Spectral Labs, under the leadership of CEO Sishir Varghese, is redefining the boundaries of Web3 with its groundbreaking onchain AI agents and innovative tools like MoonMaker. With a mission to simplify and democratize complex trading strategies and AI interactions, Spectral Labs is making waves in the crypto world.
Varghese founded Spectral Labs with a vision to bridge the gap between machine learning (ML) and decentralized technology. Initially, the team focused on building decentralized ML models and onchain credit scores. They quickly realized the potential of generalizing their approach to tackle a broader range of ML problems. This shift allowed them to address a larger market and explore innovative applications in the rapidly evolving Web3 space.
We sat down with Varghese to learn about Spectral Lab’s inventions, how it got started, and where it’s going.
From ML to Spectral
The Spectral Labs team started out as a ML team that initially started out building onchain credit scores, and was always building decentralized ML. When they started to build out this decentralized ML network with the concept of credit scoring in mind, they quickly realized that credit scoring is just one ML problem. From there, they understood that generalizing to any ML problem is “actually quite seamless.”
“We wanted to increase our overall addressable market and expand to address a lot of different problems from there as well,” Varghese shares. “We had the skill sets to do what we needed to do in terms of evolving to generalizing.”
So naturally, the pivot began. Along the way, the idea of AI and Web3 was starting to percolate in the tech space. Since the Spectral Labs team had already been building ML models and playing with AI for a while, beginning to onboard users ended up being twofold.
“There’s two things,” Varghes explains. “One is that onboarding users was typically relegated to only the developer community. The second thing is that, in this AI/Web3 sector, the majority of the attention has been around hardware and infrastructure. But there really wasn’t anything that was tailored to an end user. If you look at Web2 AI, there are millions of AI end user products, right? AI for literally everything — for actual, regular people. But we hadn’t crossed this chasm in Web3 yet. People were still focusing on infrastructure.”
And so Spectral Labs’ journey began: Striving to create AI products for the Web3 space for regular people like you and me.
Visionary Leadership & Key Innovations
“We aim to empower everyday users with the tools and capabilities usually reserved for quant traders and hedge funds,” says Varghese. “This vision of making complex AI and trading tools accessible to everyone drives the company forward.”
Syntax, the foundation of Spectral Labs’ technology, is an advanced large language model (LLM) that powers their AI agents. The agents are designed with a strong focus on Web3 applications, which means they are built to handle tasks and processes that are specific to the decentralized web. This includes onchain transactions, smart contract interactions, and other blockchain-related activities.
“Syntax was this LLM that we built as a base model,” Varghese explains. “But actually, maybe an easy way to understand is how on ChatGPT, the agents are the GPTs. So they have very purposeful, specific use cases. However, ours are all Web3 oriented.”
Web3 Applications
A significant use case for Spectral Labs’ agents is in creating and executing complex trading strategies based on various triggers and data sources. This can include everything from market sentiment analysis to specific price movements. AI agents on Syntax operate using a listening framework of triggers, followed by actions, allowing them to respond to real-time data.
“The agents are designed to automate complex tasks based on various data sources and triggers, making tasks like trading strategies more efficient and accessible,” Varghese says. “The way we are thinking conceptually about what an onchain agent is, is that it’s an LLM with its own toolbox. So this toolbox can be APIs, can be data sources. We’re basically extending it, and expanding its capabilities.”
Agents on Syntax can handle a wide range of trading scenarios. For example, they can be programmed to buy Dogecoin based on specific social media activity.
“A good example is, ‘When Elon Musk tweets the word Doge, buy Doge,’” Varghese says. “That was happening a lot a few years ago.”
Another hypothetical scenario he shares involves political events: “There could be a research trigger that listens for election results and then places a bet on PolyMarket, which is a prediction platform. For instance, if there’s news that says Biden is dropping out of the race, sell all your Biden tokens.”
Varghese further emphasizes the flexibility and accessibility of these tools, stating, “We want to simplify this process to allow regular users. The idea is that trading is such an open-ended thing that almost everything is an indicator. Some random regulation passed, or somebody said something on Twitter, or there’s some movement in price, or there’s — literally anything, right? And so, trying to take all these different data sources, and allowing the user to customize what their trading strategy is to then execute on it in an autonomous fashion can get really interesting, quickly.”
How true. Varghese has a knack for explaining what Spectral Labs does for the common person that stands as a refreshing contrast to the overly-technical noise blasting throughout the AI space.
MoonMaker
MoonMaker is one of Spectral Labs’ flagship products, enabling users to create and launch memecoins seamlessly.
“MoonMaker allows users to write code, deploy liquidity on Uniswap, generate logos, and launch websites, all through Syntax,” Varghese explains. “The idea is to take this whole concept of memecoins from ideation all the way to execution in a very seamless manner.”
The CEO and Founder has a fascinating view of memecoins, which is perhaps the most realistic and succinct way to think about memcoins in 2024.
“Memecoins are quite polarizing,” Varghese says. “My stance is that, I think, it’s just an extension of culture. When we’re trading, we usually go for fundamental value. And I think memecoins really open up this concept of cultural value or attention. Memecoins have been around for maybe a decade now, but this concept of being able to trade culture and attention is still in its early stages. There’s communities around memecoins. It really seems to bring people together, people in love putting their money into these things, because they become a part of the community.”
Upcoming Releases
Spectral Labs is gearing up for the release of Syntax V2 in July. This new version will feature an agent builder, allowing users to create customized AI agents with ease.
“We want to incentivize a creator economy, where users can build and monetize their agents,” Varghese says. “So, in July, we’re releasing a V2. It’s an agent builder. So, another easy way to understand it, on ChatGPT itself, you can create any of those things that you see in their gallery. There’s a process there, and the process that we’re building is very similar to that, but for Web3 applications.”
Spectral Labs is not stopping at AI agents and memecoins. Future plans include the launch of Inferchain, a decentralized infrastructure for end-to-end onchain transactions, slated for Q3/Q4.
“The concept of these agents and everything we’re building, like the use cases, are all for Web3-oriented things,” Varghese says. “The data and the listening events, those triggers, they can be offchain or onchain. We want to start to decentralize and validate end-to-end, so it becomes totally trustless.”
Spectral Labs’ transparency regarding its position on the centralized versus decentralized spectrum is particularly noteworthy. In a sea of AI innovators where deciphering code is often the only way to understand a project’s true stance, the project’s openness stands out.
Spectral Labs is at the forefront of innovation in the Web3 space, driven by a commitment to making advanced AI and trading tools accessible to all. With visionary leadership and cutting-edge technology, they are poised to lead the next wave of crypto and AI advancements.
