The current crypto market landscape is:
Bitcoin is digital gold, and is continuously purchased by ETF funds, listed companies represented by MSTR, and even the government as a strategic reserve; Ethereum's infrastructure is very "complete" and rich, but very deserted; SOL has various hot spots and concepts emerging one after another, and it is very popular; other altcoins rise and fall passively with the market and follow the trend.
Almost all of the ecological hot spots of Ethereum, the "king of ecology", have been snatched away by SOL in this cycle, making it lose its luster. In the financial market, whether it is the stock market, futures, foreign exchange or crypto market, the money-making effect is the first priority. Ordinary users do not understand so many technologies and principles, as long as they can hype and make money. In this cycle, the Ethereum Foundation and Vitalik Buterin are addicted to technology and faith. Ecological projects around Ethereum rely on the support of the foundation and the financing endorsement of institutions, using airdrops as a gimmick. The on-chain data looks very prosperous. After the high market value is listed, the continuous sale of coins has made a fortune, and there is no intention to develop ecological applications, resulting in a basically negative wealth effect.
The money-making effect is the most important aspect of the secondary market. In 2017, 99% of the ICO projects in the Ethereum ecosystem were just air, hyped concepts, but it was these air tokens that created Ethereum. These air coins had a market value of millions of dollars upon listing, with very few exceeding a market value of 100 million dollars, yet they experienced dozens or even hundreds of times in speculation after listing, resembling today's SOL ecosystem; the difference is that today's products are much more fun and appealing than back then.
Whether it's meme coins or the currently popular AI agents, as long as they go viral, they can easily be speculated to a market cap of 1 billion dollars within just a few days. The key point is not whether meme coins or AI tokens have value, but that many tools have been created around them. These tools significantly enhance the SOL ecosystem, driving the development of infrastructure applications through these 'air ecosystems.' When these infrastructure applications develop well, they can create more 'hotspot' concepts. Ethereum has built many infrastructure applications, assuming people would come to build the ecosystem, but the key is that the costs of these infrastructures are still very high, losing the wealth effect.
For example, the speculation of meme coins in the SOL ecosystem has given rise to the PUMP platform. Users only need to input the name, website, and link of the meme coin they want to issue, along with some additional information, and pay a minimal gas fee to successfully issue it. This has led to a massive explosion of meme coins, which in turn has caused a surge in trading volume for DeFi projects like ray and jup, whose trading volumes often exceed that of Ethereum's largest Uni platform.
Most of the recently popular AI agents are also on SOL, with tokens like ai16z and swarms experiencing dozens of times increase in just a few days. Users can easily use the platform's tools to create their own AI agents (similar to issuing memes through PUMP, without needing to understand much about AI technology principles, just use it directly), further strengthening the prosperity of the SOL ecosystem.
Whether it's memes or the current AI agents, they are essentially not very useful. AI agents sound impressive, but they are just various large frameworks and API interface calls from Web 2.0, packaged with a token concept, and then let the market speculate. But none of this is important; the secondary market needs to create hotspots and concepts to give users a money-making effect. From this perspective, SOL is likely to be the choice for users for a long time in the future.
#SOL ecosystem #AI AGENT
