AI Track Regains Momentum, Thoroughly Reviewing Potential Projects and Market Hype Logic

In October 2024, since the launch of the AI Meme——GOAT, the AI Agent concept, Crypto has begun to accelerate its integration with AI. Concepts such as Game+AI, DeFAI, AI Agent Hive, etc., have emerged, with almost a batch of new concept projects appearing every week, until January 18th of this year when Trump announced the issuance of MemeCoin, directly draining market liquidity, causing the premature bursting of the CryptoAI bubble. Then, 2 days later, DeepSeek announced the open-source R1 model, and after a few weeks of fermentation, the AI concept stocks in the US stock market also saw their bubble burst.

According to CoinMarketCap data, the total market value of AI projects has now returned to levels around the time of Trump's coin issuance. The Virtuals ecosystem has risen by 120% in the past 7 days, ai16z has risen by 115% in the past 7 days, and other projects such as Arc, GRIFFAIN, COOKIE have also seen increases of over 60%.

One quarter later, the CryptoAI frenzy has returned to the market.

What is the Market Playing At?

According to Cookie's data, the top three on the Mindshare list in recent days are FARTCOIN "15.14%", VIRTUAL "10.08%", and ZEREBRO "4.74%". And in terms of market trading volume, FARTCOIN, VIRTUAL, and ZEREBRO are also at the forefront.

Despite the lack of a TG/Discord community, project information, or founder, FARTCOIN remains strong. As a model of capital-driven culture, it leads the overall AI market with an early start. In just two weeks, it pushed its market cap from over 300 million to 1.1 billion USD, and the recent upward trend has forced many market makers to buy small amounts of spot on the market, forming a sustained upward range.

Virtuals continue to Build in a bear market, preparing multiple updates. In this moment when the AI market is warming up, they threw everything they had prepared at the market at a high frequency. In just one week, the token price more than tripled, sparking a strong market response.

Meanwhile, ZEREBRO has recently hinted at a collaboration with the well-known rapper Ye "Kanye West" and changed the name on social media X to a possible name for Ye's next album "WW3." Subsequently, they released a "portrait" of Ye, and according to a community member investigation, this photo had not previously appeared on the internet, proving that the two parties did indeed have contact offline.

Moreover, in a social media post, a new token called Crashout was introduced. This token features a well-known "meme" image of rapper Travis Scott lifting a microphone stand during a performance as its logo, reaching a peak market cap of 2 million USD. Additionally, a few months ago, OPAIUM DAO, initiated by ZEREBRO founder JEFF YU, saw its namesake token OPAIUM unexpectedly surge to a 10 million USD market cap, surpassing its previous peak of 50 million USD.

Note: Previously, ZEREBRO, as a musician, released multiple albums on platforms like Spotify, receiving strong market feedback. The music was perceived to resemble that of a seasoned rapper rather than AI-generated.

On Cookie's showcased MindShare list, the fourth and fifth positions are held by two new projects, THeoriq and MIRRA, respectively.

THeoriq

Theoriq is a modular, composable AI agent base layer with purportedly strong capabilities, including machine learning, multi-agent swarm collaboration, and the concept of DeFAI. It encompasses nearly all currently trending concepts, and regardless of how many "forerunners" have already attempted to achieve these, it inevitably leads one to wonder, "What sets it apart from other AIs?"

However, any degree of completeness in such endeavors tends to cause a stir in the market. Theoriq is indeed among the "righteous ones," with founder and CEO Ron Bodkin previously serving as Vice President and CIO of Artificial Intelligence Engineering at Vector Institute, leading collaborative innovation projects with Google's AI research team and external teams, and founding Think Big Analytics, which was later acquired by the prominent software data company Teradata, along with several successful IPO-bound startups.

The illustrious track record of the founding team has attracted top-tier VC teams such as Hack VC, Foresight Ventures, IOSG Ventures, and Alliance DAO, all vying to participate.

MIRRA

Mirra is a decentralized AI model trained on selected data. Currently, Mirra has two participation modes. Users can become a Creator, a content creator who simply needs to continuously share content on X. This mode is similar in logic to Kaito but more freeform and purposeless. The second mode is Scout, where users tag Mirra under high-quality content to learn. If the content is deemed valuable for learning, users can receive NLP. The profit model of Mirra is currently unclear, with potentially multiple adoptable models. One possible model is to integrate into other tools that require market sentiment or judgment, such as DEFAI.

The Transformation of the AI LaunchPad Landscape

Following Pumpfun's success, the crypto space experienced a wave of asset launch platforms. During the previous AI Agent trend, frameworks and AI distribution networks/LaunchPads were the two areas with the highest FDV. As the concept of developer community frameworks, similar to Ai16z, developed to a certain extent, the community realized the limitations of what frameworks could achieve, especially in capturing value in the crypto space. Therefore, the surviving frameworks gradually transitioned into LaunchPads.

However, AI LaunchPads did not fare well either, as the existing LaunchPads at the time could not meet the needs of AI product launches. To prepare for the return of the next AI hype wave, project teams began seeking solutions.

The CryptoAI Infrastructure Oasis—Bittensor

Despite experiencing a situation where the SN28 subnet was exploited to turn it into a MemeCoin, driving the TAO release into the Meme Coin frenzy, and ultimately being intervened by centralized foundation control, over time, the foundation's control over the Bittensor subnet will diminish. This has raised concerns in the community about its future potential transformation into an "attention network" incentive project. A long-time observer of the Bittensor project, known for unconventional thinking, also published an article stating that it may be a scam.

Further reading: "Opinion: Why Bittensor Is a Scam, Is TAO Heading to Zero?"

However, purely from an investment perspective, Bittensor's ecosystem liquidity is better than that of other AI Agent ecosystems. For example, Virtuals, because LP is paired with Virtuals, this leads to higher volatility for liquidity providers. Investors may experience a slippage of approximately 3% to 7% when investing in agent tokens within the platform. Whereas, when funds are invested in the dTAO subnet token, the slippage is usually between 0.05% to 0.1%.

It is for this reason that VC or large fund AI project participants tend to lean towards making long-term investments in Bittensor. Just last week, former Messari analyst and Crucible Labs partner Sami Kassab announced that he and his friend with similar work experience, Seth Bloomberg, will establish a fund specifically to provide liquidity for Bittensor.

The current "first-party" of Bittensor, Rayon Labs, has developed several products that offer insights into the preferences of Bittensor's project parties, who tend to be more "practical" and long-term oriented.

SN64 "Chutes" offers a serverless way to easily deploy AI infrastructure. The project team stated that a previous AWS outage event is the best example of why we need "serverless." Depending on centralized service providers, if there is an outage, AI applications may crash due to a single point of failure. As the Crypto industry is closely related to finance, the likelihood of losses is much higher than traditional AI.

SN56 "Gradients" is a platform for zero-code deployment of AI models. Users can train their AI models on Gradients (for specific use cases, image generation, custom LLM), and the recently launched v3 is more cost-effective compared to similar products.

SN19 "Nineteen" is a fast, scalable, decentralized artificial intelligence reasoning platform.

Creator of the AI Agent Protocol — Virtuals Protocol

As one of the most comprehensive AI projects that combined ecosystem building with the value flywheel in the previous cycle, Virtuals Protocol saw its token price slow down as the market quieted, followed by the bursting of a $45 billion market cap bubble, with a drop of over 90%, and a significant decrease in transmitter participants. However, Virtuals did not give up. In this AI bear market, they began to Build, and now Virtuals' market cap has returned to the $10 billion mark.

Firstly, Virtuals has enhanced its project by building an ecosystem and has launched the VPN Plan (Virtuals Partners Network). From the beginning, Virtuals' plan has been to introduce more AI people into Crypto, and this plan will interconnect multiple ecosystem positions, including investors, experts from various fields, scholars, and developers. Essentially, as long as you have an idea, whether you are an investor, liquidity provider, marketer, or even a professional, you can obtain resources from this plan. It is an "all-in-one" incubator service, making collaboration with Virtuals the best choice for anyone looking to enter the Crypto space.

To expand the influence and interactivity of AI Agents in the ecosystem, Virtuals has designed a protocol called ACP (Agent Commerce Protocol). It can be seen as a concrete version of the previous concepts of Swarm, Ai16z, and other projects, where ACP constructs a business ecosystem composed of AI agents. For AI Agents, this is a virtual nation where they can interact autonomously, collaborate, and transact with each other. Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that Google later released a similar concept called A2A. The main difference is that ACP is interconnected by smart contracts, while A2A is connected by protocols.

In April, Virtuals introduced a new model for Virgen points and the Genesis launch mode. Users can earn points by investing in Sentient and Prototype Agents, holding Virtuals, staking VADER, and other means. These points are the foundation for participating in the Genesis Launchpad project. The Genesis Launchpad is an IDO-style project launch mechanism where users receive investment quotas based on the points they hold. This launch mode is currently not open to everyone but requires official approval from Virtuals.

This model has several benefits. Firstly, it increases user retention on the platform through rewards. In the words of the founder, Ethermage, "Our principle is to reward believoors." Staking points to obtain participation in the Genesis project allocation makes the launch more equitable, and participants are usually of higher quality, allowing the project to develop more sustainably.

Hackathon Project

In addition to projects of note on Genesis, Virtuals just announced the winners of this hackathon on April 21, with over 100 project teams participating. The judging panel was also quite impressive, including Luca Curran, in charge of AI and DEPIN development at Base, Kun Peng, founder of the Stanford Blockchain Community, and Anand Iyer, a partner at Canonical Crypto. Anand Iyer's interestingly enough has the AI tag on X.

The Intern

The Intern is an AI assistant for operations that can help with promotion, responses, and community management on X. Through in-depth community learning, he can understand the community's culture and can use TADA to generate images. He has now partnered with Pudgypenguins to launch the Penguin Intern and is running his own Twitter account. Judging by the quality of Twitter operations, if it were entirely AI-operated independently and could be scaled to this level, it would be a promising product.

BuzzingClub

BuzzingClub is a prediction market platform where the project team believes the future of prediction markets should be in the hands of participants, not a central authority. "Everyone should be able to freely create, share, and express their opinions," so Buzzing is more free compared to other prediction platforms.

In Buzzing, all users can create prediction markets by proposing topics or questions, with AI generating rules. The AI algorithm then filters out some spam and low-quality prediction markets, and finally, an AI oracle automatically retrieves internet search data instead of manual data to determine the outcome of prediction questions.

Burnie

Burnie is a code learning platform that can enhance the overall skills of users who want to learn to code, and players can earn rewards by completing the tasks he releases.

Inspiration is an App, Post-AI Application Era Market Layout

Arc and Ai16z, after the framework development gradually stagnated, have also transformed into AI Agent distribution platforms. After the launch of Arc's distribution platform, forge, it disappeared from sight since the first product, AskJimmy. Ai16z's AutoFun went online a few days ago, but the currently publicly supported projects have not yet launched, and the development remains unclear. From a product framework perspective, AutoFun seems to lean more towards creating a community UGC cultural platform, and in terms of value retention, it is not much different from traditional LaunchPads.

Arc plans to launch the new Agentic App Store Ryzome, while Myshell's AIApp Store already exists. The former has not yet officially launched, and the latter lacks activity, with most of the products appearing to be very similar.

In this scenario, dev.fun, which previously appeared with the concept of AppFi, appears to be more traditional. At first glance, everything from color scheme to UI is similar to Pumpfun, but it seems to be more vibrant in some way. Although dev.fun, like other AI projects, has experienced a significant decline in price during this cycle, it is surprising that nearly 13,000 Apps have emerged on this platform.

dev.fun offers the functionality to generate Apps simply by chatting with AI "similar to the previously YC-backed Replit." Besides issuing tokens for projects/Memes, users can also choose their own trading pairs. Buidl, which currently has the most supporters, has a total of 1400 Apps and has been run nearly 70,000 times.

There have been multiple AI projects collaborating with dev.fun to expand its core functionality, including Zala, which recently surged to a $6 million market cap and is a collaboration between HoloWorld and devfun.

As both the AI market and the on-chain market regain momentum, the market sentiment seems to be ignited ever so slightly. However, unlike the last AI Agent craze, there have not been many innovative concept products appearing in the market. If the old concepts continue to prevail, the CryptoAI market may also encounter a corresponding bottleneck. While participating in high-heat projects, one also needs to consider the actual benefits and topic sustainability behind them.

The AI track regains momentum, comprehensively reviewing potential projects and market hype logic