Original author: BUBBLE
In October 2024, since AI Meme GOAT launched the AI Agent concept, Crypto began to accelerate its integration with AI. Concepts such as Game+AI, DeFAI, and AIAgent Hive have emerged, and a batch of new concept projects appear almost every week. Until January 18 this year, Trump announced the issuance of MemeCoin, which directly drained market liquidity and the bubble of CryptoAI was punctured in advance. Two 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 were also punctured.
According to data from CoinMarketCap, the total market value of AI projects has now returned to the level around the same time as Trump issued the currency. EcoVirtuals rose 120% in 7 days, ai16z rose 115% in 7 days, and projects such as Arc, GRIFFAIN, and COOKIE also saw increases of more than 60%.
A quarter later, the voice of CryptoAI has returned to the market.
What is the market doing?
According to Cookie data, the top three on the Mindshare list recently are FARTCOIN 15.14%, VIRTUAL 10.08% and ZEREBRO 4.74%. And from the perspective of market trading volume, FARTCOIN, VIRTUAL and ZEREBRO are also at the forefront.
FARTCOIN, which has no TG/Discord community, no project information, and no founders and no products, is still strong. As a model of capital-driven culture, it has led the overall AI market to start ahead of schedule, pushing its market value of more than 300 million US dollars to 1.1 billion US dollars in just two weeks. The recent rise has also forced many market makers to buy small amounts of spot in the market, thus forming a continuous rising range.
Virtuals continued to build in the bear market and prepared multiple updates. At the moment when the AI market rebounded, it released all the prepared things to the market at a high frequency. In just one week, the price of the coin increased by more than 3 times, and the market response was enthusiastic.
ZEREBRO also recently hinted at a collaboration with the famous rapper Ye Kanye West, and changed the name on the social media X to the possible name of Yes next new album WW 3, and then released a headshot of Ye. According to community members investigation, the photo had not appeared on the Internet before, proving that the two did have offline contact.
A new token, Crashout, was launched on social media. The token uses the famous meme of rapper Travis Scott holding up a microphone stand during a performance as its logo, and its highest market value reached 2 million US dollars. In addition, OPAIUM DAO, launched by ZEREBRO founder Jeff Yu a few months ago, also unexpectedly rose to a market value of 10 million US dollars under its eponymous token, OPAIUM, from a previous highest market value of 50 million US dollars.
Note: Previously, ZEREBRO, as a musician, released several albums on music platforms such as Spotify, which received a warm response in the market. His music sounds like that of a mature rapper rather than AI.
Ranked fourth and fifth on the MindShare list presented by Cookie are two new projects, THeoriq and MIRRA.
THeoriq
Theoriq is a modular and composable AI agent base layer, which is said to be very powerful, including machine learning, multi-agent hive cooperation, and the concept of DeFAI. It contains almost all the hot concepts currently, and no matter which one, there are too many predecessors who want to complete it, which inevitably makes people think what is the difference between it and other AI.
But in fact, any one of them that can achieve a certain degree of completion can cause a certain sensation in the market. And Theoriq is indeed a right-track army. Founder and CEO Ron Bodkin was VP of AI Engineering and CIO at Vector Institute, and was also the head of collaborative innovation for Googles AI research team and external teams. He was also the founder and CEO of Think Big Analytics, which was later acquired by the well-known software data company Teradata, as well as a series of startups, some of which were successfully listed.
The impressive resume of the founding team also attracted a number of top VC-invested teams such as Hack VC, Foresight Ventures, IOSG Ventures, and Alliance DAO to join.
MIRRA
Mirra is a decentralized AI model trained based on selected data. Currently, Mirra is divided into two participation modes. Users can become a Creator content creator, and only need to continue to share content on X. The logic of this mode is similar to Kaito, but it is more free and less purposeful. The second is the Scout Scout, who tags Mirra under high-quality content to learn. If this is worth learning, the user can get NLP. Its profit model is not clear at present. There may be multiple models that can be adopted. One of them is to connect to other tools that require market sentiment or judgment, such as DEFAI.
AI LaunchPad’s changing landscape
After the success of Pumpfun, Crypto has set off a wave of asset issuance platforms. When the last wave of AI Agents came, frameworks and AI distribution networks/LaunchPad were the two areas with the highest FDV. When the framework concept of developer communities like Ai16z developed to a certain extent, the community found that the framework could only do a limited amount of things, especially the value capture in Crypto, so the surviving frameworks gradually transformed into LaunchPad.
The AI LaunchPad was not doing well either. The reason was that the LaunchPad at the time could not meet the needs of releasing AI products. In order to support the return of the next AI boom, project parties began to look for solutions.
The Promise of CryptoAI Infrastructure — Bittensor
Although the SN 28 subnet was exploited by someone to turn it into MemeCoin some time ago, and promoted the release of TAO into Meme Coin speculation, which was eventually intervened by the foundation, and as time goes by, the foundation will have less and less control over the Bittensor subnet, which has aroused the communitys doubts that it may become a pan-incentive project of attention network in the future. Thinking Guaiguai, who has been tracking the Bittensor project for a long time, also published an article, saying that this is a scam.
Further reading: Viewpoint: Why is Bittensor a scam and TAO heading towards zero?
But from a purely investment perspective, the liquidity of the Bittensor ecosystem is better than other AI Agent ecosystems. For example, Virtuals, because LPs are paired with Virtuals, this will lead to higher volatility for liquidity providers. There will be about 3% to 7% slippage on the proxy tokens within the investor investment platform. When investing funds in dTAO subnet tokens, the slippage is usually 0.05% to 0.1%.
For this reason, VCs or large-cap AI project participants are more inclined to make long-term investments in Bittensor. Just last week, former Messari analyst and Crucible Labs partner Sami Kassab announced that he and his friend Seth Bloomberg, who has similar work experience, will set up a fund dedicated to providing liquidity for Bittensor.
Currently, Rayon Labs, the first project party of Bittensor, has produced several products, from which we can get a glimpse of the preferences of Bittensor project parties, who tend to be more practical and long-term.
SN 64 Chutes provides a serverless way to easily deploy AI infrastructure. The project team said that the previous AWS outage is a good example of why we need serverless. Because if we rely on centralized service providers, once an outage occurs, AI applications may go down due to a single point of failure. Crypto is an industry that is closely related to money, and the probability of causing losses is much greater than traditional AI.
SN 56 Gradients is a platform for zero-code deployment of AI models. Users can train their own AI models on Gradients (for specific use cases, image generation, custom LLM). The recently launched v3 is more competitive in price than similar products.
SN 19 Nineteen is a fast, scalable, decentralized artificial intelligence reasoning platform.
The creator of AI Agent protocol——Virtuals Protocol
As one of the most complete AI projects combining ecosystem construction and value flywheel in the last cycle, the price of Virtuals Protocol has slowed down with the markets silence, and the bubble of $4.5 billion market value has been punctured, with a drop of more than 90%, and the number of participants in the launcher has also dropped significantly. But Virtuals did not give up. In this AI bear market, they started to build, and now Virtuals market value has returned to the $1 billion mark.
First of all, Virtuals has improved its own project construction ecosystem and released the VPN plan Virtuals Partners Network. From the beginning, Virtuals plan is to introduce more AI people into Crypto, and the plan connects multiple ecological positions, including investors, experts in various fields, scholars and developers. Almost as long as you have an idea, from investors to market makers, marketing and even professional talents can obtain resources from this plan. The one-stop service incubator can be said to be the best choice for any talent who wants to enter Crypto to cooperate with Virtuals.
In order to expand the influence and interaction of AI Agents in the ecosystem, Virtuals has developed a protocol ACP Agent Commerce Protocol, which can be said to be a concrete version of the honeycomb concept of previous projects such as Swarm and Ai16z. ACP builds a business ecosystem composed of AI agents. For AI Agents, this is a virtual country where they can interact, collaborate and trade with each other autonomously. It is worth mentioning that Google also released a similar A2A concept afterwards. The slightly different point is that ACP is connected by smart contracts, while A2A is connected by protocols.
In April, Virtuals just launched the new model of Virgen Points and Genesis Launch Mode. Users can obtain points by investing in Sentient and Prototype Agents, holding Virtuals, staking VADER, etc. Points are the basis for participating in the Genesis Launch Pad project. The Genesis Launch Pad is a project launch method in the IDO model, and the investment amount is obtained according to the Points owned by the user. However, this launch mode is not currently available to everyone, but needs to be reviewed by the official Virtuals.
This model has several advantages. The first is to increase the stickiness of platform users through rewards. In the words of founder Ethermage, our principle is to reward believers. Staking points to obtain the amount to participate in the Genesis project makes the launch more fair, and the participants are usually of higher quality, allowing the project to develop more sustainably.
Hackathon Project
In addition to the projects on Genesis that are worth paying attention to, Virtuals just announced the winners of this hackathon on April 21. A total of more than 100 project parties participated in the competition, and the judging lineup was also quite luxurious, including Luca Curran, who is responsible for the development of AI and DEPIN sections at Base, Kun Peng, who founded the Stanford blockchain community, and Anand Iyer, a partner of Canonical Crypto. Whats interesting is that Anands tag on X is AI.
The Intern
The Intern is an AI that helps with operations. It can help promote, reply and manage the community on X. It can understand the culture of the community by in-depth community learning and can generate pictures using TADA. Now it has cooperated with Pudgypenguins to launch Penguin Intern and operate its own Twitter. Judging from the operational quality of Twitter, if it is completely operated independently by AI and this level can be mass-produced, it will be a good product.
BuzzingClub
BuzzingClub is a prediction market platform. The project team believes that the future of the prediction market should be in the hands of participants rather than a central authority. Everyone should be able to freely create, share and express their opinions. Therefore, Buzzing is freer than other prediction platforms.
In Buzzing, all users can create prediction markets by proposing topics or questions and AI will generate rules. Then, AI algorithms will be used to filter out some spam and low-quality prediction markets. Finally, AI oracles will automatically retrieve Internet search data instead of manual data to make predictions.
Burnie
Burnie is a code learning platform that can improve the various levels of users who want to learn code. At the same time, players can get rewards by completing the tasks he posted.
Inspiration is App, the layout of sinking market in the post-AI application era
After the development of their frameworks gradually stagnated, Arc and Ai16z also transformed themselves into distribution platforms for AI Agents. Arcs distribution platform forge disappeared after its first product AskJimmy was launched, and Ai16zs AutoFun was launched a few days ago, but none of the publicly supported projects are currently online, so it is unknown how it will develop. From the perspective of the product framework, AutoFun seems to be more inclined to create a UGC cultural platform for the community, and in terms of value retention, it is not much different from the traditional LaunchPad.
Arc plans to launch the new Agentic App Store Ryzome, and Myshells existing AIApp Store. The former has not yet been officially launched, and the latter lacks activity, and most of the products that appear are similar.
In this case, dev.fun, which was previously presented as AppFi, is more orthodox. At first glance, it is similar to Pumpfun in color and UI, but it seems to be more dynamic in some ways. Although dev.fun has fallen a lot in this cycle like other AI projects in terms of currency price. Surprisingly, there are currently nearly 13,000 apps born on this platform.
dev.fun provides the function of generating apps by chatting with AI (similar to Replit, which was previously invested by YC). In addition to issuing project/meme tokens, users can also choose trading pairs by themselves. Buidl, which currently has the most supporters, currently has a total of 1,400 apps and has run nearly 70,000 times.
Currently, there are already many AI projects cooperating with dev.fun to expand its core functionality, including Zala, which recently reached a market value of 6 million US dollars. It is a cooperative project between HoloWorld and devfun.
With the return of both AI and on-chain markets, market sentiment seems to be ignited. However, unlike the last AI Agent boom, there are not many innovative concept products on the market. If the old concepts are continued, the CryptoAI market may also encounter corresponding bottlenecks. When participating in high-profile projects, it is also necessary to consider the actual benefits and topic continuity behind them.
