At the CES 2025 event on January 7, Jensen Huang, the founder of Nvidia, a leading figure in the AI industry, stated, 'AI Agent is expected to become the next robotics industry, with an industrial scale reaching trillions of dollars.' Although the audience's reaction was lukewarm, the crypto industry has already bought into AI Agents — tokens related to VIRTUAL, ai16z, and swarms have become a few focal points in the recent market, and their price trends have performed well compared to the market.
Odaily Planet Daily will conduct a comparative analysis of the new and old AI concept tokens in this article to glimpse the market direction.
Current situation of new and old AI concept coins: AI Agent tokens are in high demand, while AI concept coins are facing a cooling-off period.
From the intuitive perception of the market level, AI Agent tokens represented by VIRTUAL, ai16z, and swarms are undoubtedly the most eye-catching projects at the moment. Compared to AI concept coins like FET, WLD, and ARKM, the former not only combines the AI concept but also has a broader narrative perspective, a lower entry threshold, and greater expected returns.
Market inertia of '炒新不炒旧': New cars are easier to sell, old cars are too heavy.
As an industry that operates 24/7, the cryptocurrency market's pursuit of new hotspots and new technologies can be said to be an industry commonality, leading to the inertia of '炒新不炒旧' (new is better than old): for market retail investors and the crypto community, compared to the 'AI old coins' which have a larger number of buyers, concentrated chip distribution, and a large number of trapped groups, the new coins related to the AI Agent concept are undoubtedly more attractive — with lower entry barriers, whether in terms of the price of a single token or the overall market capitalization, there are more opportunities to enter AI Agent tokens.
Narratives are more attractive: AI Agent is far more appealing than merely 'riding the AI concept'.
From the perspective of the most discussed narratives in the cryptocurrency industry, events such as AI Agent issuing coins, trading tokens, publishing social media content, and interacting with fans are undoubtedly more interesting, fun, and topic-worthy than making a serious project to 'hardly shape' and ride the AI concept.
After the emergence of Truth Terminal (GOAT), the cryptocurrency industry has opened a Pandora's box for AI Agents, liberating the power of AI in a way that many did not anticipate, endowing cryptocurrencies with stronger technological attributes, future attributes, and narratives with more imaginative space — the things that AI Agents can do in the crypto field go beyond merely helping humans produce content but involve the possibility of directly participating in human social and economic activities and monetary transactions.
Project Route Differences: The team, technology, and development directions are vastly different.
In terms of project development routes, the current AI Agent and token projects also have certain differences compared to the previous established AI concept coin projects.
From the team perspective, AI Agent and token projects often start with developers working individually. On one hand, AI and AI Agent provide developers and even ordinary people with a lower-cost, lower-threshold development path. On the other hand, relatively independent developers can respond quickly to market hotspots and adjust project directions based on market feedback, resulting in lower decision-making and optimization costs, which aligns more with the positioning of a 'makeshift team'. In contrast, established AI concept projects often begin with mature teams, harboring grand mission visions, and focus on attracting high amounts of investment through grand narratives, with project development timelines measured in years, and are relatively more accountable to investors rather than originating from the community. FET (Fetch.ai) is a typical case, having raised $5 million and $40 million in March 2021 and March 2023 respectively, and being the second crowdfunding project issued by Binance's IEO.
From a technological perspective, previous AI concept coin-related projects often viewed technology as a tool and packaging, emphasizing practical use cases and user scenarios, but the actual business implementation was far from AI, creating a strong sense of distance from users. In contrast, current AI Agent and token projects are relatively simpler and more straightforward, where the technological origin lies in the AI technology that has experienced a technological explosion, with a relatively lower understanding threshold and greater technological extensibility, allowing users to personally engage in practical operations, making user education in technology more direct and in-depth.
In terms of development direction, established AI concept coin projects emphasize building the future digital economy through AI, which sounds more like 'drawing a pie', with relatively limited relevance to market and user interests. In contrast, AI Agent and token projects not only have specific visual images for users to interact with, but the token trading is also more direct, better meeting market demands whether for speculative trading or social media interaction.
In summary, AI Agent token projects, including VIRTUAL, ai16z, and swarms, are more like meme coins dressed in AI clothing; whereas AI concept coins, including FET, WLD, and ARKM, are closer to the 'VC coin' concept, being farther from the community, and their meme attributes are vastly different from the former, making it difficult for them to compare in topic discussion with the rising AI Agent and the tokens and developers behind them.
Overview of established AI concept coins: Projects are advancing steadily, with various differences in token deflation, dumps, and unlocks.
Despite the market's relatively calm performance, various established AI concept coin-related projects have still made varying degrees of progress recently, as detailed below:
FET: 5 million tokens will be destroyed on January 10.
The project team behind FET, Artificial Superintelligence Alliance, announced on January 5 that it plans to destroy 5 million FET tokens on January 10, creating deflationary pressure in its ecosystem. This milestone is also part of the ASI Train model in its roadmap.
Perhaps the heat of the AI sector makes it difficult for FET to remain indifferent, necessitating efforts to garner more market attention for its token performance and project development.
WLD: The project is advancing steadily, and the token transfers are still ongoing.
Worldcoin previously launched Worldchain and introduced a new World ID Passport Credential last November, which is currently being trialed in countries such as Chile, Colombia, Malaysia, and South Korea. The World ID credential allows individuals to connect valid forms of ID (starting with NFC-supported passports) to their World ID without sharing any information with TFH, the World Foundation, or any other third party. Meanwhile, the World Foundation is providing WLD tokens to individuals with valid World ID passport certificates.
Additionally, according to email information released by Worldcoin to users, the number of participants in the Worldcoin community has reached 20 million. As for the tokens, in early December last year, according to monitoring by the Shield, Alameda's marked addresses had transferred about 5 million WLD tokens (worth about $16 million) to addresses 0xd9C4 and 0xEF90.
ARKM: Platform function updates, promoting derivatives exchange.
As a project that once gained high attention from numerous crypto KOLs in the Chinese community for its previous 'indifference' and now being out of reach, Arkham continues to cultivate in the blockchain data analysis platform field. On January 6, according to an official announcement, Arkham announced the addition of a Market Data page, supporting users in tracking key token data for spot, futures, and options products across multiple CEXs.
In November last year, Arkham officially announced the launch of the derivatives exchange ARKHAM PERPETUALS EXCHANGE, and subsequently launched the exchange points (ARKHAM EXCHANGE POINTS) system to encourage users to trade and earn points. However, the results have been minimal as indicated by various posts on the X platform.
Market Overview: The historical decline of established AI tokens has reached as high as 81%.
As of the time of writing, the market performance of representative 'established AI concept coins' is as follows:
FET is currently reported at $1.35, with a 24-hour decline of 13.11%. The historical highest price was $3.48, with a historical decline of about 61.5%. The market capitalization is currently reported at $3.54 billion.
WLD is currently reported at $2.27, with a 24-hour decline of 13.21%. The historical highest price was $11.96, with a historical decline of about 81%. The market capitalization is currently reported at $1.96 billion.
ARKM is currently reported at $1.4, with a 24-hour decline of 15.98%. The historical highest price was $2.7, with a historical decline of about 48%. The market capitalization is currently reported at $468 million.
At the same time, the market capitalization of AI Agent-related tokens has been rising, and they have currently stabilized at key nodes. According to Coingecko data, among these:
VIRTUAL is currently reported at $3.59, with a market capitalization of $3.59 billion.
ai16z is currently reported at $1.83, with a market capitalization of approximately $2 billion.
swarms is currently reported at $0.35, with a market capitalization of approximately $350 million.
To some extent, in terms of market performance and discussion levels, AI Agent-related token projects have become equally prominent.
Conclusion: Can the old tree bloom again? It depends on the response of established projects.
In conclusion, we can only make phased judgments. The established AI concept token projects are temporarily lagging behind the latest hotspot AI Agent token projects. Whether these established projects can rejuvenate, find new growth points, and regain market attention mainly depends on their follow-up and iteration on new technologies, new routes, and new hotspots.
If we sit idly by, everything will naturally come to an end; however, if we strive to catch up, perhaps there will be different results and answers.
Attached is the token unlocking query website:
FET - https://tokenomist.ai/fetch-ai, the next large unlocking will begin on January 28, 2025, with an unlocking amount of 3.34 million tokens.
WLD - https://tokenomist.ai/worldcoin-wld, the next large unlocking will begin on June 24, 2026.
