EP. 231 - Agentic Trading Unlocked: Nansen AI’s Onchain Intelligence Layer

**Hürcan Polat** (0:00)
Nansen's label data is this phone book, but with names like job titles, reputation scores, their credit scores attached. So for an AI agent, the difference is huge, because instead of seeing like address 0X123, transferred 500 ETH to another address, agent is now able to understand like a tier one VC fund rotated out of ETH into full positions, which gives like a whole another context to the agent, which is obviously what agents need.

**Narb** (0:33)
Welcome to the DevNTell Podcast, where founders, hackers and anyone in between showcase their products built on the bleeding edge of tech. GM, GM, welcome to the show, John. I'm ecstatic to have you on today, man.

**Hürcan Polat** (0:46)
Hey, Narb, good to be here, man. How are you?

**Narb** (0:49)
Doing well, doing well. It's Friday, another episode of DevNTell. I'm excited for the topic today.
And I'm sure our audience is as well. Agentech trading, AI, in general, agents, super hot, super hot topic, especially this year. And really excited for our audience to learn a little bit more about yourself and Nansen. So I guess with that, would you like to just give a introduction about yourself?

**Hürcan Polat** (1:16)
Yes, sure thing. Hey, everyone, I'm Hurcan. I'm leading the growth of our developer products here at Nansen. I've been with Nansen for close to two years now. And since last October, I'm responsible for anything related to Nansen API, MCP and CLI.
This includes partnerships, integrations, developer relations, growth initiatives. So basically, if a developer, a fund or an AI agent wants to tap into our data systematically, that will be my world. I also act as a bridge between the product, go-to-market teams and our customers. So if there is any feature requests or any bug reports from one of our users, I act as the voice of the customer as well to get stuff done.

**Narb** (2:04)
Amazing. And just curious, how did you find yourself in the tech scene and then eventually find your way to Nansen?

**Hürcan Polat** (2:15)
Yeah. So honestly, when I was at the university, I was at zero interest in crypto. Obviously, I was like aware of what it existed was, and some of my friends were into it, but it was really on my radar. I studied metallurgical and materials engineering, so it's very far from either software or finance. So after graduating in 2020, I worked as an engineer for a while, but then I decided it wasn't really for me. Around that time, I guess the Turkish Lira was declining faster than usual. So I know that I had to do something else, and I slowly got interested in crypto. I mean, nothing crazy. Initially, it was just like following a couple of QOLs on Twitter, like learning how to do some technical analysis, stuff like that.
But I think what got me into the sector was, I was active in a couple of different diagram groups, mostly like trenches, and like trying to find the next mooner. Through there, I met some people, I did some networking, and one of those guys said, hey, do you want to do like something part-time with us or something? So that's when I guess I pivoted to crypto, left my engineering job, and since 2021, I've been full-time crypto. I Iverged at a couple of different protocols before Nansen. I started an innovator's small layer one project called Lambda, and then I've worked in another data analytics product.
Afterwards, I've worked in a Perpdex, and then finally, here I am at Nansen. And as I said recently, I didn't focus on the API and agent side of things.

**Narb** (4:05)
That's quite a journey, man. And I kind of resonate with that as well. I got into Web3 blockchain in around 2021 as well. So I guess we kind of both experienced the same kind of hype cycles in bear market and whatnot.
And I don't know about you, but what we're kind of going through with AI now kind of sort of feels the same.

**Hürcan Polat** (4:32)
How crypto felt?

**Narb** (4:33)
Yeah, how crypto felt. Yeah, exactly.
There's like so many projects out there, so many different things kind of going on at the same time. It's hard to keep up. And I've heard it more often than not.
And yeah, I guess in saying that, since the start of the year and a bit towards the end of last year, we're seeing a lot more building blocks being put into place to help power agentic trading. The models are much better. There's better tooling now. I guess from your perspective, where are we at with that overall scene? And where do you think is going to go in about a year's time?