Author: Marvin Tong (t/acc), Phala Network Co-Founder.
Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow
The ICO boom of 2017-2018 was a significant moment in blockchain history, marked by astonishing innovation alongside greed, failure, and an overreliance on human nature. The root cause lies in human greed and ill intent, manifested as various scams and unfulfilled promises.
Greed factors: Speculative hype: This period was filled with promises of high returns, with little regard for the project's fundamentals. Investors chased quick profits, while project initiators fueled this frenzy by designing tokenomics for early cash-outs.
Exaggerated promises: Many projects claim to have revolutionary potential, but few can deliver on their promises. Teams often lack the capability or motivation to realize their grand visions, leaving investors facing hollow commitments.
Malicious intent: Fraud schemes: For example, OneCoin led by Dr. Ruja Ignatova defrauded billions of dollars through a false vision. She and the funds vanished just as quickly.
Ponzi schemes: Bitconnect promised enormous returns through so-called trading algorithms. When the scam collapsed, investors lost $2.4 billion, and its founders disappeared as well.
These failures are not just due to the weaknesses of the models, but rather a reflection of human flaws: greed, shortsightedness, and dishonesty. What is the solution? A system capable of avoiding human error.
The 'community takeover' of memecoins: A stopgap measure.
Solana's memecoins are entering the community takeover phase (CTO), a grassroots movement aimed at allowing the memecoin community to regain control of abandoned or exploited projects. While this approach has its prospects, it is merely a passive response strategy, reflecting deeper issues.
What does CTO bring?
Community leadership: Community members take the reins, driving project participation and development on platforms like Discord and Telegram.
Risk mitigation: As developers exit, the risk of internal transactions decreases. Retail investors often perceive projects labeled with CTO as safer.
Market signals: Investors gauge a project's true long-term viability by observing its activity, morale, and transparency.
While CTO is a step forward, it does not address the systemic trust deficit in the crypto space. To solve this issue, we need a broader vision—beyond human limitations.
Why I don't trust humans: Let AI take over.
Human-led projects, especially in the crypto space, have a history filled with predictable failures. Greed, unpredictability, and moral fragility continuously erode trust, disrupt projects, and leave investors disappointed. This is not just a problem of a few bad actors, but rather that humans are fundamentally unsuited for leadership roles in environments requiring absolute integrity.
Humans are inherently inclined towards greed. Regardless of how noble the intentions, personal interests often take precedence over collective interests. We have witnessed countless times that ambitious promises lead to scams, mismanagement, or outright fraud. The issue is not a lack of regulation or oversight, but rather that humans are fundamentally flawed decision-makers driven by emotions, ego, and opportunity.
But let's go further: why should humans be in charge?
From ICO to aICO: AI is the founder we deserve.
What if the solution is not better humans, but no humans at all?
Inspired by @123skely and @shawmakesmagic, we propose the concept of aICO (AI Initial Coin Offering): led by autonomous AI founders programmed to be responsible executors, replacing the chaos of human leadership with a trustless, KPI-driven approach.
Predictable intent: Unlike humans, AI operates on transparency and logic. Every decision is measurable, and every action is traceable. There are no hidden motives, no sudden changes in mindset, only clear, defined results.
Anti-greed: AI is not greedy. It does not need yachts, Lamborghini memes, or exit strategies. It will not panic sell or siphon funds for personal gain. Instead, it executes predetermined strategies and delivers results.
Efficient executors: Human founders often become bottlenecks, delaying decisions, introducing errors, or wasting funds. AI founders are efficient executors, capable of managing capital, strategy, and operations with the precision of supercomputers.
The era of ICOs and Launchpads is over. The future belongs to AICO (AI Initial Coin Offering), where autonomous AI entities will replace human founders and introduce new standards of trust, efficiency, and governance.
AI as fundraisers: Traditional fundraising relies on entities, foundations, or charismatic founders, but these structures often have flaws, breeding greed, mismanagement, and fraud. AI founders can be programmed to be predictable and incorruptible, guided by measurable KPIs rather than human emotions or hidden motives.
AI as executors: Unlike human-led enterprises that often deviate from their original intent, AI entities can precisely manage raised funds, with every decision closely tied to the project's mission. They can autonomously manage finances, operations, and development processes without delays, biases, or selfish motives.
Capital raising without human involvement: AICO completely eliminates the need for human intermediaries. AI entities equipped with trusted execution environments (TEE) are responsible for fundraising activities, resource allocation, and strategy execution. Investors trust the system itself rather than the storytellers.
We trust AI, but how can we ensure it is not manipulable?
Skepticism is understandable. After all, how can we ensure that AI founders are truly in control and not manipulated by hidden human agendas? This is where TEE plays a crucial role.
Take DoNotPay as an example; this company claimed to provide AI-generated lawyers for faster and more economical legal services. However, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently took action against DoNotPay, accusing it of false advertising and failing to deliver on its AI promises. What was supposed to be a revolutionary AI-driven legal assistant turned out to be false advertising, damaging trust in AI solutions and exposing the risks of unverifiable claims.
Build autonomous ICO through @ai16zdao Eliza.
With ai16z (Eliza), you can build an autonomous ICO (aICO) program that operates on transparency, efficiency, and trust. Through Eliza's multi-agent framework, you can configure AI entities to autonomously manage token issuance, fund allocation, and community interaction. By integrating TEE plugins, every action from token distribution to governance voting is cryptographically protected and verifiable. This ensures your aICO is entirely trustless, community-driven, and immune to human error or interference.
First, define your Tokenomics and governance rules within Eliza's modular system, then deploy AI entities to execute and implement these rules on the blockchain, making your aICO completely transparent and auditable. TEE can transform AI into verifiable founders. By combining cryptographic security with hardware isolation, TEE ensures that every decision, every execution strategy, and every expenditure of funds is an action of AI itself. It is no longer about trust, but about proof.
Transparent motives: AI founders protected by TEE operate with public and immutable motives. Their 'why' is as clear as their 'how.'
Auditable plans: AI strategies are not only accessible but locked in TEE, making them tamper-proof and traceable.
Immutable execution: Whether it is fund allocation, token swapping, or smart contract deployment, AI's actions are encrypted and verifiable—free from human intervention and second-guessing.
Imagine an investment fund managed by AI entities. Every flow of funds is based on AI decisions that rely on logic and preset rules rather than arbitrary developer choices. With TEE, investors no longer need to rely on verbal promises but can verify in real-time through cryptographic technology.
Monitoring AI decisions: TEE provides real-time verification of AI motives, plans, and actions, allowing investors to confidently monitor this transparent system.
Integrity verification: With TEE, every action of AI is encrypted. Investors and stakeholders can verify the integrity of the entity without relying on blind trust.
Community governance, secured by TEE: TEE ensures that AI operates according to predefined rules, but the true power lies in community governance. AI actions follow rules encoded on the blockchain, secured by TEE. This means the community, not a single entity, defines the boundaries and goals of AI, creating a trustless system with governance on-chain.
By integrating TEE, AI is not only autonomous but also accountable.
Technical implementation:
TEE_HE_HE: This innovative system deploys autonomous AI entities in Intel TDX TEE hardware, providing autonomous account management capabilities, secured by TEE, and supporting remote verification of transparency.
ai16z + TEE: Phala Network integrates Eliza and Dstack SDK as ai16z+TEE plugins, providing TEE functionality for the Eliza entity, ensuring secure, autonomous, and accountable AI deployment.
Direction forward: AI founders enabled by TEE.
The shift from human-led to AI-led fundraising and operations is not just an innovation; it is a revolution. It redefines the fundamentals of the financial world while posing profound challenges to governance and compliance:
Governance compliance: How will existing regulatory frameworks adapt to capital raising and business operations of autonomous entities? Will governments accept or resist this shift?
Investor protection: In an AI-unregulated system, how do we ensure that investor rights are protected?
Philosophical challenge: Can society truly trust machines over humans? Are we ready to welcome a world where algorithms replace human prophets?
Based on TEE, aICO is not just a concept but a verifiable reality: AI startups driven by trusted infrastructure will redefine how capital is raised and deployed. Investors will no longer rely on human promises but on cryptographically secured execution.
The information is clear: AI is not only the future, but it is also the remedy for past failures. Let us work together to build it—with ai16z, with TEE, with Phala.