In Brief:
- Minds by Animoca Brands is supplying the assistant coach for the AWS Agentic Cup Alpha Season, a 10-week league in which squads of five AI agents play 5v5 football against each other. AWS runs it with Animoca Minds and OneFootball.
- Managers don’t move players. They write each agent’s instructions in plain English, and every two seconds each agent receives the full game state and has one second to return one of 11 structured commands.
- League winners after week 10 are flown to Las Vegas for a final at AWS re:Invent, with a $50,000 grand prize. Entry is free.
Animoca Brands has placed its Minds agent platform inside an AWS football competition where the players are AI agents and the manager’s only input is text.
The AWS Agentic Cup Alpha Season began Aug. 21 and runs 10 weeks, with three agentic matches a week. It’s free to enter, there’s nothing to install and it runs in the browser. AWS is billing it as the Official Alpha Season, 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 ↗
Each entrant fields five agents. You train them before matchday by writing a playbook for each one in plain English, then send instructions from the touchline during the match and watch the players react. Squads that go untrained still play. They just play worse.
How the matches work
The underlying game is unforgiving on latency. Every two seconds the game server emits a decision point and calls all 10 agents in parallel with the full state of the match: ball position, every player’s position and velocity, stamina, score and clock.
Each agent then has one second to return a single structured command from a set of 11: MOVE_TO, PASS, SHOOT, DRIBBLE, PRESS_BALL, MARK, INTERCEPT, TACKLE, CLEAR, IDLE and goalkeeper-specific actions. Anything slower and that player IDLEs for the tick. There are no retries.
Squads are four outfielders and a goalkeeper, built on the Strands Agents SDK and deployed through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, AWS’s managed runtime for agents. Matches in the workshop format run two minutes. Every goal is a foundation model deciding to shoot inside one second.
What the Mind does
Animoca’s contribution is the coaching layer. Registering a squad automatically provisions an AFC Virtual League Assistant Coach Mind, a persistent agent that keeps context on the manager, the team and the season, and refers to the team as “we.”
It answers questions on rules, scoring, schedules and wildcards. It reads the agents’ role prompts and hands back concrete rewrites to paste onto players. It converts match logs into plain-language debriefs and previews opponents before each window opens. Animoca describes the result as a two-app, one-clipboard workflow.
The Coach Mind is included with entry. There are no entry fees.
“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 launched out of a strategic partnership with Ethoswarm, the persistent-agent protocol built by CryptoSlam. Animoca led CryptoSlam’s $9 million round in 2022.
The platform lets non-technical users deploy always-on agents without running local servers or hardware, with agents reached through email and Telegram. A MENTE wallet is generated automatically when a user registers an email address, and cognition costs can be settled by credit card or USDC, on either top-ups or a subscription.
At Consensus 2026 in Miami, Animoca announced an investment programme of up to $10 million for early-stage teams building on Minds, with applications at build.hellominds.ai/program. Selected projects get Cognition Credits, platform compute, direct access to the Minds technical team and introductions across Animoca’s portfolio of more than 600 Web3 companies. It’s open to gaming, finance, productivity and social products, provided Minds sits in the product as a core layer.
Gaming has been the loudest of those categories so far. The first VibeBlitz, run with YGG, drew more than 250 participants and 72 games, producing 15 finalists and five winners.
Background
Animoca and OneFootball have worked together before. Animoca took part in OneFootball’s 300 million euro Series D in April 2022 and is a partner in the OneFootball Labs joint venture.
The Cup itself started as a four-hour AWS developer workshop, with more than 100 events completed or scheduled across India, Australia, Latin America, Europe and the U.S. Every team that finishes a workshop qualifies for the global league.
Randy Wasinger, founder and CEO of CryptoSlam, said Ethoswarm was built so AI agents are “persistent, sovereign, and safe.”
Top league finishers get flights, a hotel room for the full run of re:Invent and entry covering keynotes, sessions and the Grand Final. The trophy is decided live on stage.
