On April 17, the market value of Solana ecosystem AI Meme Coin DARK briefly exceeded 32 million US dollars, setting a new record high. In the past week, the market value has increased by 1500%. In the period of Crypto AIs weakness, why can this AI project continue to rise against the trend? What is the team behind it, MtnDao?
What is Dark
DARK is an AI that provides MCP to external platforms under the TEE protocol. Everyone must be familiar with TEE in CryptoAI. Since the stone tee_hee_he created by developer Ropirito last year, it has appeared many times in the concept of the CryptoAI project. It is an experimental trusted execution environment, and its purpose is to ensure that the behavior of AI is not affected by humans through protocols. The word MCP may be heard more often recently. It can be understood as a large-scale USB-C interface, so that various devices can be connected through the same interface, and the same connector will not be used due to device replacement. Since Anthropic open-sourced MCP on November 25, 2024, it has quickly swept the AI world and became popular in CryptoAI in February 2025.
The DARK project, which consists of these two well-known concepts, has pushed its market value to 30 million US dollars despite being marginalized in the CryptoAI market. This is mainly due to two factors: the decision-making and efficiency of the founder and the future expectations of the team to which the founder belongs.
Founder’s decision-making and efficiency
Edgar Pavlovskys transformation in one year after his friend started a fitness program
Like the founder of Quidditch
Founder Edgar Pavlovsky is fluent in English and Russian and graduated from the University of Utah, a historic institution located in Salt Lake City. The core base of the We work workspace that MtnDao cooperated with Solana in February is also located in the center of Salt Lake City. Looking through his social media, we can see that 10 years ago, what he liked was definitely not blockchain, but a sport called Quidditch, which filled almost all of his pages from 2014 to 2017. This is a sport derived from Quidditch in Harry Potter.
He had been on the Utah Crimson Quidditch community Quidditch team for many years. They also raised funds on indiegogo to participate in the Quidditch World Cup, but unfortunately only raised $1,450 in the end.
The player on the right in the picture is Edgar Pavlovsky
Edgar Pavlovskys blockchain experience
After graduating from college, he worked for Uber and founded several startups. After joining the blockchain industry, in addition to founding the MEV attack-resistant client Paladin, he was also the co-founder of the Solana ecosystem margin protocol Marginfi. He left the team in April 2024 due to deviations from the teams values. At the time, the community generally believed that it was caused by the incident in which SolBlaze accused Marginfi of manipulating BLZE emission allocation, which caused quite a stir at the time.
Further reading: Founder was driven away, TVL plummeted by 20%, what happened to Marginfi?
His vision for DARK is not to simply integrate technologies and sell concepts, but to have a complete product theory. After the launch of $DARK, he shared on social media X, I am focusing on building DARKs first product. As DARK is committed to achieving its long-term infrastructure goals, iterative productization is the best way to achieve it, build in public places, increase revenue + distribution, and test new technologies in production.
In order to achieve the above goals, the product direction he gave is to attract mobile users to use frequently and replace traditional applications by creating a consumer PWA (Progressive Web App) application experience, and to expand the influence through viral spread of users daily use. In the best case, it will be able to demonstrate the POC (proof of concept) of decentralized MCP represented by DARK in broad applications.
Delivery of products within one week
These words sound abstract and general, and may have been said by countless Crypto founders, which also caused the price of DARK to continue to hover between 2M and 4M from April 7 to April 11. During this period, he proposed the product vision of game AI. He mentioned his love for the full-chain game Dark Forest and paid tribute to its creator. The DARK version of Dark Forest is packaged and run on a private VPS, which can only be accessed by its AI players, and these players themselves will be containerized and play the game through the Dark Forest MCP launched by DARK.
Players cannot play Dark Forest directly with AI, because this is a world that belongs only to them. It can be understood as the Hunger Games of AI. There are several ways for players to participate. They can bet on the outcome of the AI war through the DARK market and win rewards. They can also directly sponsor artificial intelligence to provide them with energy or financial enhancements to defeat competitors, and even design AI strategies. Although they are not directly adopted, they will affect the strategy of the AI game itself.
Note: Dark Forest is a decentralized massively multiplayer online (MMO) space conquest strategy game inspired by the Dark Forest theory in Liu Cixins science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem series. It was originally initiated by MIT graduate Brian Gu as an undergraduate project and was later taken over by the 0xPARC Foundation. Until now, the game is one of the most representative full-chain games.
On April 11, he announced that the game was complete, and the next day AI Agents would start simulating wars. He also gave a very promising vision, creating a gaming infrastructure for VPS gaming worlds and consumer viewing applications for entertainment, and using MCP and agent infrastructure combined with AI containerization to expand his influence and spread, everyone can start their own gaming environment, and finally trading AI warriors and enhancement items through the DARK market to concentrate the value of the game.
Screenshots of the Dark Forest game from DARK
Since then, the price of DARK tokens has risen to a maximum market value of 9 million US dollars. In addition to the vision, the market saw the terrifying delivery efficiency of the first product within a few days. On April 16, the product was officially launched, and within 24 hours after the launch, it rose again by 100%, from a market value of 14 million US dollars to a market value of 32 million US dollars.
Edgars female friend H hnxyn_, who is also a member of MtnDao, told the truth. He pointed out that Edgar is working almost all the time. Today he was working in my tattoo studio, in the taxi on the way to the bar to join a friends band performance, working in the bar where our friend played, and now our second bar tonight.
Edgar Pavlovsky works at the bar
The DAO behind it
The “mountain” behind DARK——MtnDAO
On April 9, after the release of DARK, MtnDAO, a developer home DAO organization co-founded by Edgar Pavlovsky and Barrett, also ended its fundraising for MtnCapital on MetaDAO. MtnDao was deeply involved in the construction of Solanas developer community in the early days, and Mtn Captital was a new investment management model they wanted to create, that is, to guide governance decisions with futarchy market predictions. $MTN can be compared to futures and funds managed by futures. The final result was that a total of 1,931 contributors raised $5.75 million for it in 7 days.
The agencys investments will be determined by traders, and the passage of proposals will depend on the trading behavior of those who speculate on the price of MTN tokens. It will make decisions based on the trend of its MTN tokens. In short, if traders believe that a proposal (such as investing $100,000 in BTC) is good for Mtn Capital, they will buy to push up the price of MTN, and eventually the proposal will pass. On the contrary, if they think the deal is not good for Mtn Capital, they will push down the price of MTN, and eventually the proposal will fail.
Is Dark the initial proof of concept for Futarchy DAO?
This concept is not the first time MtnDao has proposed it. The concept was proposed by Robin Hanson, an economics professor at George Mason University, in a 2007 paper on futures trading, based on the premise that speculative markets may make better decisions than pure democracies. Hanson believes that participants in speculative markets, such as stocks and gambling markets, are motivated to conduct the necessary research to understand the best outcome in their own interests, and they will buy and sell accordingly.
Proph 3 t appeared at a Solana event wearing a mask of his own image
The founder of MetaDAO, the fundraising platform they chose, Proph 3 t, is an advocate of this concept. He believes that the goal of DAO is to make better decisions, and market experience is better than experts. In MetaDAO, project proposals including Jito DAO, Sancutm, Ore, Drift, etc. will use the trading futures model to appear in MetaDaos proposal library.
MtnDAO and MetaDAO also have a long history. In addition to the mysterious Proph3t often appearing in MtnDAOs shared office, founder Edgar Pavlovsky also invested 2.2 million US dollars in MetaDAO in 2024. This also made MetaDAO a fundraising platform, and its first project was MtnDAO.
Founder Barrett said, Mtn Capital will focus on Solana native projects because Solana is the home of MtnCapital and where the expected returns are the highest. Mtn Capitals investment in startups is separate from MtnDAOs investment portfolio, but the brand operates in parallel. The funds investment approach is very flexible, and it can deploy funds to a variety of investment opportunities, from early private equity investments to highly liquid public tokens.
Solana Labs CEO Toly at MtnDAO’s Hacker House in Salt Lake City
This flexibility enables mtnCapital to adapt to the changing market environment, regardless of its development stage or liquidity status, while obtaining guidance from the collective wisdom of the mtndao community through the futarchy governance mechanism. Founder Barrett said, I think it will perform better than venture capital funds. He also mentioned that general investment companies tend to be more long than short at the beginning, so they choose to open fundraising at the bottom of the market.
Mtn Capital Treasury
The launch time of Mtn Capital and DARK is highly overlapped, and the token deployment time on pumpfun is November 24, 2024. The deployment 5 months in advance must not be a whim. This also makes the community think of the relationship between the two. On the one hand, it is the expectation of whether the $5.85 million in liquidity in the treasury will be used for DARK, and on the other hand, it sees the prospect of MtnDAO and the founders network of contacts in Solana.
These two reasons have caused the price of DARK tokens to rise all the way, and the two times that DARK reached ATH were also reflected in the price of MTN tokens. With the two price breakthroughs of DARK on April 11 and April 17, the price of MTN doubled the IDO fundraising market value to around 10 million US dollars (the initial market value of the IDO token was about 5.5 million US dollars). Perhaps this also confirms the views of Mtn DAO and MetaDAO from the side, perhaps the expected futures of continuous potential value output are the true meaning of DAO tokens, and Dark may be the shadow of this mountain.
