In Brief:
- Animoca Brands’ Minds platform provides the assistant coach for the AWS Agentic Cup Alpha Season, a 10-week competition where teams of five AI agents face off in 5v5 football. AWS operates the league alongside Animoca Minds and OneFootball.
- There is no player movement to control. Managers write each agent’s instructions in plain English; every two seconds an agent is handed the complete game state and gets one second to reply with one of 11 structured commands.
- Whoever tops the table after week 10 gets flown to Las Vegas for a final at AWS re:Invent, where a $50,000 grand prize is on the line. Entry costs nothing.
Animoca Brands has dropped its Minds agent platform into an AWS football tournament in which AI agents are the players and text is the manager’s only lever.
Kicking off Aug. 21, the AWS Agentic Cup Alpha Season spans 10 weeks and features three agentic fixtures per week. There’s no cost to join, no installation required, and the whole thing runs in a browser. AWS has labelled it the Official Alpha Season, delivered with Animoca Minds and OneFootball.
"I could manage a football team better than that."
This could be you, every weekend.
It's time to prove your skills as a football fanatic!
Build your agentic football squad, type the orders you want them to follow, and let them run riot. If they need a push on the pitch,Minds by Animoca BrandsView on X ↗
Every entrant puts out five agents. Training happens ahead of matchday, when you write a plain-English playbook for each one; once the whistle goes you shout instructions from the touchline and watch how the players respond. Untrained squads still take the field — they simply perform worse.
How the matches work
Latency is where the underlying game shows no mercy. A decision point fires from the game server every two seconds, calling all 10 agents at once and handing over the match state in full: where the ball is, the position and velocity of every player, stamina, the score and the clock.
From there, an agent gets one second to send back a single structured command drawn from a pool of 11: MOVE_TO, PASS, SHOOT, DRIBBLE, PRESS_BALL, MARK, INTERCEPT, TACKLE, CLEAR, IDLE, plus goalkeeper-specific actions. Miss that window and the player IDLEs for the tick. Retries don’t exist.
A squad consists of four outfielders plus a keeper, constructed on the Strands Agents SDK and shipped via Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, the managed agent runtime from AWS. Games played in the workshop format last two minutes. Behind every goal is a foundation model choosing to shoot within one second.
What the Mind does
Coaching is where Animoca comes in. Sign up a squad and an AFC Virtual League Assistant Coach Mind is provisioned automatically — a persistent agent that retains context about the manager, the team and the season, and speaks about the side as “we.”
Ask it about rules, scoring, schedules or wildcards and it will answer. It parses the role prompts driving your agents and returns concrete rewrites ready to paste onto players. Match logs come back as plain-language debriefs, and it scouts opponents ahead of each window opening. Animoca calls the end result a two-app, one-clipboard workflow.
Entry includes the Coach Mind. Nothing is charged to enter.
“Build your agentic football squad, type the orders you want them to follow, and let them run riot,” the Minds account posted on X.
Where this sits in Animoca’s AI push
Minds came out of a strategic partnership with Ethoswarm, CryptoSlam’s persistent-agent protocol. Animoca had led CryptoSlam’s $9 million round back in 2022.
Non-technical users can spin up always-on agents on the platform without local servers or hardware of their own, reaching those agents over email and Telegram. Register an email address and a MENTE wallet is created automatically, while cognition costs can be paid by credit card or in USDC, through either top-ups or a subscription.
Animoca used Consensus 2026 in Miami to unveil an investment programme worth up to $10 million aimed at early-stage teams building on Minds, with applications at build.hellominds.ai/program. Teams that make the cut receive Cognition Credits, platform compute, a direct line to the Minds technical team and introductions across Animoca’s portfolio of more than 600 Web3 companies. Gaming, finance, productivity and social products are all eligible, so long as Minds functions as a core layer of the product.
Of those categories, gaming has made the most noise to date. The inaugural VibeBlitz, staged with YGG, attracted more than 250 participants and 72 games, from which 15 finalists and five winners emerged.
Background
This isn’t the first collaboration between Animoca and OneFootball. Animoca joined OneFootball’s 300 million euro Series D in April 2022 and holds a partner stake in the OneFootball Labs joint venture.
The Cup began life as a four-hour AWS developer workshop, and more than 100 such events have now been completed or booked across India, Australia, Latin America, Europe and the U.S. Finishing a workshop qualifies a team for the global league.
CryptoSlam founder and CEO Randy Wasinger said Ethoswarm was built so that AI agents are “persistent, sovereign, and safe.”
Those finishing at the top of the league receive flights, a hotel room covering the entirety of re:Invent and access to keynotes, sessions and the Grand Final. The trophy is settled live on stage.