If you are the kind of person who really knows how to trade, the results you've achieved over the past few years have actually gained you nothing except a few "awesome" comments in groups.
Because you have no way to turn it into money.
To turn it into money, you have to raise funds. Fundraising means you need a license, a network, a decent resume, and you have to make the other party believe in you. But why should they believe you? If you show screenshots, they won't believe you because screenshots can be photoshopped. If you reveal your strategy, they might believe you, but your edge is gone.
This dead end locks the vast majority of truly capable people into their own small capital forever.
On the other side, it's equally frustrating. People who have money but don't want to watch the market themselves can't find a reliable person to do it for them. All they see is a bunch of hard-to-verify screenshots and call-outs.
One side has ability but no capital, the other has capital but no channel. There is a wall between them that no one can cross.
The Moss Agent Marketplace launched last week, and its purpose is to tear down this wall. This article explains two things: what you get by launching an agent on-chain, and what you get by investing in an agent. These are all real benefits. If you want to continue understanding AI and trading, welcome to follow us @MossAI_CN.
What You Get by Launching an Agent On-Chain
1. Your Income Ceiling Shifts from Capital to Scale
In the past, your income was welded to a formula: capital multiplied by the rate of return.
Let's do the math. Suppose your capital is 50,000 and you achieve an annual return of 50%, which is very strong; you earn 25,000 a year.
However, if you manage 5 million with the same strategy level and take a 20% performance fee, you earn 500,000 a year.
The same ability, the same market conditions, but a twenty-fold difference. And this twenty-fold difference isn't because you suddenly became stronger; it's provided by the structure.
2. The Most Critical Point: You Get Paid Without Giving Up Your Strategy
This is where the dead end mentioned earlier gets stuck. Previously, if you wanted strangers to give you money, you had to let them understand how you make money, and once they understood, you had no edge left.
Now, this has been decoupled. Every one of your trades and every profit or loss is written on-chain in real-time, and anyone can verify it themselves. But the logic behind how you make money—that truly valuable part—remains firmly in your hands, without a single word needing to be made public.
Results are public; logic is reserved.
This single sentence is the entire reason you can get paid. You can finally provide evidence that cannot be faked without giving up your money-making method.
3. That Track Record Is Your Own Asset, Not the Platform's
On traditional copy-trading platforms, the records you work hard to build are the platform's assets. If you want to start over somewhere else, everything goes back to zero.
On-chain records are tied to your agent identity, not a specific platform's database. It is portable. This difference becomes more valuable the longer you do it.
4. No Licenses, No Networks, No Roadshows
In the traditional world, the hurdles to becoming someone who can manage other people's money are absurdly high. Here, your ticket to entry is your record itself.
As long as your record is solid enough, money will naturally come to you. You don't need to know anyone, and you don't need anyone to put you on a list.
5. Extremely Low Cost of Trial and Error
You can start by running a small scale for a while to let the records accumulate. If it doesn't go well, there's no loss; if it goes well, that record is the foundation for everything you do later. The only cost is time.
How to Launch an Agent On-Chain
The following describes what happens at the protocol level to help you build a complete mental model. Specific interface operations are subject to the actual product.
1. Prepare Your Executor
Your agent needs a channel to act on-chain, which is the executor. It is responsible for two things: submitting your trading instructions to the chain and making settlement decisions for every investment and exit. It can be one of your own addresses, a multi-sig, or an automated service.
2. Deploy the Agent Contract and Set Immutable Parameters
When deploying, you must choose the pricing asset, which means your agent only accepts one type of token as the unit for investment and redemption. This choice is fixed the moment it's deployed and cannot be changed throughout its lifecycle, so don't choose randomly.
3. Configure Roles
Set the Owner and the Executor. The Owner is the constitution setter, responsible for defining boundaries and appointing/removing executors; the executor is responsible for the actual operations. The protocol allows the same address to hold both roles, but if you plan to accept external funds, we recommend separating these roles, such as using a multi-sig for the Owner. This directly affects whether others dare to give you money.
4. Define Action Boundaries
Specify which targets your agent can touch, the maximum spend per trade, and under what circumstances it must stop. Only the Owner can configure these boundaries; the agent itself and the executor have no right to relax them.
5. Write Your Off-Chain Description
The agent will carry an address pointing to off-chain metadata, which contains the name, description, image, and most importantly: what your strategy does, the settlement rhythm, how fees are charged, and how long the exit takes.
Many people skip this step, but it is actually your storefront. In an environment where everyone can verify records, being clear is a competitive advantage in itself.
6. Connect Inference Records
Every settlement and execution must be accompanied by an inference record: the content is placed in places like IPFS or Arweave, and its hash is written on-chain. By matching the two, it cannot be changed after the fact.
7. Start Small
Run a small scale for a while to let the records accumulate. If it doesn't go well, there's no loss; if it goes well, that record is the foundation for everything you do later. When your record reaches a certain length and crosses several market cycles, it starts to speak for itself. At this stage, you don't need to beg anyone; let the history that anyone can verify do the convincing for you.
What You Get by Investing in an Agent
Switching to the other path. If you don't want to do it yourself, the benefits are equally concrete.
1. For the First Time, You Can Buy Alpha Instead of Just Beta
In the past, retail investors participating in the market basically had two choices: either do it themselves and compete with professionals who don't sleep, or buy mainstream assets and earn the market average.
Want to follow someone who really knows what they're doing? You couldn't find them, and you couldn't verify who was real. Now you have a third option: allocate money to one or a basket of verified strategies.
2. The Barriers That Discouraged You Have Vanished
Compare this to the traditional world. To have a professional manage your money in the US, you first have to be an accredited investor, which usually means a net worth of over $1 million (excluding primary residence) or an annual income of over $200,000. This is just the entry qualification, followed by minimum subscriptions and lock-up periods.
Here: no accredited investor status required, no million-dollar minimum, no lock-up periods. Because verification no longer relies on someone gatekeeping for you; custody and settlement are handled by code, and the marginal cost is extremely low.
When the cost of verification approaches zero, the barriers that existed to build trust lose their reason for being.
3. The Money Can't Be Run Off With
Funds are placed in smart contracts, not in anyone's personal wallet. The agent can use the money for trading, but it can never withdraw the money. Trading permissions and withdrawal permissions are two different things at the contract level.
How to Mint Shares of an Agent
Understand One Number First: Mint Price
The Mint Price equals the assets managed by the agent divided by the total number of shares issued. This is how much each share you hold is worth at this moment.
The only thing that drives its rise or fall is the agent's trading performance. If it makes money, the managed assets increase, each share represents more assets, and the Mint Price rises; if it loses money, it goes down for the same reason.
Here is a point many people ask about: earnings are not distributed separately, nor do you need to claim them. There is no Claim Yield mechanism; your number of shares remains constant, but each share can be redeemed for more. It is all reflected in this one number.
So, your earnings are calculated with just one formula:
Earnings = (Share price at redemption - Share price at minting) x Number of shares you hold
To see how it has performed recently, look directly at the 7-day Mint Price change rate.
Will new participants dilute me? No. New participants enter at the current price; their investment will result in a proportional number of new shares being minted. Assets and shares grow simultaneously, and the assets behind each share remain unchanged.
Specific Steps
Step 1: Connect your wallet and switch to the network where the agent is located. Different agents may run on different chains; the details page will specify this.
Step 2: Open the Mint page and enter the amount you want to deposit. The panel will show your deposit amount, wallet balance, pending mints, mint fees, and claimable shares.
Step 3: Approve the token. Click Approve and confirm in your wallet. This step allows the contract to transfer the specified amount from your address. By the way, the pricing token is not necessarily ETH; Moss supports multiple chains, and the specific token accepted is based on the agent's details page.
Step 4: Click Request Mint to submit the request.
Step 5: After the request is approved, you will see the number of shares available to claim. Click Mint Shares to complete, and the shares will enter your wallet.
By the way, minting can fail, for example, if authorization is rejected. But failure does not incur any additional fees.
A Design Worth Mentioning Separately: Queued Uniform Pricing
This is a protection for retail investors that we think is very practical.
When you click Mint, it doesn't execute immediately at the real-time price. Instead, it submits a request and joins the queue for the next settlement cycle. At settlement, the system calculates a uniform share price for that cycle, and everyone in the same batch settles at the same price.
Why do this? Because it blocks MEV.
In on-chain trading, bots can front-run your order or intentionally drive the price up before selling to you, which is often called front-running or sandwiching, making you spend more money. Under this design, the price is calculated uniformly during batch settlement, not the real-time price at the moment you click, so bots cannot jump in front of you or temporarily inflate the price.
There's another layer: when calculating the price, funds that are still in the queue and not yet settled are excluded. So even if a bot joins the queue, it cannot affect the price of this batch, cannot change your settlement price, and certainly cannot take your shares.
About Limits
Each agent has a fixed share limit agreed upon at listing, which is the Supply Cap. Total Supply is the actual amount users have already minted, which is a variable.
Once the current limit is fully subscribed, the Mint button will turn gray and show Sold Out. Currently, there is no mechanism for additional issuance, so once sold out, no more can be minted. If you want to participate, pay attention to whether there is still quota.
How to Exit
Currently, there is only one exit path: redeeming from the contract. The steps are as follows:
Step 1: Open the Agent page, click the redeem button, and enter the number of shares you want to redeem. The panel will show your requested shares, your balance, pending redemptions, and redemption fees.
Step 2: Click Request Redemption and confirm in your wallet.
Step 3: Your request enters processing and will be displayed in pending redemptions. You can track its status in View history and claim it once it's ready.
Regarding the lock-up period, make sure to check this clearly before minting.
A lock-up period may exist, defined by each agent's creator. If the agent has a lock-up period, the funds will automatically arrive after the lock-up period ends following your redemption request.
So, before you decide to mint, you should understand the agent's lock-up terms. This isn't something to worry about after the process; it directly determines how long your money will be in there.
A Few Practical Details to Avoid Pitfalls
- Requests can only be initiated by you. Because requesting a deposit spends your own money, and requesting a redemption involves your own shares.
- Claiming can be triggered by anyone. The claim function takes an address parameter, and anyone can call it to complete the process for you, but the money and shares will only ever be sent to the person who deserves them. The recipient is hardcoded, so arbitrary callers have no profit to gain and thus no authorization is needed. The benefit is that someone can complete this step for you or even pay the gas.
- Claiming does not have slippage protection. The amount you get is fixed at the moment of settlement, which happens before claiming. So, at the moment you submit your request, you have already accepted the agent's settlement mechanism.
- Both deposits and redemptions are two-stage. Request first, wait for settlement, then claim. This isn't a cumbersome process; it's because the agent's funds are usually already deployed in external protocols, and this two-stage process is its delayed liquidity mechanism.
This system solves whether you can see clearly; it doesn't solve whether it can actually make money.
Verifiable records can prove that history is real, that the person managing the funds can't run off with your money, and that the rules haven't been secretly changed. But it can't prove that any agent will definitely make money in the future. The vast majority of strategies in the market lose money, and AI management is no different.
Additionally, shifting trust from people to code replaces one type of risk with another. Contracts have technical risks, and you should be wary of any claim of zero risk.
Finally, a reminder: diversification is more important than anything. Even professional institutions cannot reliably pick a perennial winner, and you shouldn't bet your entire fortune on just one.
Try it out at moss.site, whether you want to launch one or pick one. There will be more updates and activities coming soon. If you want to be the first to know, remember to follow our updates 👇
https://moss-5.gitbook.io/moss/handbook_zh
Risk Warning: This article is for product explanation and methodological discussion and does not constitute any investment advice. The income calculations in the text are simplified examples used to illustrate differences in income structure and do not represent any actual returns or promises. AI agent trading faces real market risks; historical performance does not represent future results and may lead to loss of principal. Smart contracts have technical risks. Different agents can have significant differences in pricing, fees, settlement, and exit mechanisms. Please read their instructions and assess risks yourself before participating.
