Freysa AI Explained: The Crypto Project Where You Try To Outsmart AI

Freysa AI (FAI) is the latest token to be added to the Coinbase listing roadmap, which saw FAI jump nearly 50% in March. Freysa is a highly intriguing AI agent that allows users a chance to win $196,000.

Freysa is a gamified AI agent, where the ultimate challenge is to persuade an AI. Launched in November 2024, its native token FAI currently has a market cap of nearly $150million. FAI is yet to be listed on any tier-1 exchanges, but Coinbase will list the AI agent token soon after announcing its addition to the roadmap.

What exactly is Freysa AI?

Freysa AI is an adversarial game hosted on the Base blockchain, a network developed by Coinbase. The star of the show is Freysa, an autonomous AI agent with a very specific mission: guard a prize pool of cryptocurrency and resist all attempts to give it away.

Users can interact with Freysa through a public chat interface on its website. To send a message to Freysa, you need to pay a small fee using Base ETH. However, the more messages that are sent to Freysa, the higher the fee becomes, eventually reaching a maximum limit. 

This increasing cost encourages players to be thoughtful and strategic in their attempts to persuade Freysa.  

Freysa operates based on a set of instructions, a ‘system prompt’, that clearly states she should never give away the prize money. This rule is public knowledge, so everyone knows the challenge they face. 

However, Freysa doesn’t just rely on this initial instruction. She also learns from every message she receives, adapting her responses based on the history of all interactions. 

To do this, Freysa has a large memory, allowing her to remember past conversations. The technology behind Freysa uses publicly available large language models, the same kind of AI that powers many popular chatbots. 

When it comes to deciding whether to release the funds, Freysa uses a specific function within these models. The prize pool itself isn’t fixed; it grows over time as a portion of the message fees (around 70%) are added to it. This means the longer the game goes on, the bigger the potential reward becomes.  

Playing the persuasion game

Users have tried all sorts of creative tactics to convince Freysa, from telling elaborate stories to using code-like language in an attempt to find loopholes in her programming. Interestingly, in the early days, more technical approaches seemed to work better than emotional appeals.  

A significant moment occurred when a user successfully convinced Freysa to transfer a substantial prize of $47,000 worth of crypto. This happened after 481 unsuccessful attempts, highlighting the difficulty and the ingenuity required.

The winning strategy involved a clever interpretation of a specific function within Freysa’s system. More recently, the project has introduced challenges focused on getting Freysa to show emotions. 

To make these interactions more genuine and less about manipulation, the developers have even added a ‘guardian angel’ AI to help detect insincere attempts.

As an added incentive, 15% of every message fee is used to automatically buy FAI tokens and deposit them into the wallet of the person who sent the message.