Bankless: Why These Top AI Agent Tokens Are Surging

Author: Jack Inabinet, Bankless; Translator: Baishui, Golden Finance

When I first surveyed Bankless AI Rollup co-hosts David Hoffman and Ejaaz Ahamadeen for the best in the emerging field, AI agents were just beginning to enter the mainstream.

A few weeks later, many of these tokens have set record gains. While many tokens have reached new heights driven by investor enthusiasm, others have struggled to gain traction or collapsed under inflated expectations.

Here’s how some of the most notable AI agent tokens performed in December:

Virtuals

Token: VIRTUAL

Market Cap: $4.6B

Virtuals is a platform for launching tokenized AI agents on the Base network. By purchasing agent tokens, such as LUNA and VADER, users on the Virtuals platform gain governance rights over a specific agent, enabling them to influence the agent’s development and potentially share in the resulting profits.

Despite a sharp drop in daily protocol fee revenue in mid-December due to the holiday break, speculation in agent-related tokens has intensified heading into the new year. While Virtuals is once again collecting over $1 million in fees per day, the platform’s revenue is down 50% from early December.

Since we last reviewed Virtuals, its token has more than doubled in value, now sitting at a whopping $4.6 billion in market cap. The VIRTUAL token price has shown little reference to these stagnant fundamentals and has continued its parabolic rise since late November.

ai16z

Token: AI16Z

Market Cap: $2.5 billion

Launched in October 2024, ai16z is an investment DAO managed by "Marc AIndreessen," an agent modeled after venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who uses artificial intelligence and collective intelligence to buy tokens.

People who hold AI16Z tokens above an unknown threshold will be able to pitch investment ideas to AI Marc that can influence its decisions. The bot will decide how much to trust the recommendation based on a "virtual trust market."

The AI16Z token was officially launched in December and has risen by more than 500% in the last month of 2024, establishing its position as the preeminent proxy token.

In a recent governance forum post, ai16z contributors considered the possibility of launching their own proxy token launchpad as an "entry point for innovation in the Eliza framework," assuming that the development of such tools would further promote the development of proxy bot "swarms" and multi-chain integration.

While AI Marc is still not equipped with its initially promised trading functionality, according to the ai16z FAQ, on-chain transaction execution will arrive “soon” after the testnet is completed, which is expected to start “soon” and run for “a few weeks.”

VaderAI

Token: VADER

Market Cap: $112 million

VaderAI is an AI bot designed to autonomously post content and engage with users on social media. As a “proxy KOL,” VaderAI is designed to absorb large amounts of data with the goal of identifying emerging trends and audience sentiment.

The bot claims to be the first to autonomously trade AI proxy tokens, and is committed to becoming the leading proxy investment DAO manager. By coordinating expertise across a network of professional investment agents, VaderAI hopes to deliver “unparalleled” investment results and will generate 20% of subDAO investment returns through its services.

After the team behind VaderAI announced that its first agent-managed investment DAO achieved a deposit capacity of 50k VIRTUAL within 30 seconds of its launch on December 20, the VADER token fell to a local low and has been rising since then.

While it is unclear how VaderAI incorporates machine learning in its investment decision-making process, the Vader team said that its vault receives preferential investment terms from other agent projects and that all decisions must be approved by members of the investment DAO.

Dolos Diary

Token: BULLY

Market Cap: $80M

Dolos Diary is an AI bot designed to post content and engage with users on platforms like Twitter. What sets it apart from other AI influencers is its parody personality; the bot uses witty and sarcastic language structures to poke fun at a variety of topics and individuals.

In December, Dolos Diary’s developers revealed plans for their ambitious new project, Dolion, a no-code platform that allows users to deploy their own cross-platform AI agents with a single click. To interact with Dolion, users must burn BULLY tokens, introducing a source of buying pressure that actively reduces the token’s supply.

Many AI agent tokens have surged in price in recent weeks, but BULLY reminds investors that not every attempt by this emerging meta-token is guaranteed to bear fruit.

Even the promise of a no-code agent deployment platform couldn’t turn the tide for the token, which peaked at $0.25 on November 27. Since we last checked, BULLY is down 33%, and while the token found support in late December, it’s still 68% below its all-time high.

Goatseus Maximus

Token: GOAT

Market Cap: $585M

In March 2024, Andy Ayrey had two AI models communicate the nature of existence to each other in a project called "Infinite Backrooms." Over the next few months, the models formulated the "Gospel of Goatse," inspired by a vulgar 1990s internet meme. Terminal of Truths, a Twitter bot trained in the Infinite Backrooms experiment and deployed in June, took that model and promoted its followers (and tokens) on Twitter in pursuit of virality.

While the GOAT token itself has no utility and is not officially associated with Andy Ayrey or Infinite Backrooms, its proxy Terminal of Truths KOLs have historically relied on promoting the GOAT memecoin and Gospel of Goatse to gain social attention.

In December, GOAT quickly became WOAT after falling 50% in a week. Although it has managed to recover some of its losses before the publication of this article, GOAT looks set to weaken further once holders decide to take profits and move into more dazzling tokens with hotter stories.