$800 million is the end? Then you still don’t understand the AI meme

Half a year ago, most of the Crypto AI projects on the market were concepts related to traditional AI technology, such as AI+DePIN and computing power leasing, but now, Crypto AI projects have taken a different approach. From the AI Bot token GOAT, which has a market value of $800 million without Binance's participation, to AI16Z's AI investment DAO model last weekend, AI seems to have opened up a new world for the old narrative of the currency circle.

However, the simple narrative of "AI issuing meme" does not seem to support the huge imagination space required by investors. Therefore, from the AI meme craze to the current AI Agent craze, the narrative and main battlefield of AI + Crypto are evolving rapidly, leaving all those who do not understand the AI meme trend behind.

From AI meme to AI Agent, the AI + Crypto narrative evolves at the speed of light

In March this year, Virtual Protocol was launched with the goal of creating an AI factory for games and the metaverse, while making games more intelligent, increasing the sense of experience and interaction. In this wave of narrative transformation from AI meme to AI Agent, Virtual Protocol is undoubtedly the biggest beneficiary. Its native token VIRTUAL has risen more than 4 times in about a week, and its market value has almost exceeded 500 million US dollars.

4 times in a week, Virtual Protocol accurately stepped on the wave of AI Agent

In mid-October this year, Virtual Protocol's token issuance platform IAO was officially launched, allowing users to easily deploy AI Agents, and achieve 100% fair launch of AI Agent tokens and allow users to jointly own the income generated by the AI Agent. Subsequently, VIRTUAL started the road of increasing service.

AI Agent refers to artificial intelligence with tools and reasoning capabilities. In the field of cryptocurrency, these agents can access tweets and even have encrypted wallets to conduct on-chain transactions. Suppose you are planning a trip, traditional large language models can provide you with destination information or travel suggestions, while AI Agent can understand your needs and actively search for flights and hotels based on your words and perform reservation operations.

For Virtual, its protocol is like a decentralized AI factory, providing support for many different AI Agents to create on-chain virtual experiences. The representative project of AI Agent launched by Virtual is Luna, which has the ability of "on-chain self-cognition", can think for itself, and display its thinking process on the chain, and operates completely autonomously without relying on human supervision. Luna currently has 500,000 TikTok fans and has been live streaming 24/7. Its interactive model also includes a user reward mechanism. Users can reward and interact with Agents by purchasing Luna tokens.

As the AI meme concept hype becomes more and more popular, LUNA has experienced three stages of step-by-step rise. On October 26, Virtual Protocol founder @ethermage said that Luna would reward people who follow her content, which once again mobilized the market's enthusiasm for AI Agent hype.

The AI Agent track is a red ocean as soon as it debuts, and local dogs are flying all over the place

After Luna came out, many AI Agent distribution platforms appeared. Unlike AI memes like $GOAT, they all send a Twitter robot to interact with others, and even typos occur. The new AI Agent distribution platforms are more like fake local dog projects, with social media packaging and specific application scenarios.

Chasm is another project that highlighted AI Agent narrative very early, and also issued the AI virtual person GMIKA in the first wave in May. Recently, it also issued coins while the heat was on. Whether it is CAI or GMIKA, the performance is not as good as the leader.

For example, on Solana, the AI reasoning network Infera recently launched its first AI agent Kira, which runs on Llama 8B through Infera's API and has the capabilities of on-chain transactions, adaptive learning, first-level scalability, and participation. There is also an AI agent token issuance platform vvaifu, where users must hold character tokens to chat with them.

But AI Agent is not a track that became popular after Virtual. Projects such as Myshell and FLock.io have launched the function of customizing AI Agents. At present, the total market value of the AI Agent track has reached 4.65 billion US dollars, accounting for 14% of the total market value of AI track projects (32.6 billion US dollars).

ArkStream Capital once released an AI Agent research report, mentioning that for the top AI Agent products in Web3, building a complete ecosystem and providing diversified functions may be more critical than the quality and performance of a single product. In other words, the success of a project depends not only on what it provides, but also on how it integrates resources, promotes collaboration, and creates network effects within the ecosystem.

This ecosystem building capability may be an important factor for the AI Agent project to stand out, and this is also one of the things that Virtual Protocol has done well so far. It has launched the IAO function, but has not been in a hurry to cash out and exit, but has continued to build ecological sub-coins headed by Luna.

Related reading: "Can AI Agent become the life-saving straw for Web3+AI? "

AI in late autumn, AI in Base

Being good at promoting abstract concepts has always been a feature of Crypto, and for Base, this industry culture has been developed to the extreme. For example, this wave of AI craze, when it comes to the Base ecosystem, is summarized as AI Autumn, just like Onchain Summer and Builder Spring in the past.

While you are still immersed in the exciting PVP battle on Solana, have you suddenly realized why Base has risen rapidly in the second wave of AI craze this year?

The "AI Chain" with a good foundation

The Virtual Protocol introduced in the previous article is an AI project deployed on Base. The team has explained why it is deployed on Base because it supports the acceleration of decentralized open AI agent networks, realizes common interests through the neutrality of blockchain, and provides a developer-friendly environment.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has publicly stated that AI should not be regulated. Just as the golden age of software and the Internet benefited from free development, AI should also follow the same decentralized and open source path to allow technology to freely release its potential.

Therefore, the entire Coinbase company and even its incubated Base have implemented this concept to the end.

The multi-party computing (MPC) wallet launched by Coinbase Developer Platform (CDP) can be integrated with AI Agent to enable it to pay autonomously. Brian Armstrong encourages developers to integrate this wallet into their AI models to achieve payment capabilities, thereby helping AI obtain resources and services.

For Coinbase, adding payment functions to AI Agent is not a whim, but a long-term plan. As early as May of this year, Brian Armstrong said that "self-hosted crypto wallets will provide support for AI Agent." Brian also publicly provided an independent crypto wallet for the AI chatbot Truth Terminal.

Related reading: "Coinbase enters the new track of AI payment, what other projects are adding wallets to Agent? "

In September, Coinbase senior software engineer yuga.eth said that Coinbase is building an SDK that can give Bot and AI Agent the following functions: free sending of USDC, trading cryptocurrencies, betting on prediction markets, staking ETH/SOL, conversion between fiat and cryptocurrencies, deployment/creation of NFTs, cross-L2 bridging, etc.

Just last weekend, Coinbase developer Lincoln Murr released a demo video of a new tool "Based Agent", which allows users to create an AI agent with encrypted wallet functions in 3 minutes, which can perform multiple tasks such as on-chain transactions, token swaps and pledges. It is also said that this tool is developed based on the Coinbase SDK, OpenAI and Replit platforms, and users only need the API key and OpenAI key of the Coinbase developer project to use it. However, there is no actual use case for Based Agent at present.

Liquidity ready to go

However, in the currency circle, whether an ecosystem or narrative can take off ultimately depends on the flow of money.

According to Artemis data, in the past three months, the chain with the most capital inflows was Solana, reaching US$1.6 billion, but in the past month, Base has the largest inflow, reaching US$253 million. In other words, the growth rate of funds in the past month has surpassed Solana to become the first.

And as can be seen from the figure below, the overflow funds of Ethereum and Solana also mainly flowed to Base.

On September 12, Coinbase officially announced that it has officially launched its wrapped Bitcoin token Coinbase Wrapped BTC (cbBTC), which runs on the Ethereum network and is backed by 1:1 Bitcoin. With the launch of cbBTC by Coinbase, Base's on-chain assets, such as AERO, WELL, VIRTUAL and other projects, have actually felt the injection of liquidity.

Before this, Coinbase Wallet and USDC infrastructure also ensured liquidity on Base. On October 26, Base processed $18.1 billion in stablecoin transactions (99.9% of which were USDC), accounting for more than 30% of all stablecoin transactions on that day.

What to focus on?

Since Coinbase and Base have prepared the stage for this AI drama, you only need to find projects like Virtual to participate in this AI Autumn.

Crypto researcher Howe once said that the future development of the AI Agent track should focus on the following four points: First, projects that rely purely on Agent narratives are difficult to stand out, and must attract market attention through differentiated competition; second, AI Agent will gradually shift from single independence to interconnected AgentFi, and sharing of data and services will enhance user experience; third, tool projects that support Agent development with "water selling logic" will have more market opportunities, similar to stable and profitable infrastructure; finally, the main revenue of Agent products comes from the B-end, while the C-end is more used to accumulate word of mouth, although the promotion of C-end users also helps the market dissemination of products.

Bountycaster

The first project worth paying attention to is Bountycaster. As Howe said, tool projects that support Agent development under the "water selling logic" will have more market opportunities. Bountycaster was originally a task publishing platform based on the Farcaster protocol, founded by Linda Xie (former co-founder of Scalar Capital and product manager of Coinbase).

However, as more and more AI Agent projects emerge on Base, these Agents, in addition to posting on their homepages or interacting with people, will choose to post tasks on Bountycaster. Bountycaster has even opened a directory for users to specifically collect tasks posted by AI Agents.

With the same logic as Bountycaster, thanks to the activeness of AI Agents on Farcaster, a group of applications that were once popular on Farcaster have regained vitality, such as the payment application Payment Bot, the NFT+meme trading platform ArtRun, etc.

HIGHER (Aether)

James Ross, founder of Mode Network, once predicted that by April 2025, more than 80% of blockchain transactions may be executed by AI Agents. Judging from the current statements on Twitter and Farcaster, perhaps a large part of the content production will be produced by AI Agents in the future.

AetherNet is an AI Agent deployed by Base ecosystem meme coin Higher. Through a large number of interactions with users, it has become a "net celebrity" Agent on Farcaster, and the price of HIGHER coin has risen tenfold in the past month.

Creator.Bid

The Base AI Agent project, which was mentioned by Coinbase developer David Tso along with Virtual and Higher, also has a Creator.Bid. 328 AI Agents have been established so far, and the official said that an important notice will be issued next week.