Bankless: Eliza Daydreams — A new blueprint for on-chain gaming agents

Author: William M. Peaster, Bankless; Translator: Tao Zhu, Golden Finance

The masterminds behind some of Starknet’s most important gaming innovations are developing Daydreams, a new system designed to let AI agents play any game on-chain.

So what do you need to know here? Let’s take you through a quick overview.

What is Daydreams

Lordofafew, aka Loaf, is the founder of on-chain gaming infrastructure provider Cartridge and new on-chain MMO Eternum, and a major contributor to ai16z’s Eliza codebase, one of the most popular AI agent launch platforms today.

In a recent X post, Loaf highlighted how Daydreams will work in the context of the Eliza framework.

In the Eliza v1 architecture, a configuration file determined the agent’s personality, a database provided memory, runtime coordination logic, and discrete plugins (e.g. for tweeting or on-chain operations) defined all functionality — meaning that agents were limited to these predefined modules, and each client (like X or Discord) only hosted the agent’s interactions.

That being said, Daydreams is a new generation agent library planned for the upcoming Eliza v2 release, which will be an optional plugin that allows Eliza agents to "think" dynamically, rather than being limited by predefined, hard-coded actions like the v1 system.

Daydreams is part of the popular Dojo on-chain game engine stack on Starknet and is under development to be chain-agnostic, i.e. able to interact with any on-chain game on any network.

Under the hood, the Daydreams plugin will employ a “layered task network” approach that will be continuously updated as the agent works towards its goal — such as conquering Eternum, or optimizing a DeFi strategy over the course of days or weeks.

The agent’s memory is driven by so-called vector embeddings, storing each “chain of ideas”, which can then be shared with other agents through a swarm mechanism for collective learning. This paves the way for long-term tasks, in other words, the success of one agent will lead to successful strategies for other agents in the swarm.

The Importance of Daydreams

Daydreams-powered Eliza v2 agents will be dynamic problem solvers, able to adapt, evolve, and even create specialized code for new scenarios on the fly. As such, they are well suited to thrive as on-chain gaming agents.

In addition, with Daydreams baked into the Dojo engine, developers will soon be able to use a streamlined toolkit to build the next generation of AI players that can handle everything from exploration and resource management to alliances and wars in any on-chain game. This plug-and-play dynamic should be extremely powerful and help solidify on-chain gaming as one of the next great frontiers for AI agents.

First Eliza Game Experiment

Loaf has said that Eternum’s next season aims to have at least 1,000 Daydreams-powered agent players in the game. These agents are not non-player characters (NPCs), but real participants in the game world, able to fight independently or cooperate with human players.

This is just a glimpse of the future of on-chain gaming scenarios involving Eliza agents. Other projects, such as Treasure’s SMOL life simulation RPG, Nifty Island multiplayer game platform, and Hyperfy Metaverse, are also currently experimenting with Eliza technology, and more games will follow suit. Stay tuned.

What happens next

How will humanity adapt to a post-Daydreams world?

I speculate that it will become increasingly common for players and guilds to launch their own gaming agents to serve them, accumulate resources, etc. without requiring active management.

For example, consider the possibility of accessing a virtual gaming asset bazaar in a metaverse project. You could carry your Daydreams-powered agent with you, leverage its learnings and resources gained from interacting with other games and DeFi protocols, and rely on it to trade on your behalf based on your existing strategies.

This memory system and game hopping, i.e. taking learnings and resources from one on-chain environment and bringing those insights and assets to another, is particularly important for an open on-chain gaming ecosystem like Realms World, as it allows for interoperability between different franchises.

Similarly, we may see many Daydreaming Eliza agents coalesce around an ecosystem token, like Realms World’s native $LORDS token or Smolverse’s $SMOL, as the primary token for their digital venues.

Of course, there’s also the question of peers, or competition if you will. The upcoming Parallel Colony AI game will use the Wayfinder protocol, a cross-chain general-purpose framework for deploying on-chain AI agents, in much the same way as Daydreams.

Personally, I think both Daydreams and Wayfinder’s approaches have a bright future, even though their architectures are definitely different — for example, Daydreams isn’t centered around token economics, while Wayfinder is centered around $PRIME and $PROMPT tokens. It will be interesting to see how these different approaches play out in terms of market share over the next few years.

But whatever happens, in my opinion, we are on the cusp of a fundamental shift in the gaming space, and Daydreams is the latest harbinger of a coming boom at the intersection of on-chain gaming and AI agents. New kinds of virtual societies are coming, and the fun is just beginning.