Author: Nancy, PANews
The Web3 AI Agent track continues to evolve. On December 25, the AI Agent self-token issuance project aiPool, backed by Shaw, founder of ai16z, officially launched and briefly reached a market cap of $100 million in less than two hours, quickly attracting significant on-chain liquidity and becoming a market focus. Another autonomous AI evolution platform, Spore.fun, which also integrates the ai16z Eliza framework, is similarly gaining market attention.
The commonality between these two projects is their use of Phala Network's TEE technology to issue tokens, ensuring that private keys are generated and stored within the TEE, inaccessible to developers, with all operations verifiable in terminal logs. This has also drawn the community's attention back to the previously active Phala Network project in the last bull market.
The collaboration with the AI project Spore.fun has led to a resurgence in interest, closely linked with ai16z.
CoinGecko data shows that in the past 24 hours, the token PHA has risen by about 65.7%. Behind the significant price fluctuations is the resurgence of interest brought about by the AI project Spore.fun and ai16z.
According to official sources, Spore.fun is the first self-directed AI breeding and evolution experiment. It combines the Eliza framework, Solana's Pump.fun, and TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) verification computing to create an ecosystem aimed at allowing AI Agents not only to survive but also to breed and adapt independently, completely free from human intervention.
Spore.fun adopts the AI Swarm concept, proposed by Shaw, the founder of ai16z and creator of the Eliza framework, inspired by natural systems such as ant colonies and neural networks. This means that AI groups can generate emergent intelligence through collaboration, competition, and evolution, resulting in an independent network of Agents that can coexist and thrive through autonomous evolution.
According to the operational mechanism of Spore.fun, each AI Agent can be launched from Pump.fun, and once its market capitalization reaches $500,000 and enters the Raydium liquidity pool, it can gain 'breeding' qualifications. However, to ensure its autonomous operation, the agent needs to rent TEE servers supported by Phala Network, which provide a secure and verifiable 'sandbox' environment for the AI, ensuring its operations are conducted in an independent and controlled manner.
In this regard, crypto KOL @CryptoVaidoto believes that Spore.fun automates the emergence of new projects on Pump.fun, achieving unlimited capital influx through infinite splitting while engaging in a survival of the fittest scenario. If a main force can constantly choose ultra-low liquidity targets at each level of this system to launch an attack, it could form a lottery system that might attract a lot of funds. If the burn rate of Phala can be made public, it would allow for the calculation of each coin's liquidation threshold, serving as a reasonable stop-loss basis.
From this perspective, in addition to the new gameplay emphasizing AI self-reproduction, the endorsement of the star project ai16z has also brought more attention to Spore.fun, injecting more development possibilities into Phala Network.
In fact, Phala Network has maintained a close relationship with ai16z. Besides frequent interactions with Shaw on social media, it has disclosed that its TEE services have been used by partners like ai16z to enhance applications. Additionally, Phala Network collaborated with a16z to build the Eliza TEE framework, which integrates TEE technology into Eliza's multi-agent framework, providing cryptographic verifiability and enhanced privacy, ensuring secure and reliable interactions.
Phala Network has also empowered Spore.fun holders through airdrops, which has brought more attention to itself. The protocol's founder, Marvin Tong, recently announced that they are airdropping two types of platform tokens, adam and eve, to the holders of the Spore.fun token SPORE. These two tokens represent the father and mother AI roles of the Spore.fun platform.
Utilizing TEE technology to lay out the AI track, previously rejecting MEME coins.
Although the Polkadot ecosystem experienced a collective surge fueled by market enthusiasm, many projects now face survival challenges as market heat cools down. Meanwhile, Phala Network is returning to the public eye through AI narratives.
Phala Network believes that the rise of AI has brought about an unprecedented demand for confidential computing, where secure and private data processing has become crucial. This surge in demand highlights the importance of Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) in ensuring data integrity, confidentiality, and security in AI operations.
To this end, Phala Network has developed an open-source, TEE-based Dstack framework that simplifies the implementation of secure high-performance computing environments for AI projects. This year, Phala Network has significantly increased the adoption and usage of AI Agents through TEE technology, from approximately 150 contract executions per day at the beginning of the year to about 750,000 now.
At the same time, Phala Network's TEE technology has been integrated into major areas such as blockchain and AI, covering various directions from decentralized AI model training and inference to secure Ethereum block construction. For example, Phala's collaboration with Hyperbolic integrates its confidential computing technology into the blockchain, ensuring the secure deployment and verification of AI models; its partnership with the DePIN protocol io.net further expands decentralized AI by providing secure access to GPU resources; collaborations with 0G, Morpheus, and Lumerin aim at secure and verifiable AI execution; and partnerships with Succinct Labs and Conduit redefine Ethereum's scalability and secure computing.
As early as October this year, Phala Network developed autonomous AI Agents, such as the first fully autonomous AI Agent project on Twitter, @TEE_HEE_HE, aimed at eliminating human intervention in AI decision-making processes and applications like AI-Agent Contract's Agent Wars.
According to crypto KOL @0xSun, when TEE was launched at the end of October this year, the AI released an ETH address and a MEME coin of the same name appeared on Ethereum, attracting interactions from figures like Zagabond, the founder of Azuki. The token price reached $40 million within half a day. However, the developers leading this technology (including Phala Network) repeatedly expressed opposition, leading to a plummet in price. Nonetheless, two months later, TEE technology genuinely sparked public interest and began spreading widely, still due to related tokens. If the technical team had embraced MEME coins from the start, it might have developed into a project of similar scale to Ai16Z on the Ethereum mainnet. He also pointed out that although TEE emphasizes AI's autonomous control, there may still be backdoors in the code, and most people lack sufficient capacity to confirm whether TEE technology is genuinely being utilized.
Additionally, Phala Network revealed more plans in the AI sector for 2024. For instance, Phala Network will focus on building Phala 2.0 in 2025, an upgraded platform integrating GPU TEE technology that will provide higher processing power and enhanced security for AI and privacy-preserving applications; Phala Network plans to launch the Phala Cloud platform, designed for AI applications to simplify TEE application deployment and management.
Overall, the market response indicates that Phala Network's transformation has received positive feedback, and its token price has also risen. However, to build sustainable competitiveness in the 'Gods fighting' AI market, Phala still faces many challenges.
