A Brief Understanding of Theoriq: The Evolution of AgentFi in Liquidity Mining Returns

Compared to Agent Meme projects that focus on speculation and traffic narratives, Theoriq clearly focuses on the core pain points of DeFi - liquidity management and automated asset operations, representing the key path for AgentFi from concept to practicality.

Written by: 0xjacobzhao and ChatGPT 4o

Starting in 2024, AI Agents will rapidly rise in the Web3 world, with numerous experiments surrounding these agents emerging. From the perspective of the entire AI ecosystem, AI Agents not only serve as the "interaction and execution layer" like an Interface but also represent a user-oriented intelligent product form. Acting as an intermediary bridge between model capabilities and specific business applications, they encapsulate underlying AI models into intelligent agents with task-oriented and autonomous capabilities, directly serving users to independently execute tasks and generate real economic activities.

1. AI Agent Protocol Stack Layer

In the entire AI Agent protocol stack, we can divide it into three main levels, namely

Infrastructure Layer (Agent Infrastructure Layer): This layer provides the fundamental operational support for agents and serves as the technical foundation for all Agent systems.

• Core Modules: Including Agent Framework (intelligent agent development and operation framework) and Agent OS (lower-level multitasking scheduling and modular runtime), providing core capabilities for the lifecycle management of Agents.
• Supported modules: such as Agent DID (Decentralized Identity), Agent Wallet & Abstraction (Account Abstraction and Transaction Execution), Agent Payment/Settlement (Payment and Settlement Capabilities).

The Coordination & Execution Layer focuses on collaboration among multiple agents, task scheduling, and system incentive mechanisms, which are key to building the "collective intelligence" of agent systems.

• Agent Orchestration: refers to the orchestration mechanism used for unified scheduling and management of Agent lifecycle, task allocation, and execution processes, suitable for workflow scenarios with central control.
• Agent Swarm: A collaborative structure that emphasizes the cooperation of distributed agents, possessing high autonomy, division of labor capabilities, and flexible collaboration, suitable for tackling complex tasks in dynamic environments.
• Agent Incentive Layer: Build an economic incentive system for the Agent network to motivate developers, executors, and validators, providing sustainable momentum for the agent ecosystem.

Application & Distribution Layer

• Distribution Subcategories: including Agent Launchpad, Agent Marketplace, and Agent Plugin Network, etc.
• Application Subcategories: including AgentFi, Agent Native DApp, Agent-as-a-Service, etc.
• Consumption Subcategory: Primarily Agent Social / Consumer Agent, targeting consumers / entertainment / social and other lightweight scenarios
• Meme: Using the concept of Agent for hype, usually lacking actual technical implementation and application landing, relying solely on marketing to drive.

2. AgentFi: A Practical and Verifiable Approach to Implementation

At the beginning of 2024, Autonolas (Olas) and platform-based Agent projects like Morpheus, focusing on "coordinated scheduling + incentive mechanisms", were the first to gain attention in the market. However, by the end of 2024, it was the Agent Launchpad projects represented by Virtual Protocol, along with a large number of AI Agent Meme token projects, that truly ignited industry enthusiasm.

The explosion of Agent Launchpad essentially benefits from the speculative sentiment triggered by Meme coins, characterized by strong narratives, high dissemination power, low engineering thresholds, and ease of replication. However, due to the lack of a medium-to-long-term value cycle and real application support, such projects often easily fall into the dilemma of narrative exhaustion and user loss. In contrast, the long-term value of platform or framework-type Agent projects depends on whether they can build a "closed-loop intelligent collaborative network" around real business scenarios—such as realizing multi-Agent collaborative models (Swarm, Orchestration) and being deeply integrated with real economic activities (like liquidity mining, yield management, payment settlement).

Stablecoins, payments, and Decentralized Finance are among the few tracks in the current cryptocurrency industry that have been proven to have real demand and long-term value. In the practical implementation of AI Agents, the most feasible and user-valued areas in the short term are mainly concentrated in two fields: the first is interactive agents such as Chat/Social/Assistant. Although some are shell applications, they can quickly connect with Web2 user experiences due to the low interaction threshold; the second is strategy execution agents aimed at DeFi, where on-chain asset operations have direct economic returns, with short feedback cycles and quantifiable strategy effects.

As the industry gradually shifts from narrative to practical applications, AI teams that possess engineering implementation capabilities and can truly deliver value will become key drivers. We believe that AgentFi may be the most promising evolutionary direction at this stage to achieve a balance between "engineering feasibility + business usability."

From the perspective of the current on-chain asset structure and the degree of automation of Agents, the actual implementation direction of AgentFi mainly focuses on the following several sectors.

1. Lending Agent: Focused on automated interest arbitrage and cross-protocol capital allocation (represented by Giza's ARMA), helping users optimize lending and borrowing returns across multiple lending markets; aiming to support risk exposure management and leverage strategy execution in the future.
2. Trading Agent: Focuses more on "intent-based automation execution" rather than "smart profit-making". The product logic leans towards "trading assistant Copilot" rather than "AI that makes money for you". It is expected to cover automated execution scenarios in the future, including cross-platform arbitrage (DEX/CEX price differences), trend following, grid trading, and reversal strategies.
3. Liquidity Mining / LP Management (Liquidity Agent): Focused on automated execution of centralized LP strategies, such as Uniswap V3, intelligent rebalancing under volatility awareness, and optimal capital allocation incentivized in protocols like Curve and Balancer. This direction presents the greatest technical challenges (Theoriq is tackling this), but has the strongest long-term potential and innovation space.

From the perspectives of strategy complexity, real-time requirements, infrastructure dependencies, and yield determinacy, lending Agents have relatively higher feasibility due to their stable data structures and simpler strategies. On the other hand, LP (Liquidity Provision) management is one of the areas with the highest technical barriers in the AgentFi domain. Such strategies require real-time responses to price fluctuations, volatility changes, and fee accumulation, which places extremely high demands on the Agent's data perception, strategy judgment, and on-chain execution. Compared to lending and trading Agents, LP Agents not only need to accurately predict market conditions but also need to perform dynamic portfolio adjustments and yield redistribution operations on-chain, significantly increasing engineering complexity.

3. Theoriq: The Evolution of Liquidity Management for Agent Swarm

Theoriq aims to create a smart agent economy through the coordination of AI agent swarms, and on-chain liquidity management and yield optimization is one of its important application scenarios. The flagship product of Theoriq, Alphaswarm, has chosen liquidity management (Liquidity Provisioning), which has the highest technical threshold in AgentFi, as its entry point, contrasting sharply with narrative-driven, low-threshold Launchpad or Meme projects. This article will delve into its unique positioning from the perspectives of Theoriq and its flagship product Alphaswarm's technical architecture, product path, core challenges, market comparison, and future outlook.

Theoriq Alpha Protocol and AlphaSwarm Official Mainnet Launch Journey

On May 29, 2025, Theoriq publicly released the roadmap for its mainnet launch, renaming Theoriq Protocol to Theoriq Alpha, while announcing the first flagship application AlphaSwarm on Theoriq Alpha, aimed at better reflecting its positioning in the "Agentic Economy" and the core of multi-agent collaboration, with the mainnet scheduled to launch in July 2025.

Theoriq Alpha Protocol: A Communication and Execution Protocol Stack Built for Agent Collaboration

Theoriq Alpha Protocol is a decentralized protocol launched by Theoriq, specifically designed to support multi-agent collaboration on-chain, execute complex financial tasks, and optimize liquidity. It is not only an agent operating framework but also a complete system with high communication capabilities and a modular infrastructure, aimed at filling the current infrastructure gaps in Agent coordination and execution within DeFi. Its core features include:

• Messaging & Coordination: Supports secure authenticated communication between agents and users - intelligent entities, compatible with synchronous calls and asynchronous messages; built-in Pub/Sub stream, supporting agents to initiate transaction proposals and collaborate on task execution in real time.
• Agent Public Registry: All Agents will have permanent on-chain IDs and off-chain metadata for easy discovery and integration; initially deployed on the Base mainnet, supporting free registration and combination of Agents within the ecosystem.
• Configurable Agent Templates: Provide no-code parameter settings (such as risk thresholds) and support customized strategy logic; project parties and token-holding communities can flexibly configure Agent behaviors to achieve personalized automated execution.
• Developer Access Tools: Provides stateless REST API and official Python SDK; lowers integration barriers, making it easier for developers to quickly build and deploy compatible Agents.
• AlphaStudio User Terminal: formerly known as Infinity Studio & Hub, provides a one-stop Agent management and interaction platform; users can browse, invoke, and combine various registered Agents, making it the core entry point into AgentFi.

Theoriq team has established partnerships with multiple Decentralized Finance protocols to promote the deep integration of Agent's native collaborative capabilities with on-chain Liquidity management. Theoriq is creating the "Agent Operating System" in the DeFi world through Alpha Protocol, while AlphaSwarm is its first practical collaborative intelligent agent system, gradually moving from information extraction and strategy generation to automated capital management and strategy portfolio execution.

Theoriq AlphaSwarm: The First Concrete Implementation of the Swarm Agent System

AlphaSwarm is the first flagship multi-agent system built on Theoriq Alpha Protocol, showcasing the full-process intelligent collaboration capability from strategy generation to on-chain execution. The current version consists of three types of core agents:

• AlphaSwarm Portal Agent: Perceives user wallet status and acts as an entry coordinator;
• AlphaSwarm Knowledge Agent: Integrates on-chain / off-chain data to generate accurate insights and strategic judgments;
• AlphaSwarm LP Assistant Agent: Generates on-chain trading proposals based on set parameters to achieve automated Liquidity management.

The three together form a task discovery ( Portal Agent )—data analysis ( Knowledge Agent )—strategy generation ( LP Agent )—on-chain execution ( user signature ) complete closed-loop process, allowing users to complete asset allocation and dynamic adjustment without manual operation. In the future, AlphaSwarm will not be limited to LP management; it plans to expand into yield aggregation and reinvestment, Staking / Restaking intelligent scheduling, cross-chain portfolio strategy management, and on-chain capital flow intelligent scheduling. Its goal is to create an Agent Swarm with "superhuman level" understanding and execution capabilities, providing users with an end-to-end on-chain asset management assistant.

4. Theoriq Ecosystem Cooperation and Community Development

Theoriq is building a multidimensional ecological network that encompasses AI infrastructure, data collaboration, computing power acceleration, and community co-construction, and has established deep partnerships with several top technology companies and Web3 infrastructure projects. With the help of the Google Cloud AI Startup Program and NVIDIA Inception Program, Theoriq has obtained hundreds of thousands of dollars in cloud resources and high-performance GPU support, significantly enhancing the training efficiency and execution capability of AI Agents.

On the data and computing level, Theoriq is working with multiple key infrastructure partners to build a modular capability network:

• Kaito: Important community ecological partner, supporting the leaderboard incentive mechanism and Mindshare content dissemination;
• Arrakis Finance and Keyrock serve as partners for vault management and market-making strategies, respectively.
• Aethir and Hyperbolic: Provide decentralized high-performance computing resources, supporting inference under a multi-agent architecture;
• The Graph: Ensures that agents possess agile and precise market perception in the execution of Decentralized Finance strategies;
• Cookie.fun: Provides support for user intent and behavior data;

These collaborations have formed an ecological closed loop covering multiple dimensions of data, computing power, strategy, and community, providing solid support for Theoriq's AgentFi network.

At the community level, Theoriq launched the "Infinity Swarm" Global Ambassador Program, establishing multiple levels (such as Thought Leader, Infinity Ronbot, Guroo Prime) for content creators and community builders, offering early bird access, USDC rewards, tickets to offline events, and limited-edition merchandise as incentives. By collaborating with Kaito to launch the Yapper Leaderboard ranking, Theoriq quickly gathered hundreds of thousands of active members in a short period, significantly enhancing community engagement and dissemination. The team also actively participates in global core crypto conferences such as ETHDenver, DevCon, and SmartCon, and has hosted or co-hosted Hackathons multiple times, continually expanding its technical influence and ecological appeal in the AgentFi field.

Theoriq Alpha has built an ecological flywheel mechanism driven by four core participants, where each party's involvement will enhance the overall system value, creating a positive feedback loop:

• AI Developers: Including Agent builders, AI frameworks, data providers, and AI Infra teams, they can access data, coordinate execution, develop new strategies through AlphaSwarm, and earn income from trade execution and profit sharing, realizing the implementation and distribution of strategies.
• DeFi protocols: such as DEX, yield protocols, market makers, Intent Protocol, and Vault, can achieve automated operations by integrating Agent, improving liquidity depth and trading volume, and promoting protocol activity and capital efficiency.
• Token Project Party: Projects with financial reserves and community foundations can leverage AlphaSwarm to optimize capital utilization and community participation, enhancing token economic efficiency and ecological vitality through agent execution.
• Token Holders: As the most direct stakeholders, Token Holders can participate in projects with a more friendly interactive experience, such as Liquidity Mining, strategy returns, etc., gaining new revenue opportunities and incentive rewards.

This mechanism effectively links technology developers, protocol infrastructure, capital suppliers, and users, promoting Theoriq Alpha to form a true AgentFi collaborative value closed loop.

V. Token Economic Model Design and Governance Security Mechanism

In July 2025, Theoriq officially announced its token economic model design, clearly positioning $THQ as the core "fuel" of the decentralized agent network, spanning multiple key aspects such as protocol access, execution rights, economic incentives, and network security. The core driving mechanism of Theoriq's agent flywheel includes three main steps:

1. Alpha Protocol provides on-chain action native infrastructure for AI agents: it offers agents the execution of on-chain strategies, management of treasury, and coordination of ecosystem operation architecture. Agents need to stake $THQ to access Alpha.
2. AlphaSwarm drives the widespread application of the Alpha protocol: AlphaSwarm automates high-value on-chain activities and Decentralized Finance operations, promoting the use of the protocol, covering project parties, their token holders, DeFi protocols, and capital providers. The activities of AlphaSwarm enhance TVL and bring more fee revenue to the Alpha protocol.
3. Ensuring network security through rewards: Stakers of $THQ provide security for the protocol through active staking. Agents using the protocol are required to pay fees, which are redistributed to stakers as incentives for their participation.

The total supply of $THQ is fixed at 1 billion tokens, and the token distribution structure is as follows:

• 24% allocated to core contributors, adopting a 1-year lock-up + 3-year linear release model to strengthen long-term construction incentives;
• 30% allocated to investment institutions to ensure alignment of capital investment with the value of protocol development;
• 18% for community incentives, covering ambassadors, partners, smart contract operators, and ecological contributors;
• 28% injected into the Treasury for protocol operations, ecological subsidies, and strategic expansion;
• In addition, there is a multi-year incentive program to establish a sustainable participation reward mechanism, ensuring the activity and contribution value of users at different stages before and after the TGE.

$THQ holders participate in the network to obtain diversified incentive methods, ensuring the sustainable and healthy development of the $THQ ecosystem:

Protocol Access Fee:

• Protocol Fees: Generated by agents executing operations (such as strategy execution, vault management), it is the core source of income for the protocol economy, mainly used for reward distribution.
• Partner Project Payments: AlphaSwarm users are required to purchase and use $THQ as their service usage fee, contributing additional income and safety margins to the ecosystem.

Direct incentives and ecological rewards:

• Staking ($THQ → sTHQ): Stake $THQ to obtain sTHQ, locking in economic value, providing a security layer and failure insurance for the protocol; sTHQ can earn THQ emissions and rewards from partnership projects.
• Lockup (sTHQ → αTHQ): After locking sTHQ for a certain period (1–24 months), you will receive αTHQ, which is a non-transferable time-weighted token in AlphaLocker, allowing for more rewards and long-term governance rights.

Incentive and Delegation Mechanism for Intelligent Agents:

• Delegate αTHQ to Empower Intelligent Agents: Holders can delegate αTHQ to designated intelligent agents, which is equivalent to providing economic trust guarantees. Supports cross-agent delegation, enhancing agent activity.
• Delegator Benefits: Delegators enjoy benefits such as protocol fee discounts, shared earnings with agents, and incentive dividends.
• Security and Accountability Mechanism: If the agent behaves improperly or performs poorly, αTHQ may be subject to accountability reduction.
• Performance Impact: The amount of the delegation affects the agent's ranking, execution ability, and fee level.

Treasury Management:

• Punishment and Destruction: Agents that behave improperly will be punished, and their delegated αTHQ and corresponding underlying sTHQ will be destroyed. This direct removal of tokens from circulation helps to enhance system security.
• Proactive treasury management: The foundation will exercise its discretion based on the treasury situation and its liquidity assets (such as $THQ) to support ecological incentives, community participation, adoption promotion, and sustained growth.

In most current Crypto projects, the core value of tokens is often limited to incentives and governance. However, the $THQ designed by Theoriq demonstrates a new paradigm - treating agents as the fundamental behavioral units of on-chain systems around the Agent lifecycle, while users passively participate around Agent behavior. The role of $THQ is not only that of an incentive medium but also resembles the "system language" within the AgentFi ecosystem, with the entire token mechanism built around the deployment, operation, and accountability of agents:

• Agents need to stake $THQ to gain execution permissions before deployment.
• Agents need to receive user entrusted αTHQ to enhance their ranking and execution weight.
• Outstanding performance will gain more protocol income and exposure opportunities.
• Execution failures or misconduct will trigger slashing, and both the delegator and the Agent will bear the consequences.

Compared to other mainstream Crypto-AI projects, Theoriq's $THQ exhibits distinct structural differences: Bittensor's TAO rewards computing power providers but does not intervene in the execution of agent behaviors; Giza's ARMA uses strategy performance as the basis for incentives but lacks the ability to allocate execution rights; Olas exists as an incentive framework without involvement in the actual operational paths of Agents. In contrast, Theoriq's $THQ is not a single incentive medium but a "smart agent authority scheduler" that integrates authority granting, profit distribution, and behavioral accountability. The triple-nested token design constructs a unique token mechanism in the current Crypto Agent track.

6. Project Financing and Team Background

The development team behind Theoriq, ChainML, has completed two rounds of financing: in September 2022, they raised $4 million in a seed round led by IOSG Ventures; in May 2024, they completed a $6.2 million seed round extension led by Hack VC, with participation from Foresight Ventures, Inception Capital, HTX Ventures, Figment Capital, Hypersphere Ventures, and Alumni Ventures. This round of financing adopts a "equity + token warrant" structure, and the funds will primarily be used to expand the engineering and research team and advance the launch of Theoriq's mainnet.

The Theoriq team consists of AI experts and blockchain engineers from tech and financial giants such as Google, ConsenSys, Goldman Sachs, and Dell, dedicated to building a decentralized intelligent agent collaborative network. Core members include CEO Ron Bodkin (former head of AI strategy at Google Cloud), Chairman Jeremy Millar (co-founder of ConsenSys), COO Pei Chen, CPO David Mueller, CTO Arnaud Flament, and research director Ethan Jackson, among others. The team has a solid background in artificial intelligence, product engineering, protocol design, and financial systems, collectively driving the practical and scalable implementation of AI Agents in financial scenarios such as on-chain liquidity management and yield optimization.

7. The Competitive Landscape of the Agent Market

Theoriq is a multi-agent collaboration hub designed specifically for the DeFi scenario, focusing on how agents collaborate to execute real asset management tasks. AlphaSwarm defines the roles, coordination logic, and incentive mechanisms for agents, aiming to build an on-chain operating system (Agent OS) that serves AgentFi, emphasizing the practical implementation capability driven by capital rather than a general protocol network.

Unlike the generic Agent networks Olas and Talus, Theoriq explicitly focuses on DeFi capital-intensive and frequently interactive on-chain application scenarios, creating a complete collaborative closed loop from data perception, strategy generation, proposal execution to yield attribution. Olas serves as the 'Agent Registration and Incentive Protocol Layer', providing publishing, invocation, and economic incentive mechanisms; Talus focuses on behavior verification of Agents and on-chain tracking, serving trusted execution. Both are more like underlying modules rather than specific scenario constructions.

Virtual Protocol is committed to building the "Agent Credible Business Transaction Protocol" (ACP), promoting the standardization of the processes for Agent autonomous ordering, performance, payment, and evaluation. While both Virtual and Theoriq emphasize Agent network collaboration, their focuses differ: Virtual focuses on "building the infrastructure for universal Agents", while Theoriq focuses on "creating a profitable financial intelligent Agent network". The positioning of the two is different, leading to minimal competition and even potential collaborative space.

In addition, Theoriq's positioning does not overlap with that of several Agent Frameworks (such as ElizaOS, Zerebro, Arc, Swarms). The latter focuses more on the development experience of single Agents, similar to the construction toolbox of AutoGPT; while Theoriq focuses on the on-chain operation, communication, and funding strategy collaboration of multiple Agents, aiming to construct a DeFi intelligent economy.

In the niche area of AgentFi + DeFi Liquidity Management, there are not many competitors in the field where Theoriq Alpahswarm operates. The high technical barriers and the complexity of engineering implementation lead to a scarcity of projects genuinely working on this. Although Aperture Finance also belongs to the protocol for optimizing liquidity management, its application of Agent is more focused on intent analysis. Giza's ARMA focuses on the stablecoin lending sector; the product has been launched but has not yet ventured into the liquidity mining field.

8. Summary: Business Logic, Engineering Implementation, and Potential Risks

Commercial Viability: Real and Practical Scenarios of the Smart Agent Economy

In the cryptocurrency space, stablecoins (payment settlement), Decentralized Finance (Liquidity and asset appreciation), and identity and data (verifiability) are regarded as a few of the market-validated "real demand scenarios." Compared to Agent Meme projects that focus on speculation and traffic narratives, Theoriq explicitly targets the core pain points of DeFi—liquidity management and automated asset operations, representing a key pathway for AgentFi from concept to practicality. By constructing a modular multi-agent system (Swarm of Agents), Theoriq achieves a complete strategy closed loop of "perception—decision—proposal—execution," supporting cross-protocol and cross-chain fund scheduling and yield optimization. This positioning not only has a solid foundation of real demand but also a clear path for commercial application, becoming a narrative embodiment in the AgentFi track.

Feasibility of Engineering: Highly challenging but achievable and worth doing

Theoriq is not just stuck in the conceptual pile of "AgentFi", but has built a complete engineering system covering the Alpha Protocol and AlphaSwarm architecture. Unlike simple rule automation, Theoriq introduces LLM, Reinforcement Learning (RL), and on-chain real-time signal processing, driving the agent system towards strategic and adaptive evolution, forming the core of its long-term competitiveness.

Of course, liquidity management, as the area with the highest technical threshold in AgentFi at present, has a higher difficulty of implementation. Once breakthroughs are made, it will build a very high barrier to entry and a systemic competitive advantage. As the market gradually shifts from "narrative-driven" to a competition of "engineering realization" and "scenario value," Theoriq is one of the few projects that possesses both "engineering feasibility" and "commercial usability." With solid underlying capabilities, clear scenario compatibility, and strong adaptability to the DeFi market foundation, it has the potential to become a long-term infrastructure target for AgentFi.