My Pele Agent
Trading the World Cup prediction markets with AI and Crypto
I've been playing around with agent harnesses since OpenClaw dropped at the start of the year. I've been particularly interested in agents who have money and can transact for me.
So I've been doing the classic Chris Dixon weekend hobby thing and hacking around on fun stuff that isn't the least bit mission-critical to anyone.
Given that we are fast approaching the knockout round of the World Cup, I thought I'd blog about a particularly fun project that I did last month and have been actively using since.
Two projects that I've spent a lot of time with over the last few months are Hermes and Pascal. Hermes is an agent harness from the team at Nous Research. You can use it to build agents that run on any models you choose. Pascal is a prediction market built fully onchain on the Solana blockchain that has a highly performant API that agents can easily use. And Pascal has every single World Cup game available to trade with plenty of liquidity. They came out of stealth yesterday on Twitter.
In anticipation of a summer of World Cup matches here in the US, Canada, and Mexico, I want to engage a lot more with this incredible sporting event.
So here is what I did:
1/ I took an old Mac Mini that was gathering dust in my storage basement and did a factory reset on it. I did not connect to iCloud or Google Mail on it so I could explicitly control what the agent has access to. I then opened the Terminal app and installed all of the programming tools and then installed Hermes on it. I did not use the Hermes Desktop app but if I was starting this project today, I would have.
2/ I created an agent profile in Hermes called Pele and told it that it was going to trade the World Cup prediction markets for me.
3/ I used my OpenRouter account to run Pele on one of the inexpensive Gemini models. I could have chosen any model, including the latest and greatest from Anthropic and OpenAI, but I want to see what is possible using a very inexpensive model. To date, my Pele project has spent a grand total of $21.84 on tokens.
4/ I connected Pele to the Telegram app on my phone using Telegram's BotFather feature.
5/ I used the Solana CLI and web3.js tools to generate a keypair and create a Solana wallet, which I then gave my Hermes agent access to. Then I opened the Phantom app on my phone and sent $1500 of Solana and USDC on Solana to my Pele agent's wallet.
6/ I told Pele to go look at the Pascal API docs and figure out how to create an account and start trading. I ran into a few transaction signing issues so I had to ask Pele to read the signing instructions carefully as well.
That was all it took to get up and running with Pele and Pascal.
Then I engaged in a weeklong conversation with Pele about how I wanted to approach the World Cup. I also talked to a few friends who are huge European Football fans to get their advice.
I wanted to construct a ladder portfolio that includes a bunch of Qualifier Bets (bets on teams to qualify for the knockout round that aren't locks), some longshot bets (teams that theoretically could win but are longshots to win), and then once my Qualifier bets pay off, I want to put those winnings into some favorites to hedge the longshot bets.
Pele and I ultimately settled on Senegal, South Korea, Turkey, and Scotland as the Qualifier Bets. All of them were about 1.5x returns if they qualify.
We settled on Portugal, Germany, and Netherlands as the long shot bets. All of them were 10-1 to 20-1 bets before the tournament started.
Pele placed all of those bets on the Pascal prediction market before the tournament started. I never visited the Pascal web app. I did all of this in Telegram, talking to Pele.
We have not yet made the front-runner bets. But we are leaning toward France, Spain, and Argentina at this time.
I trained Pele to do the following for me:
1/ Give me a twice-daily report that shows all of my open and closed bets and how much I've made or lost on them so far. The header image to this post is the top of that report.
2/ Alert me each day what matches are being played and when and if any of the teams I bet on are playing and what the current Pascal odds are on all of those games.
3/ Make suggestions of trades I should make to lock in some gains or mitigate some losses. I have done a few of those trades but have mostly let the bets run so far.
So what have I learned from doing all of this:
1/ Using agents in a messenger app is super fun way to bet on sports.
2/ Accessing prediction markets via an API is way better than having to open them on your phone or desktop and transact.
3/ Giving agents a wallet and some onchain money is drop dead simple to do.
4/ I am not a great picker when it comes to the World Cup. Turkey hasn't worked out and I've sold half of my position. I am underwater on Senegal too, and have sold some of that as well. Portugal has underwhelmed as well. I could have and may should have asked Pele to make all of the picks for me. He probably would have done better than me. But picking stuff (stocks, bets, etc) is so much fun for me. I'm not turning that over to an agent so quickly.
5/ Hacking around on this stuff is a ton of fun and a great way to figure out what to invest in. It has always worked best for me.
A year ago, USV decided to explore what an AI native VC firm would look like. We hired Spencer who built a platform and a bunch of agents and wrote this post about all of that before departing to do a startup. And we paused our longstanding analyst program last year and saw how far we could get with agent analysts instead of humans analysts.
That experiment was incredibly successful and we got a very long way without human analysts but in the end we concluded we could not get all the way without them. So we announced last week that we are recruiting for two new analysts.
That led our friend and fellow VC Yoni Rechtman to ask on Twitter, "What, the agents aren't good enough???"
To which our partner Rebecca answered:
-reserves analysis and fund modeling
-LP reporting and company updates
-board meeting summaries and reports
-decks
Of course, this was all pretty predictable. Humans are going to be better at being human for the foreseeable future.
So if you are interested in a career in VC and your superpowers include these things:
-be immersed in networks of early day founders interested in our thesis areas
-be someone those founders want to share ideas with
-have great judgement of people and have interesting and compelling points of view
-be human with other humans and an organizer of great people together
Then you would be a great candidate for our new analyst program that will emphasize these things.
If you want to apply, you can do so here.
Our portfolio company Flipcash shipped a product last month that does something pretty interesting. It takes a little bit from three well-understood crypto concepts and combines them into something new. Like memecoins, anyone can create a new crypto asset in Flipcash. But unlike memecoins, these assets have a reserve and are price-stabilized at their initial value, meaning they can't go all the way to zero. And like Bitcoin, there is a fixed supply of each of them.
The Flipcash website does a good job of explaining all of this as you scroll down the page.
Unlike stablecoins, these currencies can and do appreciate. The more they are accumulated, the higher the price goes.
And you can use these currencies to send/pay others.
I like to think of it as "Venmo With Upside".
A bunch of currencies have been created in the app and a few have grown their values above $100k already.
Some of my favorite currencies are DadCash for dads that hang out together to pay each other and BadBoys for "people who believe basketball should be played the Detroit way".
There are onramps available for ApplePay and GooglePay using debit cards and they are working on offramps now.
The idea is anything you use Venmo for, you can use Flipcash for. But when you use Flipcash, you can enjoy currency appreciation (and depreciation of course).
I am excited to use it for betting with friends on sports and golf and other stuff.
If you want to try it you can download it from the Flipcash website.