The upper limit of valuation for practical AI agents could be in the billions of dollars.
Written by: IcoBeast.eth
Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News
There are a ton of exciting opportunities in the AI agent boom, but there are also a ton of pitfalls. New agents are popping up at a dizzying pace as everyone rushes to launch an AI agent launchpad to grab attention and, more importantly, platform fee revenue.
The harsh reality is that we don’t know whether AI agents have reached peak performance or have unlimited potential in the future. This doesn’t mean that mental frameworks and classification schemes are meaningless: it just means that no one can get everything right.
So what I’m going to do is outline how we should treat AI agents right now, and what that means for their potential valuations. Note that nothing in this article is a recommendation to buy.
I think there are three major categories of AI agents in the market today, and that number may increase to four, but before that, let’s see how the current situation develops.
Culture / Community Awareness Promoter
Partner / Intellectual Property Agent
Practical Agent
These categories are distinct. That being said, real-life agents can have elements of multiple categories at once. In the long run, any legitimate AI agent will have capabilities from all three categories. I will explain these categories now.
Culture / Community Consensus
You may already know some of these AI agents: zerebro, Fartcoin, Truth Terminal, Dolos, etc. These tokens already have avid followings and interact with fans on Twitter every day. These are the favorite AI tokens of your favorite influencers.
They are trashy, they are funny (sometimes), and they are depraved. They are easy to understand (or at least make you think you understand them), which is why your influencer friends like them. They are essentially real AI-powered memecoins. Just like MOG, PEPE, SPX, these currencies exist and have value because people feel a sense of belonging by owning them.
That being said, I don't think these tokens can really unleash the full power of AI. It's almost a waste to have them exist only as interactive memecoins. Some people have realized this: the developers of zerebro are moving towards the practical field. I think this is the future of this category. Either they face a ceiling in market valuation (lower than PEPE), or they will expand to killer use cases together with collective consensus to raise the valuation ceiling.
I have very little exposure to these tokens currently (although I bought a few initially in the 2-10m range). I don't think they have peaked (at least long term), but this run-up is not what I'm looking for early in a bull run. I expect very few of these proxies to have the potential to peak at 2bn, and many will reach 8- or 9-figure valuations and then fizzle out.
Companion /IP
You’ve probably seen this a lot, but may not realize how they differ from category 1. These agents have a very niche appeal and feel like personal friends rather than a large community you belong to, think of the random agents launched on vvaifu or the role-based agents in Virtuals (AIRENE/SISAI/etc).
I think this category overall will be much less rewarding than category 1, and most won't generate any interest. But the winners will win big. And that's the fun part, finding the winners. In this category, I want to back an agent that was developed by someone who put their heart and soul into it.
My choices were Sploot (launched on Virtuals by Jonah, I know Jonah can be a polarizing figure in crypto but he’s really successful and a great marketer which is exactly the edge I want), Lexi (launched on Virtuals by Coop9000, Coop9000 is heavily involved in marketing and business development for AVAX), and then the crowd’s choice Wokie (launched on Virtuals by bitcoin.com).
Ultimately, the valuation ceiling for these characters is probably in the $20-30 million range, unless someone creates a breakout character that people can’t stop loving.
Practical
This is the holy grail of AI agents. There is a lot to talk about on this topic, and new use cases are being developed and experimented with every day.
For nearly a decade, we have been peddling useless utility tokens that solve problems no one cares about. I believe AI agents are the new paradigm for utility tokens. Real technology that delivers services that people actually want.
Here’s the weird thing: if meaningless, unused utility and governance tokens can reach multi-billion dollar valuations, why can’t AI agents with real use cases?
Here are some of my favorite proxies I’ve seen so far:
AIXBT: Definitely the best sentiment and momentum grabber out there. In my opinion it should be worth over $1 billion.
VADER: A brain game that effectively attempts to build and manage institutional-grade proxy investments. It’s a tokenized BlackRock on-chain.
WAI Combinator: Interesting name, interesting concept (although a bit off topic). They are setting up an AI incubator to help other AIs grow. I don't know if it works, but they have released reports about investing in other promising AIs.
DeFi maximization: There are many teams building (and about to release) AI agents that will automatically manage yield positions for you to maximize returns. Once we are able to abstract away the complex management of LPs, yields will rise dramatically. The concept is a money printing machine.
PolyAI: It’s an agent that analyzes Polymarket information in real time. It may or may not work, but it’s really interesting.
The possibilities in this space are endless. Look for exciting new utility AI agents and get them early. You will see utility agents worth billions of dollars in 2 years.
