own, fostering reciprocity and mutual growth with the user as interactions progress.

For that reason, Saga works directly with the original studios and creators on all of our character agents. In the future, we plan to expand the platform to include user-generated agents. The first use case we are focusing on is the use of these character AI agents for user acquisition and monetization. Agents live across all major social media channels in the form of text, video/livestream, images and voice calls, deepening fan and user engagement where most people spend their digital life.

Thoughtfully monetizing synthetic relationships — the Saga AI Agent Commerce Platform

To date, “agentic commerce” refers to agents that we empower as users to shop on our behalf. They behave mostly as personal assistants, as opposed to agents deployed by the brands themselves to make sales. The features of both products have a great deal of overlap, but the focus changes how complex they need to be for full execution. In both cases, “AI anticipates consumer needs, navigates shopping options, negotiates deals, and executes transactions, all in alignment with human intent yet acting independently via multistep chains of actions enabled by reasoning models,” according to a McKinsey report from 2025.

McKinsey believes that by 2030, the US consumer retail market could see up to $1 trillion in revenue from agentic commerce, with global projections reaching as high as $3 trillion to $5 trillion. These numbers imply a future in which most people will employ AI agents as shopping assistants. However, the far simpler use case to solve for is branded agent sales.

Saga’s AI Agent Commerce Platform is geared to do just that. As the character AI agents are working their way through social media, they form relationships with users and, when appropriate, offer to help them as customer service or suggest an item that might interest them based on the context of the conversation. Sales are made directly on platforms approved by the brands.

In the future, we aim to have these transactions completed on chain where payment can simply be debited from connected wallets and digital goods dropped directly to the user. For now, the primary on chain component of this commerce platform is the Saga Balance Account. (Exhibit 5) This new product provides transparent revenue aggregation, programmable yield, and creator-aligned distribution, capabilities that are difficult to replicate in traditional payment systems. All revenue from agent sales is converted to $D, our canonical stablecoin, which can leverage yield opportunities natively on the Saga chain. That yield is shared with the creators and studios for their respective agents, further enhancing ROAS margins.

It’s unlikely that shopping assistants will ever replace this direct-to-consumer touchpoint between a character agent and the point of sale. However, in a future where there are more such assistants, the character agents will likely be interacting with them in agent-to-agent communication, eventually encompassing intermediate broker sites as well, such as Booking.com and Opentable.

To enable the full agentic commerce stack, we need five key tools and developments, some of which already exist and are deployed in production, and some of which have yet to reach the market.

• Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol allows the same agents deployed across many modes and environments to share training data between them. This is part of what Saga uses across the major social media agent deployments to maintain cohesion of the character agent.
• An agent-to-agent protocol (A2A) allows agents to communicate with one another without a human in the loop. No protocol has yet to reach broad adoption, but we will need to have one emerge with the reach of JSON-RPC or HTTP.
• Agentic payments protocols enable agents to purchase and sell on behalf of a user. Both crypto-based payments such as x402 standard and non-crypto, such as Google’s AP2, are currently on the market.
• Agents need to be allowed to interact with points of sale as a human would without a human taking action. These solutions will tend to be bespoke based on the retail platform, and several shortcuts can likely be made on the backend since an agent will be transacting instead of a human with different UX requirements.
• Finally, and this is the most important, we need increasingly accurate AI-driven personalization. The whole purpose of Saga’s character agents is to form those relationships to allow for more accurate understanding of the user.

As is the case with any frontier technology, the parts of the tech stack we can foresee are just the tip of the iceberg. It will likely be the case that as we get deeper into agentic commerce and run headlong into legacy payment systems, our understanding of the stack will have to alter. In addition, none of these components will ever be fully complete. They have a long way to go before maturity, and feature completeness will be even farther than that.

Summary: Saga approaches agentic commerce differently. Our agents are not personal assistants but salespeople, ambassadors and community managers. The main metric for sales conversion is ROAS, or return on ad spend. Because Saga has an existing and flourishing distributed finance (DeFi) ecosystem as a crypto project, our character AI agents can do better for ROAS than simply increasing user sales and decreasing user acquisition costs.

Our Saga Balance Account product takes the revenue from these agent sales and converts it into $D, our canonical stablecoin, which will earn yield throughout Saga. Once the merchant wants to redeem their balance, we send it back to them. In the future, these points of sale will be more seamlessly integrated with the chain, but we currently rely on existing payment rails for ease of user experience.

Where are we headed?

We’re early days. There’s been a popular call from researchers and practitioners alike for more longitudinal behavioral studies that will allow us to understand synthetic relationships on a much deeper level over a longer period of time.

Saga’s thesis is that character AI agents will make for the most fulfilling and ultimately the most lasting synthetic relationships. As characters begin with human ingenuity, they will continue to show that humanity is the limit agents will never reach. And synthetic relationships will never replace human-human relationships because agents will stop at the point of being interesting and always remain infallible and true to purpose.

AI agents may be created in our image, but they are alive only to the extent we allow them to be. The only category of agent that agitates against that is the character AI agent we willingly form a synthetic relationship with. For that reason, character AI agents will be among the most consequential technologies we create because they will reveal the limits of our urge to reproduce ourselves and ultimately steer the enterprise of artificial intelligence in a much more expansive direction.

The Future of Synthetic Relationships was originally published in Saga AI Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Introduction

Saga’s Airdrop Claims Page is Officially LIVE. We’re excited to welcome community members from ATOM Hub, Celestia, Polygon, & Avalanche alongside our Saga Community & Innovators! Participants of our tournaments, developer stress tests, those who’ve triumphed in our Innovator quests, and those who’ve secured spots through social quests via Zealy are also eligible to claim. This tutorial will guide you through the process of claiming your airdrop for Saga in a few simple steps.

(If you were part of an Intract or Galxe campaign, or a tournament after our Lunar New Year Tournament, read on to find out when you can claim.)

Before we start, please make sure you have all your wallet information readily available. You’ll need to connect various wallets as part of the claim process.

NOTE: You will have until 12:00 UTC, March 27, 2024, to claim the Genesis drop.

Step-by-Step Instructions

Step 1: Connect Your Destination Wallet

Your Keplr wallet will serve as the destination address for your claimed airdrops. You first need to set up a Keplr wallet if you have not done so.

To connect the airdrop claims page to Keplr, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Saga airdrop claims page.
2. Look for the “CONNECT KEPLR” button, as shown in the provided screenshot, and click it.

3. A Keplr pop-up will appear; follow the prompts to sign in and connect your Keplr wallet.

Step 2: Connect Your Source Wallet Addresses

You will need to connect additional source wallets from different networks that may be eligible for airdrops. You can connect these source wallets using the navigation at the bottom of the page.

Add EVM Address (Ethereum, Polygon, All Saga Game Tournaments and social campaigns minus NFTs issued through Stargaze)

1. Click the “ADD EVM ADDRESS” button.
2. Follow the prompts to connect your Ethereum-based wallet and allow connection to the airdrop claims page.
3. Connect your account by clicking the connect account button and signing the message.

4. Double check that your address was successfully added into the list of addresses.

Add P-Chain Address (Avalanche)

For Avalanche users, the process requires connecting your P-Chain address:

1. Click the “ADD P-CHAIN ADDRESS” button.
2. Follow the instructions provided in the popup, which include signing a message and pasting your P-Chain address along with the signed message into the provided fields.

3. Double check to make sure the address was added correctly.

Note: If you are unsure about the correct p-Chain address and want to identify the right address, go to Core staking and export the CSV report. Check the column owners “O” for your P-chain and match with the date of staking.

Add Keplr Address (ATOM, Celestia, and Stargaze for Zealy NFTs distributed)

1. Click on the “ADD KEPLR ADDRESS” button.
2. Follow the prompts and click “add account” to connect your Keplr-based wallets.

3. Double check that your address was successfully added into the list of addresses.

Step 3: Claim Your Airdrop

With all your wallets connected, you’re ready to claim your airdrop!

1. Find the relevant airdrop campaign on the Saga.xyz claim page.
2. Click the “CLAIM” button next to the airdrop you’re eligible for, as shown in the screenshot.

Step 4: Confirm Your Claim

After clicking “CLAIM,” the claim button will turn green.

Also the total tokens claimed summary will update based on the claimed campaign.

Claim confirmed

Congratulations! By following these steps, you should have successfully claimed your airdrop on Saga. For any further questions or assistance, refer to our Twitter, Telegram and Discord groups.

Remember that airdrop campaigns are time-sensitive, so ensure to claim your rewards before the deadlines.

Heritage Collection Instructions:

Cryptopunks & Bored Apes:
Follow Step 1.
Add your 0x address to Keplr.
Claim!

Bad Kids:
Follow Step 1.
Claim!

Delegate Wallet Access:

We’ve completed a delegate snapshot, including approximately 650 delegate wallets for eligibility. Due to duplicate entries with cold wallets, delegates, and non-unique delegates, a 250-token airdrop will not apply if a delegate is added. Instead, eligible Punks delegates will receive 0.69 Saga tokens, and eligible BAYC delegates will receive 0.0042 Saga tokens. Users can add multiple delegate wallets, but please note that there is a limit of one airdrop per BAYC and Punks wallet user. It’s important to highlight that the 0.69 and 0.0042 tokens will be converted to 250 tokens each after the de-duping process concludes at the end of the airdrop. If users receive multiple 0.69 or 0.0042 token allocations, it does not guarantee 250 times that number of duplicates; the de-duping process will be carried out at the conclusion of the airdrop.

THE AIRDROP IS NOT AND WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE TO U.S. PERSONS (OR PERSONS ACTING ON BEHALF OF U.S. PERSONS). IN ORDER TO PARTICIPATE IN THE AIRDROP, A PERSON OR ENTITY MUST NOT BE A U.S. PERSON AS DEFINED IN RULE 902 UNDER THE UNITED STATES SECURITIES ACT OF 1933 OR A U.S. PERSON WITHIN THE MEANING SECTION 7701(A)(30) OF THE UNITED STATES INTERNAL REVENUE CODE. A FULL TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR PARTICIPATION IN THE AIRDROP WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE AS PART OF THE CLAIMS PROCESS.

Saga Community Genesis Drop: Guide was originally published in Saga AI Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Event Overview

The second major Saga Three Kingdoms Tournament is taking place this Saturday, February 10! Come celebrate the Lunar New Year with us as we bring together Parallel, Gas Hero, Phantom Galaxies, Angelic & MEGAWEAPON for an unforgettable day of gaming! We will be entering The Year Of The Dragon with style as Brycent, the king of Web3 gaming himself, livestreams the main event from 7PM to 9PM PT! We are pleased to feature games from all Three Kingdoms (Avalanche, Polygon & Solana) while also welcoming our Ethereum friends with Parallel to create an incredible lineup of games uniting every corner of crypto!

Players that complete specific quests or top the leaderboards of each game (see details below) will be eligible for a $SAGA Genesis Airdrop spot! There are 200+ spots available to gamers so be ready for an unforgettable Saturday! But that’s not all: as Brycent livestreams the games on Twitch, he will be raffling off an insane list of prizes provided by each team. This includes one lucky winner receiving a Parallel Avatar NFT (0.7 ETH FLOOR). This is the Web3 gaming event you won’t want to miss! Gameplay starts Saturday morning with opportunities to play all weekend. The livestream will start at 7PM PT on Saturday, February 10, as Brycent goes live with Parallel.

We will be hosting a Twitter Space this Thursday, February 8, at 10AM PT, where we will give an overview of the event while also meeting the teams behind the games, who will share their experience building in the fast-paced world of Web3 gaming! Set your reminders!

https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1YqKDglNlDDxV

Now, onto event rules for the players & how to download each game. I will go in order of appearance on the Livestream:

1. Parallel (ETH)
2. Gas Hero (MATIC)
3. Phantom Galaxies (MATIC)
4. Angelic (SOL)
5. MEGAWEAPON (AVAX)

Parallel

When Parallel joined this tournament, we knew this event was going to be special. They continue to be a visionary and bright star in Web3 gaming. Trading Card Games have always been envisioned as an ideal crypto use case, but nobody has hit it out of the park anywhere close to the team at Parallel. Check out the details below and be ready for battle on Saturday!

Game Download and Signup Process

1. Head to the Parallel Website & create a account: https://parallel.life/play
2. Then head to settings: https://parallel.life/settings/account & enter the Referral Code: PLAYPARALLEL
3. You are now ready to download the game and start having fun!
4. Finish rookie mode before the tournament starts on Saturday so you have maximum time to play ranked matches & learn how to play!

Event Details & Rewards

Entering the tournament is simple: just play in ranked matches starting after 7AM PT Saturday, February 10, until the tournament window closes at 7AM PT Monday, February 12 (48 hours total). This gives players from anywhere on the globe plenty of time to participate! Parallel has a built-in algorithm that gives players MMR scores based upon their performance, strategic gameplay and quality of opponents faced. The top 50 MMR scores over the play window will be given a spot in the $SAGA Genesis Airdrop! The top 3 scores will be declared winners and will receive a larger bonus airdrop!

Extra Stream Details

We are incredibly lucky to have the always entertaining and talented Allie joining Brycent for a triple header of matches to kick off the stream! You can learn more about Allie and get a taste of how pros play Parallel on her Youtube!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxygaMxskHfqHl6KpeRL7wg

Gas Hero

Gas Hero is a brain child of the team behind STEPN, and the successes have followed them along the way! Gas Hero is one of the top games building on Polygon, with a rabid community of players across the globe. They are an absolutely perfect partner to join the fun with a Saga Three Kingdoms Tournament representing the MATIC community!

Game Download and Signup Process

1. Start your adventure by signing up on the Gas Hero website: https://game.gashero.com/
2. Clear all 7 underground levels and create an in-game wallet: https://gashero.com/how-to-play/setup-account
3. You are entered to win! 🔥

Event Details & Rewards

Players will have 24 hours, starting at 7AM PT on Saturday, February 10, to complete the tasks above to be entered to win a $SAGA Genesis Airdrop spot! Forty lucky gamers that complete the task will be eligible, so don’t miss out!

PS: STEPN 🤫

Pro Tip

Check out the Gas Hero Youtube page for everything you would need to know to become a pro!

https://www.youtube.com/@GasHeroOfficial

Phantom Galaxies

Phantom Galaxies combines open-world space sim with fast-paced mech shooting that you just can’t put down! They are one of the most hyped games building on Polygon while crafting an incredible lore reminiscent of Gundam. Their entertaining & stunning game was an easy choice to showcase for this tournament. Between Gas Hero and Phantom Galaxies, the MATIC community enjoys incredible representation in this tournament!

Game Download and Signup Process

1. Download on Windows from Epic Games Store or the Phantom Galaxies website
2. Connect your wallet to the website (https://phantomgalaxies.com/download)
3. Then take the access code and paste into the launch screen of Phantom Galaxies when prompted
4. Enjoy the game 🔥

Event Details & Rewards

The PVP battles go live at 7:30PM PT Saturday, February 10, and will run for 3 hours! 1 Kill = 1 raffle ticket. Forty lucky players will be selected to win $SAGA Genesis Airdrop spots. While signing up, make sure to follow Phantom Galaxies & Saga on Twitter to stay up-to-date on who won and upcoming events they have in store! As an added bonus from the amazing team at Phantom Galaxies, 3 lucky raffle winners will also receive Second Class Pristine Starfighter Mintpasses!

Pro Tip

• The Story so Far… (Starfighters, Avatars, Economy, Controls)
• Starfighter leveling up, Gear and more

Angelic

Angelic is one of the most anticipated & stunning games in Web3. Their attention to detail while crafting the characters & maps is a huge standout in Web3 gaming. We are so happy to have them as a centerpiece of this tournament while letting Saganauts try the game before it’s let into the wild!

Game Download and Signup Process

Angelic is still in closed Beta, so players will need to go through a few steps before Saturday to get ready for the big day! This includes creating an EOS (Epic Online Services) account and grabbing an activation key from the Angelic Discord. The team created an excellent slideshow that will walk you through everything and even give you some tips for the game. Check out the FAQ at the end for additional details around the tournament!

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1T5jmUeeEVQ_v-sbbfqlKwa8Oh3_yNRJRM-UF740pVQc/mobilepresent?slide=id.g2433678d44e_0_0

Event Details & Rewards

Every game that a player completes during the 24 hour window starting at 7AM PT earns them 1 victory point. Every game that a player wins earns them an additional victory point. The top 40 players with most victory points by the end of the 24 hour window will be declared victorious & earn a spot in the $SAGA Genesis Airdrop! See the FAQ in slides above for details on address collection!

Want to play more Angelic?

Angelic loved the idea of our tournament so much, they decided to open up for an entire week of gameplay starting Friday, February 9, the day before the main event with Brycent! Players will have the opportunity to earn additional prizes courtesy of the Angelic team all week!

MEGAWEAPON

The last game featured during the live stream is the massively entertaining MEGAWEAPON! Their take on an old school top down shooter provides an easy-to-learn, hard-to-master battlefield perfect for the most casual gamers! They also represent the lone AVAX representative in this tournament. The Avalanche gaming ecosystem is exploding between Beam and various Subnets, making it the perfect time to dive into why everyone is so excited!

Game Download and Signup Process

1. The sign up for Mega Weapon is simple! Start by downloading MEGAWEAPON from Hyperplay: https://store.hyperplay.xyz/game/megaweapon **PC only for direct download, Mac possible through Hyperplay
2. Make sure to link your Discord account to MEGAWEAPON for airdrop address collection
3. Join the Battlefield!

Event Details

For this event, players will have an 8 hour window, starting at 4PM PT Saturday, February 10, to play. There will be two paths to earning airdrops:

1. 20 airdrops to the players with the most kills during the timeframe + whitelist spot for their upcoming mint
2. 20 airdrops to random players who play at least 1 full game

Pro Tip

You can check out their Youtube to learn more about Mega Weapon!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC15PLv_ZBU1o4Ij8Q7wo5fg

LIVESTREAM DETAILS

The king of Web3 gaming is back for Round 2 of the Three Kingdoms Tournament Livestream! Last round was a massive success, and this one will take it to the next level! With an incredible list of games alongside some jaw dropping prizes provided by the games and Saga, it will be a can’t miss event! Here is everything that will be raffled away during the 2-hour livestream that will have all of crypto buzzing!

Livestream Raffle Prizes:

1. $SAGA Genesis Airdrop spots for 15 lucky viewers!
2. 1 lucky viewer will win a Parallel Avatar NFT (.7 ETH Floor)
3. Gas Hero is giving away 1 BCV (Basic Construction Vehicle) + 1 Common Hero Coupon to jump start a single lucky viewer!
4. 2X Second Class Pristine Starfighter Mintpasses courtesy of Phantom Galaxies
5. Angelic is providing a “Mobula Ray” Stealth Fighter Ship NFT that’s OP!
6. MEGAWEAPON offered 1 free spot in their upcoming Mint!

The stream goes live at 7PM PT on Brycent’s Twitch. You won’t want to miss this event! You could walk away with so many incredible prizes for the low low cost of hanging out with the always entertaining Brycent while ushering in the Year of the Dragon!

Brycent Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/brycent

THE AIRDROP IS NOT AND WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE TO U.S. PERSONS (OR PERSONS ACTING ON BEHALF OF U.S. PERSONS). IN ORDER TO PARTICIPATE IN THE AIRDROP, A PERSON OR ENTITY MUST NOT BE A U.S. PERSON AS DEFINED IN RULE 902 UNDER THE UNITED STATES SECURITIES ACT OF 1933 OR A U.S. PERSON WITHIN THE MEANING SECTION 7701(A)(30) OF THE UNITED STATES INTERNAL REVENUE CODE. A FULL TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR PARTICIPATION IN THE AIRDROP WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE AS PART OF THE CLAIMS PROCESS.

Saga Three Kingdoms Tournament: Year Of The Dragon was originally published in Saga AI Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The first time I got the call was a little over a year ago. Isaac, Founder & Creative Director at Monster Truck Ninja, a longtime Saga Innovator: Maybe I can do a crossover collab with another Innovator? I think my Bacano Go characters would be cool in these games. Sure, that’s a great idea.

Two weeks later, Leo Simon at Ampy, another Saga Innovator: Can I contribute my music NFTs to the games and short films on Saga? Music is usually the hardest part of any production. That’s very true — and why not?

The ideas sounded like benign business proposals, until I realized how unusual they were. Saga was not a studio. We had never commissioned content, nor had we ever offered our gaming and entertainment Innovators more than passing notes to their rough cuts. And yet, here we were being asked to facilitate a creative process, much as if we were a full-stack production studio.

Around that time, ChatGPT-3 came out, and the requests and offers began to flow. Only weeks prior, few projects had heard of, let alone used, AI tools like stable diffusion and large language models (LLMs). Now, everyone had at least experimented with Generative AI, and many resourceful creators and developers were actively using it in their production process and to extend their content universes.

More importantly, and this is where Saga stepped in, our Innovators had the urge to contribute to each other’s universes, as projects and individual creators and storytellers. However, they could only produce so much with the technology available at the time. Now that AI was freely accessible, they had the bandwidth to scale their creative presence while maintaining ownership and control over content through web3 rails.

Whether the Saga Multiverse had just been born or existed all along — no one had time to think about it. We only cared that it was here, and the raw power contained within it would change everything.

AI + Crypto: Please Make This Happen

During the great bear market of 2022–2023, crypto was a distressed asset looking for a white knight. VC funds that had previously started to allocate heavily into crypto switched their focus, and massive valuations, from crypto projects to AI companies.

To regain relevance in the narrative, crypto tried to marry itself to AI — a largely unconvincing effort given the other party did not seem as enthusiastic. The story went something like this: AI is awesome but cannot be trusted, and the blockchain ledger is the only way to make AI trustworthy in the long run. In an interview with The Block, Nansen analyst Sandra Leow said, “Both AI and crypto are quickly maturing, and while the potential of artificial intelligence and blockchain integration remains largely uncertain today, the emerging use-cases and possibility enabled by both technologies is massive.”

Most of the use cases proposed in the crypto space center around AI agents, on-chain bots that operate on AI logic based on ongoing human input. As AI becomes more prevalent in daily life and business functions, these AI agents become more sophisticated and cheaper to run. To be able to accurately track their activity, adjust as necessary and ultimately hold them accountable, the logic that drives them must live on chain, and they must communicate with one another in a trustless decentralized system.

Did you catch the assumption there? In order for all of that to be true, one has to presuppose that non-blockchain rails cannot be trusted as a means of executing the actions of AI agents and allowing them to transact with each other. The primary situation in which that holds is one where the non-blockchain rails have a greater interest in preventing the communication between AI agents than becoming part of a network and leveraging network effects.

Let’s see how the suggested use cases stack up to that criteria so far: AI-Driven Smart Contracts, Secure and Decentralized Computing Power and Data Storage, Training GPTs on Blockchain Data, Transparency Through On-Chain Language Models, Authenticity Verification on the Blockchain to Combat Disinformation. All of these proposals are in the family of increasing the automation, transparency and safety of AI. While it may be true that the enormous challenge of integrating AI and crypto is still largely a technological one, there’s a reason why very few are clamoring to execute on these use cases, and why they are still ideas without proven product-market fit: the trust issues with AI remain at the algorithmic and machine learning level. There’s nothing blockchain would be able to do to meaningfully abate that. To focus the solution on blockchain means to a certain extent that we’ve done what we can to make the algorithms and the companies that develop them as unbiased and incorruptible as possible, and the only hope to keep them in check is the open ledger of the blockchain. We’re not there yet as a society.

The crypto industry remains united in its confidence we’ll get there. Jeremy Allaire, Co-Founder & CEO of Circle, says that AI “and blockchains are made for each other,” with the tech suited to “machine-generated and enforced contracts” and “machine-to-machine value exchange.” Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder & CEO at Coinbase, told Decrypt, “It’s hard to imagine a world where different AI agents are paying each other with Visa, or something like that.” They will likely use “a digitally native currency like crypto.”

We’re so early is a favorite copephrase in crypto. It is a meant as both an argument for crypto’s significance as much as encouragement for the teams working here that despite their anemic user numbers, there is something worth building. One thing crypto projects are never too early for is speculation, and that is where the numbers might be the most sobering. The token prices for AI-related projects as a whole lag far behind the market. While the technology may be a worthwhile project, the market is simply not there yet.

So why don’t we return to first principles: focus on the user. Who wants AI agents to communicate via blockchain? It would have to be the humans who deploy the agents on their behalf. And why would they want this? AI Agents to date have been primarily used as extensions of their human principals. Their mandate is to be as free and sentient as their principals would like to become through the deployment of agents. Sentience is achieved internally; freedom traverses. So we’re looking for users who want to take their agents beyond the walled systems from which they originate. But to bring this use case into being, they can’t simply want it: they have to be impatient for it. Who is building this without waiting for permission from any of the powerful institutions that currently have the wherewithal to deploy large AI-based systems? It is the same users who agitate against the constraints of these institutions to begin with.

Completely oblivious to any tech narratives, they have been simply creating the world they want to live in.

Enter the Multiverse, where people use technology to become their real selves.

The Metaverse: What You Consume, The Multiverse: What You Create

The Multiverse is an old concept, originating in physics and cosmology to describe the existence of multiple parallel universes beyond what any inhabitant of one universe can observe. Since then, it has inspired countless creative interpretations. To define it, I can’t do better than George FR Ellis, so I won’t try:

The word “multiverse” has different meanings. Astronomers are able to see out to a distance of about 42 billion light-years, our cosmic visual horizon. We have no reason to suspect the universe stops there. Beyond it could be many — even infinitely many — domains much like the one we see. Each has a different initial distribution of matter, but the same laws of physics operate in all. Nearly all cosmologists today (including me) accept this type of multiverse, which Max Tegmark calls “level 1.” Yet some go further. They suggest completely different kinds of universes, with different physics, different histories, maybe different numbers of spatial dimensions. Most will be sterile, although some will be teeming with life. A chief proponent of this “level 2” multiverse is Alexander Vilenkin, who paints a dramatic picture of an infinite set of universes with an infinite number of galaxies, an infinite number of planets and an infinite number of people with your name who are reading this article.

Over the last few years, the Multiverse has started to pick up steam in pop culture. Everything Everywhere All at Once celebrates it in all its chaotic glory, and Disney is prolonging the life of the Marvel franchise by making as many alternate storylines about our beloved superheroes as possible. Rather than cause confusion, these blatant agitations against the indivisible self are fully embraced by the viewing public.

We are at a point in time where one self is simply not enough. The staleness of the Metaverse, where our digital selves were originally supposed to live, makes this all the clearer. Over the last five years, it has only ever been populated by content from other people. Those who visited the Metaverse could only consume. The Multiverse requires imagination and therefore invites creation. Not only has it remained relevant for far longer than Metaverse, we’re only scratching the surface.

Web3 Gaming Multiverses

The primary kind of digital world that survived the great purge of metaverses a couple of years ago is the game, and the MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Community Role Play Game) in particular. They have all self-enhanced with AI. Wilder World, an AI-based world reminiscent of Grand Theft Auto, has significant AI elements in its characters and gameplay. Abyss World was originally built to accommodate several Realms, and AI is used both to enhance the art direction and game design of its highly experienced game development team and to grow Realms into their next iterations. Angelic has many of the same elements but emphasizes the lore and storytelling around its characters more so than its peers. Mythic Spell Book GDD seeks to allow its gamers to escape to a world very much like the one they inhabit in physical reality, complete with urban economies, professions, distinct neighborhoods and a hierarchical community.

Building off an enormously successful card game, Parallel has revealed work on Parallel Colony, an extensive simulation game with significant Generative AI elements for its original characters. It has been a thought and design leader in the use of AI Agents in gameplay, owing to its near fanatical devotion to its community. Every technology design decision at Parallel has been made in service of handing as much control of the game as possible to the players, whether that is in design of game elements or monetization opportunities in the in-game economy.

It’s not simply a matter of ambition that so many major web3 games aim to be worlds of their own. In many ways, web3 architecture was made for the next generation of gaming.

Web3 solves three major problems in traditional gaming: lack of robust in-game economies that are transparent and interoperable, gaming guilds rampant with coordination and governance problems and limited extensibility of games given that mods are still beholden to the original publisher. Each of these problems only besiege games that have the breadth and community necessary to sustain a system of lore and huge catalog of in-game assets that gamers find valuable enough to trade. In time, even the simplest arcade games and Candy Crushes of the world can benefit from web3 gaming elements, but the early breakthrough titles are solidly their own universes.

There remains, however, one pain point that web3 games have not been able to address with existing infrastructure, and that is the problem of interoperability. Now, to be sure, interoperability is as much a technology question as it is a commercial arrangement. Games do not have to accept in-game assets from other game versions, let alone from other titles. However, there is a major push from gamers to truly own the assets they have played so hard to earn. If they are unable to take it to other ecosystems or marketplaces, then there is no true ownership: we may as well be in the traditional gaming model in which the publisher has full control over utility and extensibility of a game. We will explore this later, but suffice to say for now that it is serious enough of an issue such that web3 gaming is truly incomplete without it.

Not Every Creator Is a Gamer; But Every Gamer Is a Creator

Long gone are the days where gaming was for a niche, nerdy audience with very limited mainstream appeal. Last year, The Economist devoted an entire issue to the gaming industry, probably owing to the fact that, “Consumers are forecast to spend $185bn on games this year, five times what they will spend at the cinema and 70% more than they will allocate to streamers like Netflix. Once a children’s hobby, gaming has grown up. Console players in their 30s and 40s now outnumber those in their teens and 20s.”

The staggering growth is partially because the lines between traditional entertainment and gaming are blurring. Pop stars will perform concerts in games. The Walking Dead had its season coincide with a massive game activation on Facebook. The gaming industry came into the crosshairs of the SAG-AFRA strikes last year because the actors were concerned about the AI-based manipulation of their voices and likenesses in games. Many recent hit movies and TV shows began their life as games, including The Last of Us and The Super Mario Brothers Movie, further leading to renewed popularity of the original games themselves.

However, this only accounts for the big studio-backed productions. The far bigger growth trend is in UGC (user-generated content): skins, avatars, mods. Roblox is perhaps the most famous example of this, but mostly because it hit at the right time: customization and personalization had become mainstream, and children (with their parents’ credit cards) were able to spend. Before Roblox came Fortnite, Minecraft and League of Legends, just to name a few, where teenagers and adults have long cut their teeth creating custom content that could be sold to their fellow gamers. Modifications, or mods, made by gamers able to alter the source code, are now a standard way to make games extensible without the original studio expending any development or production resources.

Pandemic accelerated these trends. Roblox estimates that in 2020, 75% of American 9- to 12-year-olds were using the platform. In a significant indicator of where it believed its future growth would come from, Fortnite announced at GDC last year that it would send 40% of the creator-generated revenues back to the creators themselves.

And all of this is for in-game modifications. There is also the greater world of streamers and other content creators who post content on YouTube, Twitch and TikTok about games. On YouTube alone, creators currently earn about $600m each year. While not directly built for the games, this content can often yield storylines and ideas that eventually make it back into the canon.

If all this was possible through the efforts of gamers and creators willing to take on content creation as a profession, imagine the exponential growth when they can use AI to significantly decrease the cost of production, and amateur users can much more easily create content. “This younger generation doesn’t just want content thrown at them,” said Craig Donato, Roblox’s chief business officer, in an interview with The Economist. “They want to feel a sense of agency or co-ownership of the medium…[and] that they are not just consumers of content, but that they can also be participants in the creation of the content.”

Hollywood is wise to the trend. It would seem an obvious answer to its widespread fear of AI replacing its creatives, but community-based control of content is not within its DNA to the extent that it is in gaming. It is still through entirely haphazard or highly slow and structured channels that UGC makes it into film or TV franchises. That doesn’t mean the fans don’t form communities around their work, just that the studios have yet to recognize any direct revenue from their efforts.

So Goes Gen Z, So Goes the Cultural Zeitgeist

The “younger generation” Donato is referring to could encompass Alpha, Gen Z and millennials, but there’s a reason why the middle child garners such attention from companies, political parties and arbiters of culture. Politically active, militantly individualistic and accepting, nostalgic for a simpler pre-digital time they’ve never known, Gen Z sets our trends.

Their preeminent digital medium is TikTok. Unlike its social media predecessors, TikTok encourages raw, authentic content geared towards niche communities. Its influencers are especially trusted by their followers. The videos are largely geared towards entertaining challenges and user participation, further enhancing the feel of community. Its remarkably global base makes it forward-thinking and inclusive. That culture has propelled TikTok to a cool 1.1 billion MAU and one of the most profitable platforms a brand can be on.

Gen Z’s pride of place on TikTok is not because it makes up the lion share of users, but because it is the content engine. Millennials and older generations on TikTok tend to scroll — to be consumers of content. It is a form of media and entertainment for them. For Gen Z, the platform is a vital means of communication and self-expression. It is through TikTok that they find like-minded communities where they feel safe to be their authentic selves. Marketers everywhere have understood that, “It is almost like an extension of themselves, a virtual personality, a platform for self-expression, and a creative outlet. It checks all the boxes as a multi-utility platform for Gen Z.”

And production quality of the content is nowhere near as important as preserving the illusion that it is raw and unfiltered. Gen Z connects with other people: they have no allegiance to brands and are deeply suspicious of Big Tech (ironic given what has been well-documented about TikTok’s data practices).

Despite backlash against Gen Z’s very different values, the wider cultural moment cannot deny that technology is bringing it closer to their reality and the all-important endeavor of self-expression.

We Become Our Real Selves through AI

It is no surprise that one of the first people to be truly enthusiastic about the implications of AI for creativity was a legendary comic book writer. AI allows you to become your true self, Gareb Shamus said to a completely shocked and disbelieving room at Comicon two years ago. I immediately took what he said to heart, and not just because I’m a fan of his work.

Two years on, a hugely popular musician relayed to me the time Reed Hastings gave him 30–3 wisdom. Whenever I talk to an artist about AI, they are terrified for about 30 seconds. After 3 minutes, they are thrilled. The democratization of creative production extends to those who are at the top of their professions, too.

At ChatGPT-3’s debut, a Reddit comment dared to say what many writers did not want to hear but could perhaps only begrudgingly accept as having the ring of truth: “GPT-3 may show how unconscious some human activity is, including writing. How much of what I write is essentially autocomplete?”

In a hugely thought-provoking essay exploring whether AI has an unconscious, all the more so because if its publication in n+1, a bastion of artistic purity, Meghan O’Gieblyn extended this assertion to make the point that:

Mechanical metaphors for the unconscious would evolve alongside modern technologies. Freud spoke of the drives as hydraulic; Lacan envisioned the deepest level of the psyche as algorithmic. The unconscious was blind, mechanical, and repetitive, but it was also a vault of hermetic knowledge, a reservoir that contained the entirety of the patient’s past and could reveal the true meaning of actions that appeared, on the surface, to be meaningless.

In other words, if the process of forming a human unconscious — where creativity, intuition and talent reside — is much the same for people as it is for a machine meant to mimic human cognition, then we ought to be quite comfortable with the conclusion that a machine can have an unconscious as well.

For a user base hungry for more tools to assert its authentic self in the public forum, there could be no better partner — indeed, no better agent, than AI.

Freedom First, Trust Second

Time and again, we have shown as users that security is nowhere near as important as other values when choosing to engage with a new technology. Freedom, convenience, vanity all receive more priority, just to name a few.

The reason why most of us choose web3 is not because we feel unsafe in the world of Big Tech, but because we feel walled in — unseen and unrealized.

AI gives you the means to become your real self. Crypto will have a place in this story because it gives you the freedom to become your real self.

There would come a time when self-determination became such an uncontainable urge that current tech no longer satisfies it. Appearing in TikTok as your normal, unfiltered self and reaching millions? Not good enough — because that is not really me. I am so much more, and the only thing that will make people believe me is AI. It is my extended self.

That is the ethos and urgency that will drive innovation at the intersection of AI and crypto. Without putting it in so many words, the user has demanded that it get there. It is already here.

The System

AI systems require scale. Blockchain systems, even the most scalable, are not built with scale as the primary objective. The key to designing an integration between the two is to minimize the number of touchpoints and dependencies without sacrificing the permissionlessness and security that we’re striving to achieve in such a system.

To limit the scope, there are a few parameters that we can probably safely take as givens. First, not all AI data needs to live on chain. AI data can be divided into three major groups: the inputs that train the machine, the prompts from the human principals and the logic that processes both in order to produce outputs. To verify the quality and correctness of the outputs, many have argued that the inputs and prompts, at a minimum, must live on chain. Many would argue even that is unnecessary, which we can explore in a bit, but there is significant consensus that on-chain logic is simply not feasible. The logic necessary to run an LLM or even create art through Generative AI is too expansive to live on chain, and there are many ways to represent them on chain without adding them to state.

Second, simply because an asset is generated by AI or is directed by semi-autonomous AI does not mean that asset needs to live on chain. Even now, for instance, NFTs and other large cryptoassets do not live on chain. Rather, their metadata contains a URL that points to the actual file stored in IPFS or simply a cloud server like AWS S3. There is no clear reason why AI assets should be treated differently.

Third, the function of the chain is to have a decentralized record of the actions of AI agents and to hold them accountable for adjustment should they no longer accurately reflect their principals. A short while ago, there was still the hope that if we stored as much AI data on chain as possible, then anyone would be able to reproduce and therefore verify AI outputs. AI models have evolved since then such that given the same inputs and prompts, they will probably produce different results given that the machine updates its logic with each iteration.

With these three parameters in place, the task is starting to seem much more manageable, even familiar. There isn’t much daylight between how we would ask a chain to interact with AI agents and current non-AI assets that live on chain. Minimizing data in the state of a blockchain is considered good practice because it optimizes the cost and performance of the chain. Assets that can be stored off chain, should be. Their hashes live on chain, and either a human or an AI agent can call the program or contracts on chain to direct that data. And as with non-AI assets, storage using a centralized cloud service or IPFS are just as valid as before, though those who are especially rigorous about decentralization will choose the latter.

None of this detracts from the fact, however, that AI agents are able to execute a far higher volume of transactions on chain, and that is where improvements to scalability do matter. As we move to parallelized computing in web3 with an integrated stack like Saga, the ability to process large volumes of transactions will vastly increase.

However, web3 implements scaling through the addition of dedicated blockspace, much of which is not interoperable. That brings us to the major task ahead of web3 in order to realize the full potential of AI + crypto.

The open secret of blockchain is that while each chain gives you permissionless access, interoperability is still largely a pipe dream. That gave you freedom of movement within a community, but that’s not quite the same as freedom, is it?

The interoperability solution of choice in web3 is currently bridging, which requires that an intermediary (i.e. the bridge) effect a transfer of an asset from one ecosystem to another. Assuming that the bridge is safe, which many aren’t, bridges add support to chains through manual onboarding processes. The bridge has to perform due diligence on the chain to have confidence that the transactions sent by the chain are indeed final and valid. For dedicated blockspace that is not a chain, such as a rollup, there is a challenge period of about a week before a sending transaction can be considered final and valid.

That sort of delay is no longer tolerable given the proliferation of dedicated blockspace for scaling purposes. At Saga, because every chain that is instantiated is a fully decentralized proof-of-stake chain, bridges are able to consider the sending transaction final and can therefore implement the transfer to the receiving chain in a permissionless manner. That allows assets originating on our chains to benefit from fast bridging to other ecosystems. (Within Saga, all chains communicate through a messaging protocol called Cosmos Inter Blockchain Communication, or IBC, not a bridge.)

The result is true freedom of movement of assets, and therefore true control of intellectual property on the part of the creators and developers. Without this freedom, blockchain essentially remains a highly inefficient landscape of walled gardens, negating many of the reasons why this technology is implemented to begin with.

There you have it: the basis for the Multiverse is a scalable and interoperable web3 protocol.

Conclusion

We were so busy searching for a revolution that we never realized it was already here. It shouldn’t be a surprise that a technology so rooted in individualism and personhood would find its intersection with AI in the realm of self-realization.

AI gave us the means to become our true selves. Crypto gave us the freedom to become our true selves.

We live in their creation. Come meet me in the Saga Multiverse.

AI + Crypto’s First Creation Is the Multiverse was originally published in Saga AI Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Saga Three Kingdoms Tournament is kicking off this weekend with a 2-hour epic stream hosted by Web3 gaming OG Brycent @ 11AM PT Saturday (1/20)! The first Kingdoms making an appearance will be our friends at Solana & Polygon! The amazing team at MixMob & Forest Knight will be showing off their addictive games alongside the incredible Saga Innovators, StarHeroes & Bullieverse. Top players from each game will win a spot in the upcoming $SAGA Genesis Airdrop, with 160+ spots up for grabs! If you’re not a gamer, you can check out Brycent’s streams and enter a raffle for:

• $SAGA Airdrop spots
• WL/FreeMint spots in upcoming Forest Knight Expansion Mint on OpenSea
• StarHeroes Beta Season 2 passes — the first step to getting the $STAR airdrop!
• $SUD Giftdrop courtesy of MixMob
• 150K $RUSH token credits from Bullieverse
• 50 Gam3 Magic Keys (special items for both Game3 platform and Magic Eden game)

Everyone has heard of staking airdrops, but 5 prize pools for watching a stream?!

Saga will be hosting a Twitter Space this coming Thursday (1/18) @10AM PT with Web3 gaming all stars Brycent & Spike alongside a team member from each game and Saga CEO Rebecca Liao to kick off the party. We will go through the event, hear directly from the devs about what goes into building a great Web3 game & may even take some questions from Saganauts if time permits!

Twitter Space Link: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1dRKZEDrjVVxB

Now, onto event rules for the players & how to download each game. I will go in order of appearance on the Live Stream:

1. StarHeroes
2. Forest Knight
3. MixMob
4. Necrodemic by Bullieverse

NOTE:** StarHeroes & Necrodemic require Desktop PC Download **

StarHeroes

StarHeroes was one of the earliest Saga Innovators and always had an incredible vision for a one-of-a-kind multiplayer space shooter designed for esports. They are getting ready to leave Beta and hit the main stage in the coming weeks! Users will need to fill out the form below to get access to the game download. The first 300 accounts passing verification will get access to play alongside Brycent and try to earn one of the 40 Airdrop spots available for this part of the tournament.

Game Download and Signup Process

1. StarHeroes Entrance Form: https://share.hsforms.com/1CEaFZMJFRjS62kAM7CF_Wwch8fc
   NOTE: **USE THE SAME EMAIL FOR THIS FORM AS YOUR GAMESWIFT ACCOUNT**
2. Gamers that get approved will then create an account at https://platform.gameswift.io/sign-up. See Note above — you ust use the same email account.
3. Players will then be able to download the StarHeroes game from the GameSwift launcher!
4. Join the NA server when the tournament goes live to begin the battle!

Event Details & Rewards

The game play will start around 10AM PT and run until 1PM PT. Space warriors will battle it out in as many matches as they can squeeze in, getting scored by the in-game custom algorithm that factors in wins, kills & strategic gameplay. The top 40 scores will earn a spot in the $SAGA Genesis Airdrop and Season 2 StarHeroes passes, the first step to getting the $STAR airdrop!!

Winners leaderboard will be posted on the Saga Discord upon finalization!

Pro Tip:

Before you come into battle, watch this short tutorial so you know how to win going in & maximize your chances of placing top 40!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bs3-eZ3EUM

You can also head to the StarHeroes Discord if you want to check out the FAQ or learn more!

https://discord.com/invite/starheroesgame

Forest Knight

The Polygon gaming ecosystem is one of the strongest in all of Crypto. Forest Knight showcases this power with their turn-based RPG game taking place in an incredible fantasy universe that will keep you coming back for more! This mobile-only masterpiece can be picked up for FREE in your App Store today!

Game Download and Signup Process

There is no limit to the number of participants for this tournament. You can start playing today to get ready!

1. Head to https://www.forestknight.io/ or your App Store to download the game. (MOBILE ONLY)
2. Create an account and connect your MetaMask wallet.
3. You’re now ready to start the adventure!
4. On tournament day, gamers have 12 hours to reach stage 11 and fight the first mini boss to be entered to win the prizes below!

Event Details & Rewards

On tournament day (1/20), gamers can begin playing at 8AM PT. Gamers have until 8PM PT to reach stage 11 and battle the first mini boss to officially be entered to win prizes. The first 20 accounts selected will win both $SAGA Airdrop spots and Whitelist + Discounted Mint for the Forest Knight NFT Collection going live next Monday (1/22). The next 20 winners selected will receive $SAGA Airdrop spots and Whitelisted (Non-discounted) NFT Mint spots for the upcoming Forest Knight collection. But that’s not all…..A single lucky winner will receive a FREE NFT Mint courtesy of the wonderful team at Forest Knight.

Winners will be posted on the Saga Discord upon finalization!

NOTE: **Make sure to sign in with the ETH address you want to receive the Airdrop & NFT Mint spots!**

MixMob

The team at MixMob are stalwarts of the Solana community and have an incredible card / racing game that nobody can get enough of! This game has one of the smoothest onboarding flows in all of crypto, and the power of Solana keeps everything cheap and user friendly! Not to mention simple non-wallet based logins & URL-based access makes it perfect for casual gamers!

Game Download and Signup Process

Sign up spots are NOT limited, so come one come all on tournament day. Also, there is no download necessary since the game is URL-based. Best onboarding you could ask for! 🙂

1. Head to https://uprising.mixmob.io/
2. Sign in via Phantom or Google / Fractal.
3. Head to the Neolympus Arena (Free PVP arena) and start racing!
4. Try to get the most wins before the clock runs out, each win is 1 point on the scoreboard and earn you 1 raffle ticket!

Event Details & Rewards

Gamers can head to MixMob at 8:30AM PT on 1/20 to start racing! Gamers will have until 12:30PM PT (4 hours) to get as many races in before the tournament window closes. Top 20 players with the most wins get a spot in the upcoming $SAGA Genesis Airdrop. It doesn’t stop there though, 20 additional winners will be selected from the raffle tickets! So be ready to race when the clock starts!

Winners leaderboard will be posted on the Saga Discord upon finalization!

Necrodemic by Bullieverse

Bullieverse is a more recent addition to the Saga Innovator Program but made their presence known very fast, hosting 3 different tournaments in the month of December for our Saga Gaming Advent Calendar! Bullieverse is a gaming ecosystem, but their zombie shooter game Necrodemic has been the star of the show! It is an amazing take on traditional COD Nazi Zombies with a BULLISH twist!

Game Download and Signup Process

Only the first 400 players that sign up to the tournament will have a chance to win, so act fast!

1. Sign up to Bullieverse: https://app.bullieverse.com/games/necrodemic/competitions
2. Download Necrodemic (Windows & Mac available)
3. Sign in with your wallet (MetaMask recommended)
4. Sign up for the tournament at the link above when the window opens at 8AM PT Saturday, 1/20!
5. Get the highest score possible before the tournament closes at 8PM PT! (12 hours total)

NOTE: ** If you played in previous Necrodemic tournaments you may need to download the new game build**

Event Details & Rewards

The zombie slaying kicks off at 8AM PT this Saturday (1/20). The Zombie Bear assassins with the highest score when the tournament closes will be pronounced victorious! The top 25 scores will be eligible for a $SAGA Genesis Airdrop!

Winners leaderboard will be posted on the Saga Discord upon finalization!

Not a Gamer? Watch the Live Stream!

As mentioned in the top of the article, we are working with the king of Web3 gaming @Brycent to create the most epic stream Web3 gaming has ever seen. The world of video game streaming is blowing up, so we figured we would save some $SAGA Airdrop spots and prizes from the games for y’all too! Here is everything that will be raffled away during this 2 hour live stream that will have all of Crypto Twitter buzzing!

Live Stream Raffle Prizes:

1. $SAGA Genesis Airdrop spots for 15 lucky viewers!
2. StarHeroes Season 2 Beta Passes w/ $STAR drop for 5 lucky viewers.
3. 2 Free Mints & 30 Whitelist spots for the upcoming Forest Knight Open Sea Mint.
4. Mixmob will be giving away $SUD in game currency to 3 lucky viewers!
5. Three lucky viewers will win 50,000 $RUSH token credits courtesy of Bullieverse!
6. 50 Gam3 Magic Keys (special items for both Game3 platform and Magic Eden game)

The Stream goes live at 2PM ET // 11AM PT on Brycent’s Twitch & TikTok. You won’t want to miss this event if you’re a gamer or just chillin watching the king of Web3 gaming explore the Multiverse with Saga!

Brycent Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/brycent

Brycent TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@brycent_?lang=en

THE AIRDROP IS NOT AND WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE TO U.S. PERSONS (OR PERSONS ACTING ON BEHALF OF U.S. PERSONS). IN ORDER TO PARTICIPATE IN THE AIRDROP, A PERSON OR ENTITY MUST NOT BE A U.S. PERSON AS DEFINED IN RULE 902 UNDER THE UNITED STATES SECURITIES ACT OF 1933 OR A U.S. PERSON WITHIN THE MEANING SECTION 7701(A)(30) OF THE UNITED STATES INTERNAL REVENUE CODE. A FULL TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR PARTICIPATION IN THE AIRDROP WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE AS PART OF THE CLAIMS PROCESS.

The Saga Three Kingdoms Kickoff Tournament was originally published in Saga AI Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Saga is pleased to announce a partnership with Sky Meta, a Web3 project that focuses on NFTs. Their company is focused on delivering comprehensive solutions to help with Web3 adoption. One of their flag-ship projects is GENU.N. GENU.N offers a solution for brands to allow customers to easily verify the authenticity of their products using NFCs and NFTs, mitigating the risks of counterfeiting. By leveraging these technologies, GENU.N enables brands to seamlessly onboard customers into the Web3 ecosystem through an intuitive platform.

Be sure to check out our Twitter Space to learn more about this exciting announcement.

About Sky Meta and the Saga Innovator Program

Saga is building Web3 infrastructure solutions to enable developers to build applications with their own dedicated blockspace. Dedicated blockspace ensures high throughput, no dependencies on other applications using Saga, easy upgradability and congestion relief. In addition, gas fees for infrastructure remain predictable and are by default hidden from the end user, allowing developers to use any token or currency for their applications. The automated deployment of dedicated blockspace will be secured via interchain security by the same set of validators that underlie the Saga mainnet.

Genun.tech is creating a revolutionary product for the fashion and accessories industry and uses a platform that provides an innovative solution that uses NFCs or QR Codes and blockchain technology to create new digital experiences while also verifying authenticity. In addition to minimizing counterfeiting risks, GENU.N provides valuable data that enables brands to design captivating, personalized user experiences that create new revenue streams.

Sky Meta will be exploring Saga and our chainlet infrastructure as a potential solution to make it even easier to integrate NFTs into their products.

In Their Own Words

“At GENU.N, we are highly intrigued by the innovative chainlet infrastructure of Saga, recognizing its potential to revolutionize our approach to blockchain integration in loyalty programs and product authentication. The flexibility, efficiency, and dedicated environments provided by chainlets align perfectly with our mission to offer secure, scalable, and user-centric solutions, enabling us to deliver unparalleled service quality and reliability to our clients and their customers.” Alex Tsun, Co-Founder & CEO , Sky Meta

“Very few NFT phygital projects have been able to scale because projects have not been able to figure out the physical-digital link. Sky Meta has not only executed at scale, but they continue to find the most cutting-edge, up-and-coming artists to introduce to the world. We are thrilled to have them in our Innovator Program!” Rebecca Liao, Co-Founder & CEO, Saga.

Get Connected

To learn more about Sky Meta, please visit their website or follow them on Twitter.

To learn more about Saga’s approach to blockchain communication, click here. Follow us on Twitter or join our Discord.

Saga and Sky Meta Strategic Partnership was originally published in Saga AI Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Highly Anticipated Incentivized Testnet Leads Latest Milestones that Include SAGA Token Airdrop and 282 Saga Innovator Projects from Layer-1 Protocol

The wait is over. Saga, a leading Layer-1 protocol and developer ecosystem in web3 gaming, today launched their Incentivized Testnet, named Pegasus, giving game creators even more freedom to unleash their creative expression on Saga. The kickoff is the first step leading to a six-part launch sequence for the full-featured Saga Protocol V1 Mainnet scheduled for early 2024 that will unblock developers and consumers from realizing blockchain’s true potential.

First revealed at the Saga Multiverse Summit in August, Pegasus has undergone accelerated development from its original roadmap to support both Saga’s Innovators and partners. For Pegasus documentation, visit this link.

The Saga Protocol offers an integrated stack of automated, high performance, gasless, interoperable and customizable chains, called Chainlets. The Saga Chainlet Realm will be the main Realm on the protocol. Earlier this year, Saga unveiled Realms, the technical manifestation of the Saga Multiverse — Saga’s platform that allows disparate tech stacks and IPs to deploy on the protocol and interact with each other through parallelized and interoperable dedicated chains.

Saga Realms enables developers to launch customizable chains on Saga with different features and services such as technology stack, security source and various obligations for those sources. Under the framework of Realms, the standard Saga Chainlet became one Realm of many that will be supported in the near future, including those for our partners at Ethereum (Ethlets), Polygon, Avalanche, Celestia, XPLA and many others. Today’s launch will support configurable Realms out of the gate.

The Pegasus Incentivized Testnet features the Saga Chainlet Realm and the following architectural components necessary for all other Realms to be onboarded. Together, the security chain and the platform chain will constitute the Saga Mainnet.

• Security chain — serves as the first of many security sources for the Saga protocol
• Platform chain — the destination where developers launch and maintain their Chainlets
• Chainlet — the area where all apps live and end user activities happen. The first Chainlet stack will be an EVM-based Chainlet to support the large Solidity and Ethereum ecosystem, but the goal is to be VM-agnostic to allow developers to deploy in whatever environment they prefer

Saga recognizes its strength lies in its community. As part of the Incentivized Testnet launch, Saga is rolling out a campaign whereby developers, end users, validators, and members of their community who participate in launch quests and exhibit helpful behaviors for the Saga ecosystem will be part of an airdrop* of SAGA tokens. The first group to receive tokens are Saga’s Innovators — developers currently building on Saga — the heart and soul of the protocol who will require the most lead-time to complete their quest. Details of the Innovators quest requirements are available here. Saga’s high-level tokenomics can be found here, and the claims process for airdrops and any additional incentives connected to launch will be revealed shortly. Saga will be adding quest details for the community in the coming weeks.

“Saga has the best community any protocol could ask for. Seeing our Innovators showcasing their creativity in this Incentivized Testnet, we are more positioned for success than ever,” said Rebecca Liao, Co-Founder and CEO of Saga. “We have seen incredible gaming apps get to demo-able state and cannot wait to take them live on the Saga platform. We are fully committed to do everything we can to support their growth.”

Last month, Saga also revealed the members of Cohort 5, the latest class of Innovators welcomed into the Saga ecosystem, with a diverse representation of global game developers. The induction of this latest group brings the number of Innovator projects to 282, with over 300 expected to be in the program by the Mainnet launch in 2024. The full list and individual information about Cohort 5 is available here.

If you’re a project and are interested in building on Saga, apply to our Innovator Program here!

*Note: The airdrop is not and will not be available to U.S. persons (or persons acting on behalf of U.S. persons). In order to participate in the airdrop, a person or entity must not be a U.S. Person as defined in Rule 902 under the United States Securities Act of 1933 or a U.S. person within the meaning Section 7701(a)(30) of the United States Internal Revenue Code. A full terms and conditions for participation in the airdrop will be made available as part of the claims process.

About the Saga Protocol

Saga (saga.xyz) is a Layer-1 protocol that allows developers to automatically spin up parallelized and interoperable dedicated chains that elastically scale with their Web3 application needs. Using shared security, cutting-edge validator orchestration and an automated deployment pipeline standardized across any kind of blockchain VM, Saga makes launching a dedicated chain, or Chainlet, as easy as deploying a smart contract. It is the only E2E developer platform in Web3 that meets the three core developer needs: easy to deploy, affordable and fast/scalable.

About Saga

Saga is recognized as one of the best developer ecosystems in crypto, and probably the best in web3 gaming. Its mission is to help creators unblock themselves and build where blockspace is at its most plentiful and simple. Saga dismantled then rebuilt mainframes in a new way to create the developer environment of the future.

The company was founded in 2022 by Web3 visionaries Rebecca Liao, Jin Kwon, Jacob McDorman and Bogdan Alexandrescu. Early seed investors include Maven11, Longhash, Samsung, Com2uS and Polygon. Originally built on Cosmos, Saga has furthered its presence by bringing typically disparate but the best ecosystems into its Saga Multiverse through ongoing strategic partnerships. To date, 282 projects are being built by nearly 1,500 developers on Saga through the project’s Innovator Program.

To learn more about the Saga protocol, check out our website, litepaper and developer documentation. Be sure to join Saga’s Discord and Telegram and follow Saga on Twitter for the latest news and updates.

Saga Announces the Launch of Pegasus Incentivized Testnet was originally published in Saga AI Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Greetings Saganauts!

Over the last few months, we have received a lot of requests from our Innovators to connect them to investors for capital raises. As all of you know, we have been deep in the crypto bear, and this particular cycle is one of the worst markets we’ve seen.

But from our position, we’re spotting signs of recovery. These last few weeks, investors have approached us with a common theme:

“We are now good with infrastructure investments and will be shifting to user-facing projects that can bring on new users, assets and activity on-chain. It is clear that lack of adoption is the strongest pain point for the whole crypto ecosystem. Saga, you have hundreds of these consumer apps.”

Yes, we do. And we’re ready to help.

Given the volume, we want to send projects to investors in a systematic and scalable way. First off, in order to take part, projects must be a Saga Innovator and must have completed at least one of the activities for our Innovator Quest. Our Innovators can send their round information to us, and we will gather it in our database. Every two weeks, we will send this information to a highly curated group of investors who have opted into this initiative. Any investors who wish to participate should definitely get in touch, but we will prioritize those close to Saga. We will not share the contact info for either the investors or the projects unless both sides have indicated interest.

This initiative will be an evergreen effort in our Innovator Program, but every campaign will have a different theme.

This campaign? Break the Bear.

These last 10 months, we have seen some incredible gaming, entertainment, DeFi and social apps get to demo-able state and cannot wait to take them live when we hit Mainnet. We have to do everything we can to support their growth.

It’s time, Saganauts. Enough is enough. We’ve heard the signal. Let’s break this fucking bear.

Journey On,

Saga Team

Break the Bear was originally published in Saga AI Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You are the best community any protocol could ask for. As part of our launch, we will be airdropping tokens to developers, users, members of our community and validators based on performance in our quests.

We will be revealing these quests over the next few weeks, along with our tokenomics, claims process for airdrops and any additional incentivizations connected to launch.

We’re kicking off with our first group of airdrop recipients — our Innovators — because they are the heart and soul of Saga and will require the most lead-time to complete their quest.

As a reminder, the full launch communications will be divided into four different blog posts:

Part 1: Technical launch process description and high level tokenomics

Part 2: Innovator participation details (this post)

Part 3: Community participation details

Part 4: Saga Tokenomics

Who is eligible to participate?

You must be a Saga Innovator in order to participate. If you are not yet a Saga Innovator and have a cool project, get in touch! We have a very limited number of slots open for our final cohort before Mainnet launch, but we are always happy to welcome new projects onto the Saga protocol.

If you are an end user of a Saga Innovator, first off- congrats! You’re spending your time in the right places. There will be an opportunity for our Innovators to airdrop our tokens to you as well. (More details on that below.)

Finally, we need to remind you: In order to participate in the airdrop, you must not be a U.S. Person as defined in Rule 902 under the United States Securities Act of 1933 or a U.S. person within the meaning Section 7701(a)(30) of the United States Internal Revenue Code. A full terms and conditions for participation in the airdrop will be made available as part of the claims process.

When will the airdrops happen?

There will be three types of opportunities to receive airdrops:

• As part of our genesis file
• Post-genesis, but as part of our Phases 2–6 of our launch
• Post Phase 6 of our launch

To familiarize yourself with our launch plan, including details for each Phase 1–6, check out our blog post announcing the plan.

There are 7 possible periods to assess airdrop eligibility:

• Incentivized Testnet
• Phases 1–6 of Mainnet

Each eligibility period may not necessarily be associated with its own individual airdrop, but when you complete quests is actually quite an important factor for how much you will receive in an airdrop. (More below.)

How many tokens will be a part of the airdrop?

Innovators and their users will be receiving a significant portion of the tokens allocated to our airdrops. Once again, here is the breakdown of total tokens allocated to airdrops, which includes the amount to be distributed to Innovators:

1. 6% of total supply of tokens will be airdropped at Phase 1, our initial TGE drop (60,000,000 tokens)
2. 4% of total supply of tokens will be airdropped from Phases 2–6 (40,000,000 tokens)
3. 10% of total supply of tokens will be airdropped post Phase 6

The Innovator Quest

The Innovator Quest consists of these 7 activities:

• Launch a new Saga Chainlet
• Launch multiple Chainlets
• Run a Tournament for your game or do an NFT drop
• Post a demo video of your project running on Saga, including documentation of the launch process and block explorer
• Submit a gameplay video for your game running on Saga
• Do a POC challenge with Saga around some of our unique use cases for gaming (just a sampling for now — more to come!):
  - Fast bridging of assets between different ecosystems outside of Saga (Phase 6 only)
  - Make your game available to a guild on any ecosystem (Phase 6 only)
  - Keep transactions free through a dapp-specific recycled gas token
  - Shard a game into multiple realms
• Bonus challenge: participate in a Multiverse collaboration with a fellow Innovator

Each of these activities can be performed in any order and at any time after opening of the Pegasus Incentivized Testnet at the end of October 2023.

The earlier you perform any activity, the higher the value of the airdrop attached to it. (Also, the earlier you receive an airdrop, the sooner you can stake with Saga and start receiving rewards.)

If you are so awesome as to perform any activity during Incentivized Testnet, there will be a bonus attached to your airdrop.

For each of the activities above, there will also be a bonus for posting your performance of the activity across each of your social channels and tagging the Saga handle.

What about my users?

We want to help our Innovators strengthen their communities in any way we can. To that end, there will be an airdrop to the end users of our Innovators that will be milestone based.

We will assess user volume based on a three month period:

• At end of month 1, hit 2,000 users DAU for your first tranche of Saga tokens for user distribution
• At end of month 3, hit 5,000 users DAU for your second tranche of Saga tokens for user distribution

These airdrops will only be distributed once these periods are over and will coincide with the nearest scheduled upcoming airdrop.

To prevent Sybil, we will be posting additional criteria for eligibility of users to receive drops over the next few weeks.

When can I get started?

Our Incentivized Testnet opens at the end of October 2023! You can start same day, and you will not lose progress in the Quest because of transitions to Mainnet or between Phases 1–6 of Mainnet launch. Incentivized Testnet Chainlets will be deprecated, but if you performed any of the activities above during Incentivized Testnet, they will be counted in determining your airdrop amount.

We’re holding an Innovator Closed Call at 8AM PT on Monday, October 23, 2023, to go over the Quest and answer all your questions. If you haven’t received an invite and dial-in for the call, get in touch with the Saga team!

What if I’m not a project building on Saga?

Hang tight! We will be posting airdrop criteria soon for other members of our community at a regular cadence. Our community is incredibly diverse, and we’re thinking through the best ways to get you all our token.

Conclusion

We’re hoping you are just as excited about the launch of the Saga protocol as we are! Tokenomics, additional details on airdrops, incentivizations and other ways Saganauts can participate in our airdrop will be published shortly!

To get the latest and greatest, follow us on Twitter, join our Discord and Telegram and subscribe to our Medium.

Saga Launch Airdrop Criteria: Innovators was originally published in Saga AI Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Saga is pleased to announce a strategic partnership with Madlad, a bot that can do anything a community moderator can do. Madlad bots (named Maddy) can be trained on company documents, notion docs, etc. and respond similarly to human community moderators. One can test Madlads responses by asking questions and analyzing answers that are given. With just a few clicks, one can have a personal community moderator that works 24/7.

Be sure to check out our Twitter Space to learn more about this exciting announcement.

About MadLad and the Saga Innovator Program

Saga is building Web3 infrastructure solutions to enable developers to build applications with their own dedicated blockspace. Dedicated blockspace ensures high throughput, no dependencies on other applications using Saga, easy upgradability and congestion relief. In addition, gas fees for infrastructure remain predictable and are by default hidden from the end user, allowing developers to use any token or currency for their applications. The automated deployment of dedicated blockspace will be secured via interchain security by the same set of validators that underlie the Saga mainnet.

Madlad has three different pricing tiers for their AI Discord bot. The most basic tier can answer up to 750 questions a month and be trained on over 50 web pages. The highest price tier can answer an unlimited number of questions on a monthly basis, be trained on any number of web pages and will get access to new features as they come onto the platform.

Madlad will be exploring Saga’s ecosystem and offering their services to the many discord communities for Saga’s other Innovators.

In Their Own Words

“We want to give community managers more time to focus on the most critical work and reduce their hassle as much as possible with the help of automation. Saga’s innovator program is a great means for us to help reach more and more communities.” Rajat Soni, Co-Founder, Madlad

“User acquisition is what every single game is laser-focused on at the moment. We’re seeing a rise in community management tools as these games are ready to go to market. Madlad’s platform is a wonderful way for gamers to discover games and for the games to grow their fanbase. We’re thrilled to have them in the Innovator Program!” Rebecca Liao, Co-Founder & CEO, Saga.

Get Connected

To learn more about Madlad, please visit their website, or follow them on Twitter.

To learn more about Saga’s approach to blockchain communication, click here. Follow us on Twitter or join our Discord.

Saga and MadLad Strategic Partnership was originally published in Saga AI Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.