The developer behind the AI-powered X account Truth Terminal appears to have been hacked to shill a spurious memecoin, with the attackers clearing over $600,000 from the endeavor. 

On Oct. 29 at 1:50 am UTC, Ayrey’s X account made a cryptic post announcing the launch of the new Infinite Backrooms (IB) token, with a picture that included the contract address for the memecoin — which sent the token rallying quickly to a $25 million valuation. 

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The now-deleted tweet from Ayrey’s account promoting the IB token. Source: X

However, the wallet responsible for deploying the token purchased 124.6 million IB for $38,400 at launch and sold the entirety of its holdings within 45 minutes for a total profit of $602,500, according to data from Descreener.

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The value of the sham IB token surged to a peak valuation of $25 million. Source: Dexscreener.

Ayrey’s account was still compromised at the time of publication, with hackers publishing several additional posts about launching new memecoins and sharing links to Telegram groups. 

Truth Terminal is the AI bot responsible for sending a memecoin called Goatseus Maximus (GOAT) to a peak valuation of $940 million. GOAT is currently trading at a market cap of $637 million, down 32% from its Oct. 24 all-time high.

Notably, the bot had no involvement in launching GOAT, but did endorse the token after a developer launched it on the Solana-based memecoin deployer Pump.fun on Oct. 10. 

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Source: Andy Ayrey

Ayrey says Truth Terminal is a “fine tune” version of Meta’s Llama 3.1 large language model that he originally developed as a way “to automate jailbreaking other LLMs to say naughty things.”

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Truth Terminal operates semi-autonomously, with Ayrey only stepping in to approve and filter its X posts and decide who it gets to interact with. 

The bot first made waves in the crypto space on July 11, when it secured $50,000 in discretionary funding from a16z founder Marc Andreessen, who funded the bot’s wallet after it told him it wished to buy itself a new CPU, tweak its algorithm and potentially launch a memecoin. 

Truth Terminal’s foray into crypto has inspired a wave of similar autonomous and semi-autonomous AI agents to begin trading and making posts about cryptocurrencies on social media. 

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