Article reproduced from: Nancy
Author: Nancy, PANews
With the gradual improvement of infrastructure and the implementation of application scenarios, the crypto AI Agent ecosystem is thriving, presenting a new market development trajectory, with liquidity and user participation continuously rising. In this wave of AI Agent enthusiasm, ai16z and Virtuals Protocol are undoubtedly the two most prominent representative projects, attracting various capital eager to explore opportunities.
ai16z and Virtuals dominate the AI Agent market, contributing over half of the share.
Although the AI Agent ecosystem is rapidly rising in the crypto market, attracting a lot of attention and capital, its market structure still appears singular, mainly relying on the driving force of a few leading projects.
According to the latest data from Cookie.fun, as of December 30, the overall market capitalization of AI Agents has reached $11.68 billion, with a nearly 39.1% increase over the past 7 days. This growth trend indicates the rapid growth of the AI Agent ecosystem in the crypto market.
From the perspective of ecological scale, the entire crypto AI Agent ecosystem exhibits a significant head effect, mainly dominated by the two projects, Virtuals and ai16z. Specifically, the market capitalization of Virtuals' ecosystem reaches $5.01 billion, while ai16z stands at $1.63 billion, together occupying 56.8% of the AI Agent market share. The combined market capitalization of other projects is approximately $170 million. This also means that the growth and development of AI Agents currently rely more on the construction of these two leading projects.
At the same time, from a type perspective, the market capitalization of Virtuals exceeds that of customized AI Agents, which stands at $4.67 billion, while the cumulative market capitalization of other categories reaches $1.8 billion.
From the on-chain distribution perspective, Base and Solana are the two main battlegrounds for AI Agents. The market capitalization of AI Agents on Base is approximately $5.76 billion, while on Solana it is about $5.47 billion, together contributing 96.1% to the overall market. Other on-chain projects have a cumulative market capitalization of only $920 million, further indicating that the AI Agent ecosystem is still in its infancy.
Although Base and Solana are comparable in the market scale of AI Agents, their ecological compositions differ significantly. The main project in the Base ecosystem is Virtuals, which accounts for 86.9% of the projects in this ecosystem. In contrast, ai16z only occupies nearly one-third of the market share on Solana, indicating that the AI Agent ecosystem on Solana is richer and more diverse compared to Base.
Presenting different ecological development paths, but market concentration is evident in both.
With the rise of Virtuals and ai16z, their ecological projects have also become the focus of market investors' attention and bets.
According to data from daos.fun, as of December 30, the net asset value (NAV) of ai16z is approximately $23.355 million, covering over 1,400 tokens. Among these tokens, only 3 have a market capitalization exceeding one million dollars: ELIZA, fxn, and degenai, whose cumulative market capitalization accounts for 84.3% of the total; there are 6 tokens with asset sizes between $100,000 and $1 million, and the remaining tokens have market capitalizations below $100,000. This distribution indicates that ai16z's token composition is relatively concentrated, with a few high-value tokens dominating the overall asset scale, while most tokens have a more fragmented market value, showing that this ecosystem is still in a highly differentiated state.
Compared to ai16z, the quality of projects in the Virtuals ecosystem is relatively higher, and recently it has been discussed due to its market capitalization exceeding that of the star AI project Bittensor (TAO). Nevertheless, there is still some structural imbalance within the Virtuals ecosystem.
The Virtuals official website shows that as of December 30, there are about 510 projects in the Virtuals ecosystem. Among them, 4 projects have a market capitalization exceeding $10 million: AIXBT, G.A.M.E, Luna, and VaderAI, accounting for 19.2% of the overall ecosystem; there are 99 projects with market capitalizations between $1 million and $10 million, while about 60% of the remaining projects have market capitalizations below $100,000. The overall projects in the Virtuals ecosystem receive more market recognition, but there is a certain degree of concentration issue in its ecological development.
Regarding the different AI Agent development paths of ai16z and Virtuals, Web3 independent researcher Haotian previously pointed out that ai16z is more open-source, resembling an 'Android-style' developer ecosystem alliance. However, due to ai16z's token being in an extreme state of no-token economics, the tokens in its entire suite lack a reasonable evaluation model and cannot form synergy in the short term. Nevertheless, this will be resolved after a systematic Tokenomics is established. At the same time, each member of the ai16z suite has its own strengths, with the momentum relying on the developer community's power. The first thing founder Shaw aims to do is lead the scattered suite into a super open-source growth flywheel driven by technology open-source communities.
In a recent interview with PANews, Shaw revealed that ai16z will announce a new token economics proposal around January 1, 2025, which will include LP pairing mechanisms, DeFi functionality integration, and other content.
Comparison of Virtuals and ai16z, Source: @0xgangWhat
In contrast, Virtuals is relatively closed. Haotian pointed out that Virtuals has taken an 'Apple-style' ecological expansion route, resembling an AI Agent 'star-making factory.' Due to Virtuals having a complete token economics early on, users need to stake VIRTUAL tokens to create AI Agents, and purchasing new AI Agent tokens requires spending VIRTUAL tokens. Therefore, as more AI Agents are issued on Virtuals, the demand for Virtuals tokens increases, naturally creating a positive growth flywheel effect. However, because Virtuals focuses on asset issuance platforms and provides a standard AI Agent framework, the AI Agents on the platform may become quite homogeneous. The emphasis on asset issuance rather than technological breakthroughs in Virtuals is essentially a limitation of a closed ecosystem.
From pure MEME to on-chain applications, AI Agents are innovating market operation models.
The hype surrounding Virtuals and ai16z reflects the increased attention on AI Agents and is an important manifestation of the evolution of MEME.
"AI is the main theme of human technology and productivity enhancement for the next 20 years, and can be integrated into all Crypto categories, including DeFi, GameFi, NFT, and Desci. During the rapid enhancement phase, it will bring a large number of new applications and technologies that can be applied in Crypto." Crypto KOL 0xWizard believes that new targets combining AI could recreate a new on-chain asset market value, even reconstructing the total market value of crypto.
"From the initial pure MEME like GOAT, to chat-enabled AI Agents, then to on-chain funds like ai16z, and then to new asset issuance platforms like Virtual and Spore, each step is getting closer to application. The essence of this on-chain market trend is that new 'application projects' bypass exchanges and VCs, directly achieving profit redistribution through on-chain asset issuance models. At the same time, project parties no longer need to curry favor with VCs, compete for resources, or pay tolls to exchanges; they can directly showcase their projects on-chain to see if the market will respond." Crypto KOL @Michael_Liu93 pointed out.
Haotian also believes that the environment has changed, and the logic of capturing value in the market is also changing, mainly reflected in the following points: (1) from previously stacking infrastructures that detached from actual market demands to using AI Agent applications to validate market demand; (2) past VC rounds of financing have led to increasingly narrow profit margins in the secondary market, and now projects can be built in the form of open-source Public Good to directly finance the secondary market, while allowing AI Agents to autonomously manage assets, which brings greater imaginative space for projects; (3) the previous methods of airdropping to gain early users and traffic have brought subsequent operational pressure, while opening with a MEME-based secondary approach can suit continuously growing Tokenomics (LP fees, transaction taxes, reserved share releases, etc.); (4) breaking away from the terminal of CEX listings will gradually lean towards DEX, with high-quality project parties having a greater chance of achieving a 'grassroots counterattack'; (5) realizing new market operation rules, projects that do not engage deeply with the community or remain focused on product lines will find it hard to emerge in the market and ecosystem.
