Key Takeaways:

• AI + Interoperability is reshaping how users interact in the crypto industry, driving a shift from the “wallet era” to the “AI-terminal era.”
• Hustle enables cross-chain asset discovery, automated trading, and strategy execution through natural conversational language, lowering the barrier for multi-chain operations.
• Hustle builds tokenized vaults powered by Emblem Vault technology to achieve multi-chain support, using a non-custodial method to protect user assets and ensure transparent on-chain execution.
• Hustle’s product is already live on Solana and is expanding to EVM ecosystems and leading blockchains, aiming to become the primary entry portal for crypto users over the next decade.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and Interoperability are two frontier technologies reshaping the way we think about the crypto industry, and how blockchain ecosystems connect with one another.

On October 20, 2025, XT hosted a Twitter Space AMA with Hustle to explore this topic in depth. Joining the discussion were two guests who are deeply involved in this field: Hustle CEO Jake Gallen and the project’s Chief Strategy Officer Adam McBride.

Hustle is currently building what it calls a “DeFi terminal” — an AI-powered trading system that helps users analyze markets, automate strategies, and interact across multiple blockchains through natural-language conversation. It represents an intelligent fusion of AI, DeFi, and interoperability technologies.

Meanwhile, Hustle’s native token, HUSTLE, has been listed on XT.COM, providing users with a new gateway into its AI + interoperability ecosystem. We invite users who are passionate about this project and the broader track to actively participate!

— Jake Gallen (@Jakegallen), CEO at Hustle

— Adam McBride (@adamamcbride), CSO at Hustle

How did experience in interoperability innovation inspire the vision for Hustle as an AI-powered DeFi terminal?

Introduced by host Peter Lee (@pllgpt), Jake and Adam shared how they first entered crypto space and later founded Hustle.

Jake entered crypto in 2016, giving him roughly nine years in the industry. He and Adam joined Emblem Vault in 2022. According to them, Emblem Vault is one of the leading NFT cross-chain bridges in the industry and a flagship interoperability protocol.

In 2024, they began building the AI agent Hustle on top of the Emblem Vault tech stack, driven by their strong conviction that AI will fundamentally transform the crypto user experience. The Hustle team is highly experienced, consisting of nine members who all entered the industry around 2017 or earlier.

Before Hustle evolved into an AI terminal, Emblem Vault’s main use case was enabling cross-chain trading of on-chain assets such as NFTs.

Jake explained, “For example, trading Bitcoin NFTs on Ethereum, trading Ethereum NFTs on Solana, or moving Solana NFTs to Base, and so on. But the more important part is that our founder developed a unique technology called Tokenized Vault. Emblem Vault supports every major blockchain — whether it’s EVM, SVM, UTXO, MoveVM, DAG networks, or others. It doesn’t matter the architecture. The reason we can do this is because our founder created a Key Derivation system that enables universal chain support.”

“Using this technology, we’ve been able to build Agent Hustle on top of the Emblem tech stack, allowing us to support every chain on the market,” he said.

Hustle first launched on Solana, and the recent AI boom also began on Solana. Jake said, “Now we’re starting to expand to EVM and a bunch of other chains, as we just completely feel that the new kind of experience for crypto is going to be through an AI terminal and not through dozens of different wallet extensions that are relative to just the chain itself.”

Hustle’s vision is to create “AI + Interoperability.” The idea is to understand user intent and execute on-chain actions accordingly.

Adam, the other guest, put it this way: “From the user perspective, I don’t think people actually care about interoperability. They don’t care about vaults or AI or anything. What they really want is ease of use.”

He continued: “From a strategic perspective, the way we’re looking at it is kind of, we’re looking at it as the end of your traditional wallet system in crypto. So right now, if you look at your web browser, you have six or seven wallets up there, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Metamas, Phantom…… And the system of sea phrase management and all of this is so clunky that we were never gonna onboard the rest of the world to crypto. It was never going to happen. Being in the old system and until we got into AI, you know, space heavily over a year ago, I never saw an actual end to that.”

Adam explained that OpenAI already has nearly 1 billion daily active users, meaning the world has embraced chat-based interaction. What Hustle is building is simple: users just tell the AI what they want to do in a chat interface, and the AI handles all cross-chain execution in the background.

“So, a simple example: I’m on Solana and I have SOL. But there’s a meme token taking off on Cardano. I have no idea how to use a Cardano wallet, but my AI agent Hustle will be able to go buy that meme coin for me using the SOL in my wallet. It’ll swap SOL to ADA, buy the meme token, and store it in my Cardano wallet — all through Hustle. ”

Adam added that Hustle will soon support EVM and quietly roll out to another top-20 chain, followed by Bitcoin and more. They believe this will become the primary way people interact with crypto over the next decade.

Then, how Hustle’s AI understands user intent, processes data, and turns it into precise on-chain actions?

Jake explained, “When the AI terminal sector or what’s commonly called to is DeFAI, it was really a lot of kind of throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what worked. For example, Bankr kicked off the social trend where you interact with an AI agent directly on your X timeline, and it then executes on-chain transactions for you. You also have projects like Hey Anon, which experimented with multiple approaches before eventually building a web extension that overlays the trading interface and suggests take-profit and stop-loss levels.

He continued, “We wanted to build a platform that’s more general-purpose — one that serves the so-called “mid-curve” users, or roughly the 80% of people in crypto who aren’t high-frequency traders. These users take time to validate their theses; they don’t need to execute within seconds. They typically have minutes to hours to make decisions.”

Based on this insight, the team built three unique proprietary capabilities for Hustle: the Toolbox, the Memory System, and the Conditional Trading Engine. The combination of these features gives Hustle a distinct position in token discovery.

Jake said the primary use case today is simple: go to agenthustle.ai and let it find tokens on Solana for you. You can ask it questions like:

• “Find me the hottest dog-related meme coin that Toly has tweeted about.”
• Or be even more specific: “Find five tokens launched on Pump.fun in the last 24 hours with over 1,000 holders, a market cap above $1M, and matching traits X, Y, and Z.”
• You can also use the conditional trading engine to combine everything, for example: “Find two tokens launched on Pump.fun in the last week with more than 1M social interactions. Buy them with 1 SOL.”

Once the conditions are met, the AI automatically buys and sets advanced orders. The user can then just go on with their day — and that’s exactly the experience most crypto users want.

As a result, Hustle is now expanding this intelligent token-discovery-plus-automated-execution model to all chains.

How does Hustle ensure that users always stay in control of the AI’s actions and that execution remains transparent?

Adam said, “It’s really challenging, not gonna lie — AI systems are complex. We all use AI every day and we all know it makes mistakes. So I think the best strategy for a new user trying out Agent Hustle is just to come in and use it. You can try it today for free — you get 10 prompts a day. Just go to agenthustle.ai and start experimenting. But you’ve got to be smart about it. This isn’t something where you can give it a huge instruction, walk away, and expect Hustle to make you money automatically. That’s not how any AI system works.”

Adam continued, explaining that users need to get into the product, learn how it works, and strategize with it. Its capabilities are extremely strong, especially in token discovery and verification. “If you see something pumping on your timeline and you’re thinking, ‘I don’t know — cat coin? Which cat coin is the real one?’ he’s incredibly good at sifting through all that data. Doing it manually would take time and effort, and you’d probably still get it wrong. He’s extremely good at that part.”

But for something like what Jake mentioned — conditional trading, where I tell him in text what I want to do and he goes and executes it — we’ve put safety precautions in place. First of all, you have to verify. He’s going to ask you, “Is this what you want to do?” and only when you confirm will he proceed.

Adam said, the great thing is, there’s also a manual interface with Hustle. If you log in and try it, you’ll see you can just chat with him — but behind the scenes, you can toggle over and actually see what he did. You’ll see where he set the buy order, where he set the sell order, and you can see the entire conditional engine laid out. You can double-check everything to make sure it’s correct.

If something’s wrong, users can manually override it or simply tell him, “You messed up — change it to this,” and he’ll adjust. So it’s really a checks-and-balances system: you can always override the AI, and he will always double-confirm with you before executing trades.

“But it is a learning process. Don’t expect him to turn you into a millionaire tomorrow. Where he truly shines today is token discovery — I honestly think it’s the best in the industry. For conditional trading, my advice is to start slow and learn how he thinks, ” Adam said.

Adam continued, “There are already a few incredible communities that have sprung up around Hustle, teaching people how to use it. They’re amazing — spend 30 minutes in there and the prompt templates and techniques you’ll learn are off the charts. Once you get the hang of it, we already see tons of traders using it every single day. It’s basically you — plus a smarter, more analytical version of you — trading 24/7. It’s pretty incredible. That’s the system working behind the scenes.”

What is Emblem Vault, and how does it support Hustle?

In response to this question, Jake explained that Emblem Vault can essentially be considered the wallet layer — or wallet support layer — for Agent Hustle. Right now, it’s used to deposit SOL, and in the future it will be used to deposit Ethereum and assets from every other chain the platform expands to.

The team is also building something called “smart vaults” on top of Emblem, which can integrate directly with Agent Hustle. These smart vaults don’t really exist in the industry yet — or only exist in very early experimental forms within the AI crypto ecosystem. The idea is to combine a vault with a smart contract to enable more advanced on-chain execution mechanisms.

“So things like Hustle staking are possible in the future, as well as AI-powered yield-optimization vaults, which seem to be gaining traction in the industry. Granted, we still have to build these, but they’re the kind of future features that could be implemented as Emblem Vault continues to grow alongside Agent Hustle,” Jake said.

“Yield-optimization vaults are pretty popular in the AI space. For example, you deposit 100 USDC into a vault, and the AI controls it to execute advanced yield strategies to generate returns. Or you deposit tokens into a vault that then gets staked on your behalf, and you earn different types of rewards. There are a lot of exciting possibilities once we combine the two systems.”

“And that’s fully our intention. In our view, Emblem Vault is one of the premier technologies in the industry — and in its nearly ten-year history, it still hasn’t been replicated. To us, that signals just how difficult and powerful it really is,” Jake said.

What safety measures does Hustle take to prevent unintended or unsafe transactions when users enable automated strategies?

Jake explained that, in general, the first step when using AI is confirmation — and this has basically become an industry standard. For example, when you ask the AI to buy a certain XYZ token, it will show you the token name, contract address, and other details to make sure it’s purchasing the correct asset. That’s the most basic layer of protection.

On the technical side, Emblem Vault is a non-custodial backend architecture that uses something called a TEE (Trusted Execution Environment). This means the AI itself cannot access the vault’s private keys. It can request actions, but it does not have the ability to directly access or “rug” your funds. So from a technical perspective, we maintain a decentralized, non-custodial model to protect user assets and reduce risks from AI agents or potential AI configuration errors.

“As we continue to grow and expand, we’ll adopt different types of safety features. Once you start mixing different networks — EVM, SVM, UTXO, and others — you run into different kinds of compatibilities and incompatibilities that need to be engineered around. But the key is hiding all those “wires” behind the scenes so users never feel how technically difficult this stuff really is. So we’re always thinking about security as we scale. And that’s a big reason Emblem has such a strong reputation — there have been no security issues to date.”

Looking ahead, will Hustle collaborate with other AI systems or protocols? What new milestones and partnerships can users expect?

Speaking about Hustle’s future plans, Jake shared, “So we’ve actually already started down this path. We ran some early experiments partnering with AI XBT and integrated it into the terminal for a while. We also have an MCP server, so we can interact with other agents. And we’re currently in discussions with several teams that are building agentic marketplaces.”

“It’s really about the idea of letting your AI or agent offer services and interact autonomously with others. We’re exploring all of these directions. But as Adam mentioned, it’s still very early, so there isn’t yet a clear “winning” use case or standard for agent-to-agent compatibility and interaction. That said, we’ve already built the tooling — Agent Hustle is fully ready to interact with any AI agent, literally right now.”

Adam added, “Yeah, I think I already mentioned that EVM support is coming very soon — likely in the next couple of weeks. EVM and Base are on the way. I can’t announce the third chain yet because it’s a significant partnership, but it’s a top-20 blockchain. We’ve secured a great partnership with a really substantial network, and we’ll be launching there to expand on what I mentioned earlier: most people aren’t actually on that chain today. But I think it’s going to be really exciting — not just for believers in that ecosystem, but also for people who’ve heard about it but never spent the day or two needed to set up a wallet and figure out how to trade there. With Hustle, they’ll be able to interact directly and trade natively across chains through the platform.”

About XT.COM

Founded in 2018, XT.COM now serves nearly 7.8 million registered users, over 1,000,000+ monthly active users and 40+ million users in the ecosystem. Our comprehensive trading platform supports 800+ high-quality tokens and 1000+ trading pairs. XT.COM crypto exchange supports a rich variety of trading, such as spot trading, margin trading, and futures trading together with an aggregated NFT marketplace. Our platform strives to cater to our large user base by providing a secure, trusted and intuitive trading experience.