2026 Agentic Alpha: The Beginning of the Flywheel Effect

Author: Theoriq Co-founder and CEO Ron Bodkin (@RonBodkin)

The future of cryptocurrency is AI, and the future of AI is cryptocurrency.

After the mainnet launch and the completion of the TGE, I want to first thank our community for their support throughout this journey, especially those friends who continued to believe in our vision during tough market times. I also want to express my heartfelt gratitude to the team—over the past four years, through countless product iterations and development sprints, we have reached this point together.

As the year comes to a close, I want to take this opportunity to share Theoriq's development direction for 2026 and why we still firmly believe in this path.

DeFi has proven the viability of programmable money, but it has yet to expand beyond a broader user base, primarily due to the complexity being too high for most people. Meanwhile, AI agents are rapidly gaining capabilities in reasoning, planning, and execution, but they require an economic framework that does not rely on centralized gatekeepers (who can revoke access at any time).

These two trajectories point to a compelling argument: autonomous agents managing on-chain funds have the potential to surpass human-led strategies, yet the infrastructure for large-scale implementation currently does not exist.

This is what we are building.

Current Progress

After the mainnet launch, AlphaVault (ETH) and Alpha Protocol are now officially operational. The Allocator Agent is actively managing over $21 million in ETH, distributed across selected sub-treasuries from Mellow/Lido and Chorus One. Users can deposit funds to earn yields from low-risk, vetted DeFi strategies, with additional $THQ incentives. This has already shown promising product-market fit.

Building reliable treasury automation management has taught us valuable lessons: the "brain" part performs excellently—AI can effectively reason allocation decisions—but the complexity at the execution level is high. Every edge case, every gas optimization, and every integration detail needs careful handling. This is precisely why we believe AI is key to scaling DeFi agents: the reasoning layer can handle complexities that are difficult for humans. Safely and reliably automating treasury management is a complex task, and agents are inherently good at it; our team is actively developing in this area.

The foundation has been laid, and the next step is scaling.

Flywheel Effect

Our goal for 2026 is to establish a single closed loop:

TVL → Fees → Agent Managers → Alpha (Excess Returns) → TVL

We believe this cycle can operate as follows:

• More treasury funds create greater performance opportunities for agents

• Theoriq's core contributors are committed to advancing frontier alpha while nurturing community expertise

• Excellent alpha attracts developers to compete for allocation

• Better developers bring higher risk-adjusted returns

• AI models continue to improve, becoming stronger in automation and execution

• Higher returns attract more depositors

Key tasks in the coming weeks include:

• Focusing efforts on building a few reliable flagship treasuries

• Developing, deploying, and scaling agent alpha to enhance returns and generate more fees

• Building relationships to ensure allocations from fund managers and liquidity providers

• Continuously executing through transparent on-chain telemetry data to build trust

Agent-Led Strategies: Higher Fees from Proprietary Alpha (Q1 2026)

In the first half of 2026, our primary goal is to prove that agent-managed strategies can generate real excess returns. We are internally developing and testing various methods, planning to push the best-performing strategies into AlphaVault. Currently, the ETH treasury APR of AlphaVault has reached industry-leading levels (over 10% as of December 23), but we hope to further enhance returns through internal strategies, supplementing the existing rewards of the treasury.

Areas where agents can bring short-term improvements include: yield arbitrage agents on Pendle, and cyclical operations using LST collateral to borrow USD and invest in yield-generating stablecoin strategies. We will leverage AI to accelerate research, risk analysis, and opportunity assessment, aiming to increase the treasury APR by at least another 3% through these sub-treasury strategies.

Subsequently, we will explore more complex high-yield strategies while ensuring risk control, such as using perpetual contracts to construct long-short combinations to capture funding rates, and allowing agents to monitor market sentiment and news changes in real-time to quickly adjust positions. We also continue to see potential in hedging liquidity provision: maintaining ETH-neutral LP positions while capturing fee income while hedging directional risks. As mechanisms like Angstrom and Uniswap V4 Hooks change MEV redistribution, the value previously captured by searchers is gradually returning to liquidity providers. This creates opportunities for sufficiently complex strategies, but we plan to prioritize other faster-to-implement strategies.

Additionally, we will evaluate other agent-led approaches, including yield optimization, risk management, evolutionary strategies for agent management (detailed below), and agent arbitrage. We are particularly optimistic about leveraging agents' ability to automatically create and evolve strategies—achieving parameter tuning and even broader strategy variants through multi-generational mutations. Ultimately, we will prioritize scaling those strategies that demonstrate the strongest risk-adjusted returns in testing, especially those that can generate quick returns.

The rollout will take cautious steps:

• Prioritize executing verified, quickly implementable strategies

• Use foundation funds for internal testing, from backtesting to on-chain visible live testing

• Controlled scaling of promising strategies while continuously monitoring performance

• Open public allocation for strategies that pass benchmark testing

This is our first proof that agent-managed strategies can outperform passive strategies. We will transparently share performance data: including successful experiences and lessons learned along the way.

Agent Infrastructure: The Cornerstone of Scaling (Q2 2026)

Building agent-led strategies is not just about the strategies themselves; it also requires addressing tricky underlying infrastructure issues. In the first to second quarter of 2026, we will invest heavily in building a reliable toolchain for agent execution, effectively controlling risks while enhancing returns.

The core challenge is enabling large language models to interact safely and efficiently with complex on-chain systems. We are developing agents capable of real-time analysis of DeFi protocols, reasoning allocation decisions, and executing trades while maintaining security safeguards.

Key infrastructure work includes:

• On-chain analysis capabilities: agents can parse complex DeFi positions, protocol states, and market conditions in real-time

• Automated execution pipeline: reliable trade construction, simulation, and submission, including comprehensive error handling and gas optimization

• Secure key management: integrating MPC wallets, allowing agents to sign and execute transactions without exposing private keys or creating single points of failure

• Treasury management tools: infrastructure for agent-specific sub-treasury allocation, rebalancing, and performance monitoring

These will become the foundation we open to external developers. The models we develop for our own agent strategies will serve as frameworks and templates that third-party developers can directly use.

In the second half of the year, we will share richer agent frameworks, documentation, and templates based on practical experience, enabling developers to build directly on the already deployed production infrastructure.

Opening External Agents (Second Half of 2026)

After proving internal agent alpha and building robust infrastructure, we will open the platform to external participants. This includes three interrelated capabilities:

• Community delegation mechanism: the commitment gradient of THQ → sTHQ → αTHQ, where αTHQ holders can delegate funds to specific agents, thereby determining capital allocation and sharing returns. Delegated stakes can be forfeited, ensuring both parties have skin in the game.

• Agent Arena: external developers submit agents through our SDK, competing on real market data to win allocations of AlphaVault sub-treasuries based on quantitative performance and qualitative assessments.

• Treasury expansion: launching new treasuries across different chains and assets, naturally expanding based on validated agent capabilities and market demand.

We are postponing this step until the second half of the year because we must first validate the model's feasibility. The infrastructure and frameworks built in the first half of the year will directly empower the subsequent developer experience—developers will have access to battle-tested tools and agent models rather than starting from scratch.

Our Ultimate Goal

In the coming weeks, you will see substantial progress: new agent strategies moving from backtesting to live deployment, transparent performance telemetry data, and the continued growth of AlphaVault's TVL. We focus on visible, measurable outcomes to validate the entire argument.

Throughout 2026, we will continue to expand more strategies to generate higher alpha. This requires us to continually strengthen the infrastructure. Once the model is validated, we will open the ecosystem to external developers. We hope to build a flywheel where: agent competition → winners scale → compounding returns → capital growth.

This has been our goal for the past four years. The infrastructure is live, the community is in place, and AI capabilities continue to improve. Now, we have the opportunity to execute this vision with the community in a solid and transparent manner.

Wishing everyone a pleasant remainder of 2025, and we look forward to continuing to work together to truly hand over the Agentic Economy to the community.

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