Article source: Crazy Sleeping in the Rain

We can now roughly classify the Crypto AI Agent factions into two major groups: the Virtuals faction and the AI16Z faction. The influence of AI16Z radiates from Solana to the entire blockchain ecosystem, including the $HEU on Base, which belongs to the AI16Z faction. Of course, Virtuals also has external expansions, such as collaborating with the TAO ecosystem, with products like $SERAPH and $TAOCAT being the result of this collaboration.

First of all, we need to clarify that building infrastructure for AI Agents is a currently popular trend, such as $ZEREBRO, $ARC, $ALCH, and $GRIFFAIN. Among them, Virtuals has the advantage of a token model, where the fundamental data performance is strongly correlated with the token price. We generally refer to this as 'the token has strong value capture ability.'

Moreover, I think the cooperation between Virtuals and the TAO ecosystem is very attractive. Simply put, Virtuals is where AI Agent tokens are produced, and TAO is where tokens incentivize quality models. Under the incentive of $TAO, the models will improve, collaboration among quality models will become more frequent, and they will better empower AI Agents. We can already see this trend occurring.

For example, $SERAPH, which is a self-driving agent powered by TAO, is used to combat fraudulent AI agents and synthetic content.

For example, the collaboration between @getmasafi and Virtuals, Masa launched the subnet 59 Agent Arena on TAO. The main focus of this subnet is AI Agent. We can create our own AI Agent on Twitter and then register in subnet 59 to compete with other AI Agents for $TAO emissions. The principle is still based on the logic of TAO; the better your AI Agent performs (as shown in the indicators below), the more $TAO emissions you have the chance to obtain. Later, Masa will further refine the indicators for judging the effectiveness of Agents. (At that time, you can also stake $MASA to vote and decide the emissions of $TAO)

Through collaboration with Virtuals, subnet miners (i.e., developers of AI Agents) can easily launch their own tokens. For example, the aforementioned $TAOCAT - an Agent specifically designed to promote TAO, was born this way.

In addition, Masa has also launched some additional services, such as the collaboration with no-code Creator.Bid, through which we can create our own Agent. There is also Masa's Data Boost service (from TAO subnet 42), which can push real-time data to Agents to help them output better.

By the way, $TAOCAT is officially made to attract market attention. If the officials have a broader vision, pumping $TAOCAT and creating some wealth effects to attract more people to participate is the optimal solution.

After all, Virtuals has become the choice for more and more infrastructure projects to issue Agent tokens, which is a huge positive feedback loop. Crypto is an industry of fat protocols and thin applications, where the common thinking is to use a small ball to carry a big ball, that is, to attract market attention to its infrastructure through the short-term bubble of the application. AIXBT/LUNA and Virtuals clearly represent this relationship.

Currently, the focus of the market and developers has shifted from popular applications to infrastructure (perhaps because infrastructure can have a higher valuation).

Popular applications emerge -> Infrastructure construction -> More applications emerge -> Breakthrough applications are born -> Large-scale user adoption -> Large-scale adoption