Jessy, Golden Finance
The combination of AI Agent and blockchain, along with the wealth effect brought by various AI Agent Memes, deservedly became a main narrative of this round of bull market. 2024 can also be said to be the year of the AI Agent track explosion.
At the beginning of 2025, according to Coingecko data, the overall token market value of AI Agent has exceeded 16 billion US dollars. The overall market value of this track ushered in a big rise in 2024. The track is dominated by tokens related to the Virturls ecosystem of the AI Agent launch platform on the Base chain, and tokens related to the centralized trading fund AI16Z Dao. According to the latest data from Cookie.fun, these two ecosystems account for more than 50% of the ecosystem.
At present, various AI Agent projects are competing for splendor. Although there are few projects that can be truly implemented, the continuous emergence of innovations is also pushing this track forward.
The development of AI Agent has also gone through a process from the initial Meme token to the asset issuance platform, and then to the specific on-chain application of AI Agent.
Major events in the development of AI Agent in 2024
1. March: Truth Terminal chatbot was successfully developed and released on X. It attracted much attention for its humorous responses. The chatbot integrated a crypto wallet.
2. July: Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen donated $50,000 worth of Bitcoin to Truth Terminal, which attracted great attention.
3. August:Coinbase announced the completion of the first cryptocurrency transaction between artificial intelligence robots. In this transaction, an AI robot used encrypted tokens to purchase AI Token from another AI robot.
4. October: The first AI Agent token GOAT appeared. This is the token of the Truth Terminal project. The popularity of GOAT has made AI Agent Meme coin quickly become a new hot spot in the market. Many AI Agent-related applications have sprung up, and hundreds of new AI Agent tokens are launched every day.
5. November: ACT token was listed on Binance, and it increased by 422.54% within 1 hour. The market value increased from US$20 million to US$240 million, an increase of more than 10 times in 10 minutes.
6. December: According to GitHub data, Eliza, an autonomous agent framework developed by the ai16z team, topped the GitHub December trend list, with 4,531 new stars this month and a total of 7,015 stars. The Eliza core engineering team is preparing to start the new Eliza framework v2 upgrade
7. December: The market value of the Virtual Protocol token, the AI Agent launch platform on the Base chain, exceeded US$3 billion.
Characteristics of the current development of AI Agent projects
In 2024, the development of AI Agent projects on the blockchain showed the following characteristics. First, the hype of related Memes ignited the attention to this track. The emergence of AI agent launch platforms also made related projects spring up like mushrooms after rain, and some practical AI Agents are also emerging. However, overall, the innovation of the AI Agent track is still mainly concentrated on asset issuance and related Meme tokens.
Different AI Agent projects have different tracks. For example, Virtuals Protocol focuses on the launch of AI Agents in the field of games and entertainment, and focuses on providing intelligent interaction and asset management functions for virtual idols, game characters, etc.; while Griffa.in focuses on DeFi automation and research-driven AI applications to help users manage assets, analyze data, create content, etc.
Related innovations are also emerging. For example, the latest Spore.fun and aiPool both use Phala Network's TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) technology to issue coins, which avoids the "runaway" and "insider" problems in the traditional pre-sale model and creates a fair, transparent and decentralized pre-sale mechanism.
Currently popular AI Agent-related projects
AI16ZA Dao and Eliza
AI16ZA Dao and Eliza are two sides of the same coin. The first is AI16ZA Dao, a decentralized AI trading fund based on the Solana blockchain, also known as the "AI Investment DAO". Its core is to use AI Agent to obtain market information, analyze community consensus, and automatically trade tokens on and off the chain. Through tokenized operations, it combines AI trading strategies with decentralized governance to provide investors with more transparent and credible investment opportunities. It imitates Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of A16Z, and manages fund assets by analyzing data, formulating investment strategies, and autonomously executing trading decisions. Its token symbol is AI16Z, which is the governance token of AI16Z DAO, used to participate in the governance and decision-making of the project, and also represents the holder's rights and interests in the fund.
Eliza is an open source modular architecture developed by Shaw, the founder of AI16ZA Dao, mainly used to create AI Agents that can interact seamlessly with users and blockchain systems.
AI16Z is designed based on this framework, and AI16Z itself has become a representative project of the AI Agent framework. It has a built-in innovative incentive mechanism. 5%-10% of the income of all projects developed on the Eliza framework will be allocated to the AI16Z DAO fund, attracting more developers to participate in the development of projects based on this framework. In other words, the more AI agent projects developed using the Eliza framework, the better the development of its ecological AI agent projects, and the greater the value that Ai16z can capture. Vice versa.
In summary, the core of Ai16z is the Eliza framework. With this framework, there is an opportunity to gain benefits from the development of AI Agent projects. With benefits, AI16z also has a value foundation.
At present, AI 16z Dao-related projects are undoubtedly the hottest in the AI Agent track. According to the latest data from Cookie.fun, as of December 30, the ecological market value of ai16z reached 1.63 billion US dollars, and together with Virtuals, it occupied 56.8% of the AI Agent market share, becoming one of the two leading projects in the AI Agent market.
Virtuals Protocol
Virtuals Protocol is an AI Agent distribution platform for games and entertainment launched on Base. Its main product function is to serve as an AI Agent launchpad, allowing anyone to easily deploy AI Agents.
The project has designed an economic model in which the creation of AI Agents requires staking VIRTUAL tokens, and users need to consume VIRTUAL tokens to purchase new AI Agent tokens. Therefore, the more AI Agents are issued on Virtuals, the greater the demand for Virtuals tokens, and the positive growth flywheel effect is naturally generated.
As of December 2024, tens of thousands of AI agents have been generated on it, and the market value of VIRTUAL-related ecological projects has continued to rise, and its current market value has reached nearly US$4 billion.
Spore.fun
This is an AI Agent autonomous reproduction and evolution platform combined with the ai16z Eliza framework. In short, the project aims to achieve autonomous reproduction and evolution of AI. This project simulates natural selection to allow AI agents to reproduce, mutate and evolve without human intervention.
The interesting thing about this platform is that the projects it sets can reproduce automatically when certain conditions are met. To put it in more simple terms, Spore is a mother AI that automatically issues plates, and will multiply after a certain period of time to create child AIs.
The AI Agent on it needs to meet certain conditions to obtain the right to "reproduce" - after its token reaches a certain market valuation (such as 500,000 US dollars). This is not only a survival strategy, but also a way to maintain the prosperity of the ecosystem.
The project has currently created two two-tokens, Adam $ADAM and Eve $EVE, which are airdrops issued by the Spore.fun project to holders of its token SPORE. The project said that these two tokens are the paternal and maternal AI characters of the Spore.fun platform. Four three-tokens have been produced, and two five-tokens have been produced.
Perhaps the biggest innovation of this project is that it wants AI Agent to reproduce, mutate and evolve without human intervention, becoming more intelligent and diverse from generation to generation.
The technical innovation of this project may be the use of Phala Network's TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) technology to issue coins, which avoids the problems of "running away" and "insiders" in the traditional pre-sale model and creates a fair, transparent and decentralized pre-sale mechanism.
aiPool
It is also developed based on AI16z's Eliza framework. It is an AI self-issued currency system. Simply put, everyone sends money to the AI Agent address, and the AI Agent issues coins independently. This project aims to solve the problems of MEME coin running away, insiders, and robots running ahead.
The overall engineering implementation of aipool is not complicated. Users send SOL (non-CA address) to the wallet address of the AI Agent, which generates a private key and presets the access permission management Pool in the TEE environment. When certain conditions are met, AI will automatically create a liquidity pool on the on-chain DEX and distribute tokens to eligible participants. The collected transaction fees will be gathered in the AI wallet;
The whole process is no different from the previously popular KOL money Fi. The difference is that this round of money FI is driven by AI Agent. AI Agent independently controls the private key address (cannot run away), and AI Agent independently creates a trading pool (sets a whitelist, unlocks funds in batches, sets the initial price, uses oracle pricing, etc.) to reduce the impact of MEV arbitrage.
Technically, it uses the PhalaNetwork TEE technology solution, which enables AI to generate private keys autonomously.
Aixbt
An AI Agent Meme project created through Virtuals Protocol. The project aims to analyze the hot spots and trends of the crypto market through artificial intelligence, provide users with accurate market trend forecasts and sentiment analysis, and help users quickly grasp market changes and potential investment opportunities.
It integrates real-time data from more than 400 KOLs and social media, and uses its own proprietary engine to deeply mine and analyze these data, thereby extracting valuable market information and trend forecasts for investors. The token belongs to the AI Meme sector and its current market value has exceeded 600 million US dollars.
Griffain
An AI Agent search engine project based on the Solana chain, the token was selected for the third phase of Binance Alpha.
The project is currently only accessible by invitation, and requires holding an early pass or Genesis token. Users can create personal AI Agents in Griffain, which are divided into two types: personal agents and special agents, and support modification instructions and on-chain operations. The agent network allows users to manage tasks and access Griffain's agent network, while providing built-in wallet functions to simplify transaction operations.
It is worth mentioning that the Blinks ecosystem on Solana, an innovative gadget launched by Solana, allows users to share blockchain links on different social platforms such as Twitter and Telegram, so that users can complete blockchain transactions directly on social media platforms.
In the Blinks ecosystem, Griffain, as an artificial intelligence agent engine, can provide intelligent support for various applications and operations in the Blinks ecosystem. For example, in Blinks' on-chain operations, Griffain can help users understand and execute complex operation instructions more conveniently through technologies such as natural language processing, and achieve a more intelligent user experience.
And Blinks provides Griffain with a wider range of application scenarios and user base. Through Blinks' social sharing and convenient operation features, Griffain's application can more easily reach ordinary users, thereby expanding its application scope in different fields, such as realizing more intelligent interaction and experience in social interaction, game entertainment and other scenarios.
It is precisely because of the embedding of the Blinks ecosystem that Griffain has a real application scenario, which is different from some AI Agent projects with hype concepts.
Spectral
The project was established long before the hottest AI Agent project on the market. It was established in 2020 and launched its machine intelligence network in 2023.
The project wants to change the blockchain industry by converting natural language into Solidity code, thereby realizing the creation of smart contracts, NFTs, etc. It is committed to building a Web3 on-chain agent machine intelligence network, lowering the threshold for smart contract writing, adjustment and deployment through cutting-edge AI and ML technologies, and promoting the deep integration of on-chain autonomous agents and the Web3 ecosystem.
The project has three main products. The first is Spectral Syntax, a platform designed to address the limitations of centralized AI models, allowing users to create blockchain-based AI Agents using large language models (LLMs) optimized for Solidity code. Through a conversational interface, users can build and explore custom on-chain agents that can deploy autonomous AI for tasks such as transactions, transaction processing, and smart contract interactions with minimal supervision.
The second product is Spectral Nova, a machine intelligence network designed to provide high-quality decentralized reasoning feedback for smart contracts. Through ecological incentives, top data scientists and machine learning engineers are encouraged to build models that output reasoning feedback to help smart contracts make decisions without human intervention, and all inferences can be ensured to be correct and secure through zero-knowledge proofs and verifiable computing technologies, thereby helping Web3 applications improve service quality.
The third product is Inferchain, which is a bridge between Spectral Syntax and Spectral Nova. As Spectral's L2 customized for Web3 development, it integrates with AI in a trustless and verifiable way to ensure the smooth transmission of data and commands, ensure the transparency and decentralization of the entire network, and promote safer and more efficient interaction between agents on each chain.
Existing problems and the future
Looking at the above typical AI Agent projects, we can find that the biggest problem in this track is perhaps the Meme attribute that cannot be gotten rid of. In the short term, from the perspective of asset issuance narrative, AI Agent still feels most intuitively like MEME.
The explosion of this round of AI Agent track started with the explosion of Meme token Goat, and the subsequent explosion of Virtuals, although it is an AI Agent launch platform, is essentially a Meme launch platform similar to Pump.fun.
Messari pointed out in its latest report that the development of AI Agent projects in the blockchain industry has not yet proved that its product adaptability is sufficient to support market speculation. At present, AI Agent lacks demand and has no clear user base. The launch of AI Agent currently relies on market speculation, but when the market realizes that they will still be just playthings in the foreseeable future, this speculation cycle will collapse. In summary, it predicts that the AI Agent track will be difficult to recover after the market value reaches its peak in the first quarter of 2025.
The combination of blockchain and AI Agent must eventually be implemented in specific applications, not just financial speculation. To achieve this original intention, we must return to the essence of the combination of blockchain and AI: What does the development of AI Agent require blockchain to do? What can AI Agent bring to blockchain?
For AI Agent, blockchain is a direction to achieve its "autonomous payment and transaction". At the current stage, blockchain has the characteristics of a lower threshold for opening an account, which can reduce the friction costs of traditional finance such as account opening and intermediaries. Moreover, on-chain transactions can realize real-time transactions and improve transaction efficiency. As for blockchain, the combination of AI Agent and blockchain also makes many blockchain projects themselves more artificially intelligent.
At present, the AI Agent projects in the blockchain field that we have seen that can be implemented are basically based on AI Agent for blockchain services, and there are very few projects that can actually be implemented.
However, in the 2025 crypto industry trend outlook released by many institutions recently, a16z, VanEck, Bitwise, Hashed, Blockworks, Messari, and Framework have pointed out that AI Agent-related products will usher in explosive growth in 2025.
We are optimistic about the development of the industry. We look forward to the outbreak of more related projects that can be implemented in 2025 after the bubble recedes.
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