Key points:

• AI and cross-chain interoperability are reshaping how the crypto industry interacts, driving transactions from the "wallet era" to the "AI terminal era".
• Hustle enables cross-chain asset discovery, automated trading, and strategy execution through conversational natural language, simplifying the multi-chain operation process for users.
• Hustle builds a "tokenized vault" based on Emmblem Vault technology to achieve multi-chain operation and protects user assets in a non-custodial manner, ensuring transparent on-chain execution.
• Hustle's products have been deployed on Solana and are expanding to EVM and leading public chains, aiming to become the main gateway for crypto users in the next 10 years.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and cross-chain interoperability are two cutting-edge technologies that are changing the way we think about the crypto industry and how we interconnect across blockchain ecosystems.

This time, XT co-hosted the X Space AMA with Hustle on October 20, 2025, with two guests who are deeply involved in this field: Hustle CEO Jake Gallen and the project's Chief Strategy Officer Adam McBride.

Currently, Hustle is developing what they call a "DeFi Terminal"—an AI-powered trading system that helps users analyze markets, automate strategies, and interact across multiple blockchains through conversational natural language. This is an intelligent solution that integrates AI, DeFi, and cross-chain technology.

Meanwhile, Hustle's token HUSTLE has been listed on XT.COM , providing users with a new entry point to participate in its AI + cross-chain ecosystem. Users interested in the project and its ecosystem are welcome to participate!

— Jake Gallen ( @Jakegallen ), CEO at Hustle

— Adam McBride ( @adamamcbride ), CSO at Hustle

How can entrepreneurial experience in interoperability projects lead to the concept of AI DeFi terminals?

With introductions from host Peter Lee ( @pllgpt ), Jake and Adam each shared their reasons for joining the crypto industry and how they founded Hustle.

Jake entered the crypto space in 2016, approximately nine years ago. Adam and Jake joined Emmblem Vault in 2022. According to them, Emmblem Vault is one of the industry's leading NFT cross-chain bridges and one of the most representative interoperability protocols.

Sometime in 2024, they began building the AI agent Hustle on top of the Emmblem Vault technology stack, because they were very confident that AI would completely revolutionize the user experience in the crypto industry. The Hustle team is very experienced, consisting of 9 people, most of whom entered the crypto industry around 2017.

Before Hustle became an AI terminal, the use case for Emmblem Vault was to enable cross-chain transactions of on-chain assets such as NFTs.

Jake stated, “ For example, you can trade Bitcoin NFTs on Ethereum, trade Ethereum NFTs on Solana, and then trade Solana NFTs on Base, and so on. More importantly, our founders created a unique technology—'tokenized vaults.' Emmblem Vault actually supports all chains, whether it's EVM, SVM, UTXO, MoveVM, DAG, etc. This is because our founders invented a technology called Key Derivation to support all chains. Therefore, based on this technology, we were able to build Agent Hustle on top of the Emmblem technology stack, allowing it to support every chain.”

Hustle initially launched on Solana, and the AI sector exploded last year starting with Solana. "Now we're expanding to EVM and more chains. We firmly believe that the new user experience in the crypto industry will come from AI endpoints, not dozens of plug-in wallets that rely on a single chain," Jake said.

Hustle’s vision is to create “a combination of AI and interoperability”—how it understands user intent and performs on-chain operations.

Another guest, Adam, argued: " From a user's perspective, most people don't really care about the word 'interoperability.' They don't care about vaults or AI—they just want something 'easy to use.'"

“From a strategic perspective, we believe that the traditional wallet system is coming to an end. Now everyone has seven or eight wallets in their browser: Bitcoin, Metamask, Phantom... too many. And mnemonic phrase management is cumbersome, which will never allow the world to truly enter the crypto space. It wasn't until we delved into AI a year ago that we saw the real possibility of the old system's demise.”

Adam stated that OpenAI now has nearly 1 billion daily active users, and users worldwide have accepted the "chat interface" interaction method. What Hustle does is allow users to simply tell the AI what they want to do through the chat interface, and the AI will automatically execute it across chains in the background.

“To give a simple example: I only have SOL on the Solana chain, but a meme coin on Cardano suddenly takes off. I don’t know what a Cardano wallet is, but my AI assistant Hustle will automatically use the SOL in my wallet to exchange for ADA across chains, buy that meme coin, and deposit it into my Cardano wallet. The whole process is completed seamlessly through Hustle.”

Adam stated that Hustle will soon support the EVM and will quietly launch another top 20 blockchain by market capitalization, followed by Bitcoin and many more. They believe this will become the way people interact with the crypto world over the next 10 years.

So, how does Hustle understand user intent and execute on-chain operations?

Jake explained, "When the AI terminal track—or what the industry often calls DeFAI—was just emerging, the whole direction was actually in the 'constantly trying and seeing what works' stage. For example, Bankr started the social trend: users interact with AI agents on the X platform's timeline, and it executes on-chain transactions for you. There are also projects like Hey Anon, which tried many directions and eventually made it into a browser plugin that is overlaid on the user's trading interface, suggesting profit-taking and stop-loss positions for users."

He continued, “The platform we want to build is universal and can cover the so-called ‘middle curve users’—that is, 80% of the people in the crypto world: they are not high-frequency traders, but they take the time to validate their investment ideas and do not need to complete the transaction in seconds. They usually have several minutes to several hours to make a decision.”

Based on this, the team built three unique and proprietary capabilities for Hustle: a toolbox, a memory system, and a conditional trading engine. The combination of these three features gives Hustle a unique position in the token discovery field.

Jake stated that the primary use case currently is: accessing the agenthustle.ai terminal and having it help you find tokens on Solana. You can ask it any questions, such as:

• "Find me the most popular meme that's dog-related and has been tweeted about by Toly."
• Or more specifically: "Find 5 tokens that were issued on Pump.fun in the past 24 hours, have more than 1,000 holders, a market capitalization of more than $1 million, and meet the characteristics of X, Y, and Z."
• You can also use the conditional trading engine to combine all of these, for example: "Find two tokens that were issued on Pump.fun in the past week and have over 1 million social media interactions. Buy them for 1 SOL."

Once the conditions are met, the AI will automatically complete the purchase and set up a premium order. Users can then continue with their daily routines—which is exactly the experience most crypto users want. Therefore, Hustle is now extending this smart token discovery and automation model to all chains.

How can we ensure that users always have control over the operation of the AI and guarantee transparency?

Adam stated, “It is indeed a challenge, I won’t deny that. AI systems are inherently complex. We use AI every day, and if we were smart, we should be using it every day, but we all know they make mistakes. So, I think the best strategy for new users is to try Agent Hustle for themselves. You can use it for free now, with 10 interactions per day, by visiting agenthustle.ai. But you must use it smartly. This is not a product where you ‘give a big command and leave it there to automatically make money for you’—no AI system works that way.”

Adam continued, saying that users must truly engage with the product, understand how it works, and work with it to develop strategies. Its capabilities are extremely strong, especially in coin discovery and project verification. For example, if you see a coin on your timeline and don't know which "cat coin" is genuine, it can efficiently sift through massive amounts of data to find the correct answer. Doing this manually is time-consuming and prone to errors, while it excels in this area.

“But in scenarios like the conditional transactions Jake mentioned—where I tell it what I want to do via text and then let it execute automatically—we have multiple security measures in place. First, Hustle will ask you for confirmation. It will ask you: ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ It will only proceed after you agree.”

Adam stated that, more importantly, there's a "manual visual interface." While users interact with it, it's just a front-end interaction; but they can switch views to see exactly what it's doing: where to set buy orders, where to set sell orders, and the overall parameter presentation of the conditional engine. You can check if it's correct.

If it's incorrect, you can manually overwrite it, or simply tell it "You made a mistake, change it this way or that way," and it will adjust accordingly. This is a "balance system": the user can always control the AI, and the AI will also double-check your actions.

“However, this is a learning process. Don’t expect it to make you a millionaire tomorrow. But when it comes to ‘discovering tokens,’ it’s almost the strongest in the industry. For conditional trading, I suggest everyone take it slow and familiarize themselves with its logic first,” Adam said.

Adam went on to say, "There are already some really great Hustle user communities in the community that teach you how to use it, and the results are amazing. You can spend 30 minutes there and learn very powerful prompt templates and operational skills. Once you master it, you'll find more and more traders using it every day. Essentially, it's like a 'you' who's with you 24/7, but with stronger logic . It's really amazing. That's the mechanism behind it."

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

In response to this question, Jake explained that the Emblem Vault can essentially be considered a wallet layer, or wallet support layer, for Agent Hustle. Currently, it's used to deposit SOL, and later it will be used to deposit assets on Ethereum, as well as all other chains it will expand to in the future. The team is building "smart vaults" with Emblem that can integrate with Agent Hustle. Such smart vaults don't actually exist in the industry yet, or are only in the very early stages of exploration within the AI ecosystem. Its principle is to combine vaults with smart contracts to execute more advanced mechanisms on-chain.

“For example, in the future, we can realize Hustle token staking and AI-driven yield optimization Vault. This direction is already starting to gain some attention in the industry. Although we still need to build these functions, they are features that can be implemented in the platform in the future, and they will be realized as Emmblem Vault and Agent Hustle continue to grow together,” he said.

"For example, the logic of the AI-optimized yield Vault is: you deposit 100 USDC into the Vault, and then let AI control the Vault to automatically execute advanced yield strategies to help you make money. People are already familiar with similar staking mechanisms. You deposit tokens into this Vault, it will be staked, and then you will receive corresponding rewards. So when we combine these two systems, there will be many very cool uses and capabilities—and that is exactly our goal."

“In our view, Emmblem is one of the most advanced technologies in the industry, and no team has been able to replicate it in its nearly ten-year history. This also shows how difficult it is to implement. This forms a strong moat for us and will continue to be a key differentiator for Agent Hustle from its competitors,” Jake said.

What security measures does Hustle take to prevent accidental or insecure transactions when users enable automation policies?

Jake explained that, generally speaking, the first step in using AI is verification. This is basically an industry standard. For example, when you ask AI to buy a certain XYZ token, it will display information such as the token's name and contract address to ensure that the correct token is being purchased. This is the most basic method.

He explained that, from a technical perspective, Emmblem Vault is a non-custodial backend architecture that uses a technology called TEE (Trusted Execution Environment). This means that the AI itself cannot access the vault's private keys. It has the authority to initiate operations, but it does not have the ability to directly access and steal your funds. Therefore, from a purely technical standpoint, Hustle maintains this decentralized and non-custodial approach to protect user assets while also preventing risks arising from AI proxies or potential AI misconfigurations.

"As we continue to expand, we will introduce more security mechanisms. Because various compatibility and incompatibility issues can arise across different chains—EVM, SVM, UTXO, etc.—we need to handle these 'wires' at the underlying level so that users are completely unaware of the underlying complexity. Therefore, security has always been a key consideration throughout the development process. This is why Emblem has a good reputation—because there have been no security issues to date."

Looking ahead, will Hustle collaborate with other AI systems or protocols? What new milestones and partnerships are expected?

Regarding Hustle's future plans, Jake explained, "We've actually already started working on this. We've done some early experiments with AI XBT and integrated it into our endpoints for a while. We also have an MCP server, so it can interact with other agents. In addition, we're discussing the possibility of building an agency marketplace with different teams."

He stated, "The idea is to allow your AI or agent to sell services and interact autonomously. We're exploring all of these directions. But as Adam said, it's still very early, so there isn't a 'agent-to-agent compatibility technology' or 'use case' that's winning out yet. But we've built the tools, so Hustle agents can now interact with any AI agent at any time. It's possible right now."

Adam added, “Yes, I did mention that EVM is coming soon, probably in the next few weeks. We will be launching on the EVM and Base ecosystems. I can't announce the third partnership right now, but it's a very important partner, a top 20 blockchain project. We will be launching on that chain to expand on the concept I mentioned earlier: most people aren't actually on that chain right now. But I think this will be very exciting, not only for the advocates of that chain, but also for many people who have only heard of it but don't have the time to spend a day or two installing a wallet and figuring out how to trade. In the future, they will only need to use Hustle to natively conduct cross-chain transactions.”

About XT.COM

Founded in 2018, XT.COM currently boasts over 7.8 million registered users, over 1 million monthly active users, and a user traffic exceeding 40 million within its ecosystem. We are a comprehensive trading platform supporting over 1000 high-quality cryptocurrencies and over 1300 trading pairs. The XT.COM cryptocurrency trading platform supports a wide range of trading instruments, including spot trading , leveraged trading , and contract trading . XT.COM also offers a secure and reliable NFT trading platform . We are committed to providing users with the safest, most efficient, and most professional digital asset investment services.