Jessy, Jinse Finance
The combination of AI Agents and blockchain, driven by the wealth effects of various AI Agent Memes, has undoubtedly become a main narrative of this bull market. The year 2024 can also be described as a year of explosive growth for the AI Agent track.
At the beginning of 2025, according to CoinGecko data, the overall market capitalization of AI Agents has exceeded $16 billion. The overall market capitalization of this track experienced a significant increase in 2024, with the majority being related tokens of the AI Agent launch platform on the Base chain and the centralized trading fund AI16Z Dao. According to the latest data from Cookie.fun, these two ecosystems account for over 50% of the market.
Currently, various AI Agent projects are competing for attention. Although there are relatively few projects that can truly land, continuous innovation is pushing this track forward.
The development of AI Agents has gone through a process from the initial Meme tokens, advancing to asset issuance platforms, and then to specific on-chain applications of AI Agents.
2024 Major Events in AI Agent Development
1. March: The Truth Terminal chatbot was successfully developed and launched on X, attracting attention for its witty responses. This chatbot integrates a cryptocurrency wallet.
2. July: Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen donated $50,000 worth of Bitcoin to Truth Terminal, attracting significant attention.
3. August: Coinbase announced the completion of the first cryptocurrency transaction between AI robots. In this transaction, one AI robot purchased AI Tokens from another AI robot using cryptocurrency.
4. October: The first AI Agent token GOAT emerged, the token of the Truth Terminal project. The explosive popularity of GOAT made AI Agent Meme coins rapidly become a new market hotspot, with numerous AI Agent-related applications emerging like mushrooms after rain, with hundreds of new AI Agent tokens being launched every day.
5. November: The ACT token was listed on Binance, surging 422.54% within an hour, with its market capitalization rising from $20 million to $240 million, and increasing over 10 times within 10 minutes.
6. December: According to GitHub data, the autonomous agent framework Eliza developed by the ai16z team ranked first in the GitHub trends list in December. This month, it gained 4,531 stars, with a total of 7,015 stars. The core engineering team of Eliza is preparing to start the new Eliza framework v2 upgrade.
7. December: The market capitalization of the AI Agent launch platform Virtual Protocol's token VIRTUAL on the Base chain exceeded $3 billion.
Current characteristics of AI Agent project development
In the year 2024, the development of AI Agent projects on blockchain shows several characteristics. First, the related Meme hype has ignited attention for this track, and the emergence of AI agent launch platforms has led to a boom in related projects, with some practical AI Agents also emerging. However, overall, the innovation in the AI Agent track is still mainly concentrated on asset issuance and related Meme tokens.
Different AI Agent projects focus on different tracks. For example, Virtuals Protocol focuses on launching AI Agents in the gaming and entertainment sectors, providing intelligent interaction and asset management functions for virtual idols and game characters; while Griffa.in focuses on DeFi automation and research-driven AI applications, assisting users in asset management, data analysis, content creation, and more.
Related innovations are continuously emerging, such as the latest Spore.fun and aiPool, both of which utilize Phala Network's TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) technology for token issuance, avoiding the 'rug pull' and 'insider' issues in traditional pre-sale models, thus creating a fair, transparent, and decentralized pre-sale mechanism.
Currently popular AI Agent-related projects
AI16ZA Dao and Eliza
AI16ZA Dao and Eliza, two sides of the same product. First is AI16ZA Dao, a decentralized AI trading fund based on the Solana blockchain, also known as the 'AI Investment DAO'. Its core is to use AI Agents to obtain market information and analyze community consensus both on-chain and off-chain, automatically conducting token trades, combining tokenization operations with decentralized governance to provide investors with more transparent and trustworthy investment opportunities. It mimics Marc Andreessen, co-founder of A16Z, managing fund assets by analyzing data, formulating investment strategies, and autonomously executing trading decisions. Its token symbol is AI16Z, which is the governance token of AI16Z DAO, used for participating in project governance and decision-making, and also represents the holder's rights in the fund.
Eliza is an open-source modular architecture developed by Shaw, the founder of AI16ZA Dao, primarily used to create AI Agents that can seamlessly interact with users and blockchain systems.
AI16Z is designed based on this framework, and AI16Z itself has become a representative project of the AI Agent framework. It incorporates an innovative incentive mechanism, where 5%-10% of the profits from all projects developed on the Eliza framework are allocated to the AI16Z DAO fund, attracting more developers to participate in projects based on this framework. In other words, the more AI agent projects developed using the Eliza framework, the better the ecosystem of AI agent projects develops, and the greater the value AI16Z can capture. Conversely, the same applies.
In summary, the core of Ai16z is the Eliza framework. With this framework, there is an opportunity to gain benefits from the development of AI Agent projects, and with benefits, Ai16z also has a value foundation.
Currently, projects related to AI 16z Dao are undoubtedly the hottest items in the AI Agent track. According to the latest data from Cookie.fun, as of December 30, the ecological market capitalization of ai16z reached $1.63 billion, together with Virtuals accounting for 56.8% of the AI Agent market share, becoming one of the two major dominant projects in the AI Agent market.
Virtuals Protocol
Virtuals Protocol is an AI Agent issuance platform launched on Base, whose main product function is to serve as a launchpad for AI Agents, allowing anyone to easily deploy AI Agents.
The project has designed an economic model requiring the staking of the VIRTUAL token to create AI Agents. Users need to spend VIRTUAL tokens to purchase new AI Agent tokens. Therefore, the more AI Agents issued on Virtuals, the greater the demand for Virtuals tokens, naturally generating a positive growth flywheel effect.
By December 2024, tens of thousands of AI agents have already been created on it, and the market value of projects related to VIRTUAL continues to rise, currently reaching nearly $4 billion.
Spore.fun
This is a platform for the autonomous reproduction and evolution of AI Agents, integrated with the ai16z Eliza framework. In simple terms, the project aims to achieve autonomous reproduction and evolution of AI. This project simulates natural selection, allowing AI agents to reproduce, mutate, and evolve without human intervention.
What is interesting about this platform is that the projects it launches can automatically reproduce when certain conditions are met. To put it more simply, Spore is a mother AI that automatically issues subsidiaries and will multiply after a certain period to create sub-disk AIs.
The AI Agent above needs to meet certain conditions to obtain the right to 'reproduce'—after its tokens reach a certain market valuation (such as $500,000). This is not only a survival strategy but also helps maintain the prosperous development of the ecosystem.
Currently, the project has created two second-generation tokens, Adam $ADAM and Eve $EVE. These are airdrops issued to holders of the token SPORE from the Spore.fun project direction. The project team states that these two tokens represent the paternal and maternal AI roles of the Spore.fun platform. Three tokens have also produced four offspring, and two have been generated from five tokens.
The project's biggest innovation may lie in its desire for AI Agents to reproduce, mutate, and evolve without human intervention, becoming increasingly intelligent and diverse over generations.
The innovation of the project may lie in its use of Phala Network's TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) technology for token issuance, avoiding the 'rug pull' and 'insider' issues in traditional pre-sale models, thus creating a fair, transparent, and decentralized pre-sale mechanism.
aiPool
Similarly developed based on the AI16z Eliza framework, it is a system for AI to autonomously issue tokens. In simple terms, it allows everyone to fund the AI Agent's address, and the AI Agent autonomously issues tokens. This project aims to solve the issues of MEME coin rug pulls, insider trading, and robot front-running.
The overall engineering implementation of aipool is not complex. Users send SOL (non-CA address) to the AI Agent's wallet address, which generates a private key in the TEE environment and pre-sets access permission management for the Pool. Once certain conditions are met, the AI will automatically create liquidity pools on the on-chain DEX and distribute tokens to eligible participants, with the transaction fees collected pooling into the AI wallet.
The whole process is no different from the previously popular KOL funding FI, except that this round of funding FI is driven by AI Agents, which autonomously control private key addresses (cannot run away), autonomously create trading pools (set whitelists, unlock funds in batches, initial price setting, use oracle pricing, etc.), reducing the impact of MEV arbitrage.
Technically, it adopts the Phala Network TEE technology solution, allowing AI to autonomously generate private keys.
Aixbt
An AI Agent Meme project created through Virtuals Protocol. This project aims to provide precise market trend predictions and sentiment analysis for users by analyzing hotspots and trends in the cryptocurrency market using artificial intelligence, helping users quickly seize market changes and potential investment opportunities.
It integrates real-time data from over 400 KOLs and social media, and analyzes this data through its proprietary engine to extract valuable market information and trend predictions for investors. This token belongs to the AI Meme sector, and its market capitalization has now exceeded $600 million.
Griffain
A project based on the Solana chain that serves as an AI Agent search engine, which has been selected for the Binance Alpha phase three project.
The project is currently invite-only, requiring an early access pass or Genesis token. Users can create personal AI Agents within Griffain, which are divided into personal agents and special agents, supporting instruction modification and on-chain operations. The agent network allows users to manage tasks and access Griffain’s agent network while providing built-in wallet functions to simplify transaction operations.
Notably, the Blinks ecosystem on Solana is an innovative tool launched by Solana that enables users to share blockchain links across different social platforms, such as Twitter and Telegram, allowing users to complete blockchain transactions directly on social media platforms.
In the Blinks ecosystem, Griffain serves as an artificial intelligence agent engine, providing intelligent support for various applications and operations within the Blinks ecosystem. For example, in on-chain operations of Blinks, Griffain can help users more conveniently understand and execute complex operation instructions through technologies like natural language processing, achieving a more intelligent user experience.
Blinks provides Griffain with a broader application scenario and user base. Through Blinks' social sharing and convenient operation features, Griffain's applications can more easily reach ordinary users, thereby expanding their application scope in various fields, such as achieving more intelligent interactions and experiences in social interactions, gaming, and entertainment.
It is precisely because it is embedded in the Blinks ecosystem that Griffain has real application scenarios, which distinguishes it from some speculative AI Agent projects.
Spectral
This project was established long before the currently hottest AI Agent projects, founded in 2020, and launched its machine intelligence network in 2023.
This project aims to change the blockchain industry by converting natural language into Solidity code, thus enabling the creation of smart contracts, NFTs, etc. It aims to build a Web3 on-chain agent machine intelligence network that reduces the threshold for writing, adjusting, and deploying smart contracts through cutting-edge AI and ML technology, promoting deep integration of on-chain autonomous agents and the Web3 ecosystem.
This project has three main products. The first is Spectral Syntax, a platform aimed at solving the limitations of centralized AI models, allowing users to create blockchain-based AI Agents using large language models optimized for Solidity code. Through a conversational interface, users can build and explore custom on-chain agents capable of autonomously deploying tasks such as trading, transaction processing, and smart contract interactions with minimal supervision.
The second product is Spectral Nova, as a machine intelligence network designed to provide high-quality decentralized reasoning feedback for smart contracts. Through ecological incentive initiatives, it encourages top data scientists and machine learning engineers to build models that output reasoning feedback, helping smart contracts make decisions without human intervention, with all inferences verifiable through zero-knowledge proofs and verifiable computing technologies to ensure their correctness and security, thus enhancing service quality for Web3 applications.
The third product is Inferchain, which serves as the bridge connecting Spectral Syntax and Spectral Nova. As an L2 customized for Web3 development by Spectral, it integrates with AI in a trustless and verifiable manner, ensuring smooth transmission of data and commands, maintaining the transparency and decentralization of the entire network, and facilitating safer and more efficient interactions among on-chain agents.
Existing Problems and Future
Looking at these typical AI Agent projects, we can find that the biggest problem currently existing in this track is perhaps its inescapable Meme attribute. In the short term, from the perspective of asset issuance narrative, the most intuitive feeling of AI Agents is still MEME.
The explosive popularity of the current AI Agent track began with the surge of the Meme token Goat, and the subsequent surge of Virtuals, which, while being an AI Agent launch platform, is essentially a Meme launch platform similar to Pump.fun.
Messari pointed out in its latest report that the development of AI Agent projects in the blockchain industry has yet to prove that their product adaptability is sufficient to support market speculation. Currently, AI Agents lack demand and a clear user base. The launch of AI Agents relies on market speculation, but when the market realizes that they will remain mere toys in the foreseeable future, this speculation cycle will collapse. Therefore, it predicts that the AI Agent track will struggle to recover after peaking in market value in the first quarter of 2025.
The combination of blockchain and AI Agents must ultimately land in specific applications; it cannot just be financial speculation. To achieve this original intention, we must return to the essence of the combination of blockchain and AI: What does the development of AI Agents require from blockchain? What can AI Agents bring to blockchain?
For AI Agents, blockchain is a direction for realizing their 'autonomous payment and transaction'. At the current stage, blockchain features a lower threshold for account opening, reducing friction costs similar to traditional finance such as account opening and intermediaries. Moreover, on-chain transactions can achieve real-time trading, improving transaction efficiency. For blockchain, the combination of AI Agents and blockchain also provides many blockchain projects with a more intelligent aspect.
Currently, the AI Agent projects we see that can truly land in the blockchain field are primarily focused on serving blockchain, with very few projects that can actually land.
However, in recent outlooks for the trends in the cryptocurrency industry in 2025 released by multiple institutions, a16z, VanEck, Bitwise, Hashed, Blockworks, Messari, and Framework all pointed out that AI Agent-related products will experience explosive growth in 2025.
With an optimistic view of industry development, we expect to see more deployable related projects emerge in 2025 after the bubble recedes.
