Author: Frank, PANews
AI Agent has become a hot topic in on-chain trading that cannot be ignored. From ai16z to Virtual, and then to Swarms, in just one month, the AI Agent track has again given rise to new sub-ecosystems in the MEME field. Faced with the continuously emerging AI Agent tokens, which can break through the competition and which are just passing concepts? There may be multiple angles to consider, but the flow of funds and changes in main players on-chain may still be the most important indicators.
PANews has taken the recently popular Swarms token as the main object of analysis and conducted a comparative analysis with six high-market-cap AI Agent token addresses, attempting to 'carve a boat to seek a sword' and glean some insights. The data range for this analysis includes the initial purchase and sale situations of the top 1,000 holding addresses of Swarms tokens (data time cutoff at 24:00 on January 6, 2025), the overlap of addresses for six AI-related tokens with a market cap exceeding $100 million such as Fartcoin, GRIFFAIN, ZEREBRO, ai16z, arc, and Swarms (data time cutoff at 14:00 on January 7, 2025), and the analysis of trading records on the internal market.
Some quietly layout at the bottom, while others follow the trend to enter.
First, looking at the timeline of large holders entering the market, most large holders started entering after January 2, which was 12 days after the token was created. In terms of timing, many large holders of Swarms began buying only after the Swarms ecosystem started to gain popularity, failing to complete early layouts.
However, from the price curve of Swarms, if purchased before December 27, the price generally maintained below $0.02, with nearly a 30-fold increase from the current highest price of $0.6. Through analyzing the initial purchase prices of these addresses, 202 addresses bought in the price range of $0.01 to $0.05, while the largest number of addresses bought in the range of $0.3 to $0.4.
The distribution of these two data points means that early layout investors of Swarms bought in batches at low prices during periods of significant price drops, and this buying was relatively dispersed, not concentrated in a single time period. The benefit is being able to acquire chips at a lower price. Another group of large holders began to enter significantly after the discussion around Swarms heightened, but these large holders' holding prices do not have much competitive advantage.
The distribution of chips may explain why the Swarms market appears to have large short-term fluctuations. If large investors who were early to enter sell at a high point, new large investors have a higher cost. Once significant sell-offs occur, it can easily trigger sensitive nerves on both sides, leading to short-term sharp declines.
However, from the perspective of chip distribution, the main chips of Swarms are relatively scattered. In the analysis of the top 1,000 holding addresses, there are not many tokens originating from the same address, and most addresses' initial token sources are primarily on-chain exchanges. Therefore, there is less occurrence of early large investors acquiring a large number of chips and then distributing them to multiple addresses.
Additionally, through comparing internal trading addresses, it was found that the addresses involved in internal purchases basically did not appear among the current top 1,000 holding addresses. Therefore, the early chips of this token have mostly completed rotation.
From the overall data, the average initial purchase price of Swarms tokens is $0.17, while the average initial selling price is $0.23, with the average initial purchase amount per address reaching $37,600, and the average initial selling amount being about $28,200. Comparing the buying and selling situation of individual addresses, the average initial selling price of these addresses is approximately 2.43 times the buying price.
The largest investor has made a profit of $25 million without selling.
Compared to other MEME tokens, the average initial purchase amount for the above-mentioned addresses is significantly higher, mainly influenced by some large addresses. Among them, the address with the highest initial transfer amount is Dsjzh2oj3HxyPefjQr5qqvbR5NrMnvBgptGLSQ3t8T5i, which transferred in about $4.13 million from another address on December 31, followed by several transfers of about $500,000, with the current holding value at $27.33 million.
The address that transferred in, 5HfrnyodRraAw63aRVPueD5Er4D1sRKMZBMx9LBbhUAs, began large purchases as early as 8:22 on December 20, continuously buying afterwards, spending a total of $1.89 million on 54.95 million Swarms, with an average price of about $0.034, currently realizing a profit of approximately $25.44 million.
According to tracking, the earliest associated purchase for this address began at 7:13 (Swarms' opening time was around December 20 at 06:45). Notably, the associated funding address for this address began purchasing ai16z tokens on October 27, yielding a profit multiple of about 36 times.
In addition, another address 5NQTp9jHbzS4N9yKMWxwm8pPZW3RFSFPze3Edwss7iLe transferred in about $3.63 million worth of Swarms tokens on January 4. According to on-chain traces, this address also dispersed purchases through several addresses around January 2, eventually consolidating the tokens into one address, which currently has a holding value of about $5.26 million.
There is also an address H1zFMUjYLzJwcfgXEtwiJ2ykvxmBr7JW6afW29PkcEAe that used a similar method, holding about $2.27 million, but the token source of this address initially came from the Bitget exchange, followed by multiple on-chain purchases.
The combined initial transfer amounts of these three addresses reached approximately $10.53 million. Looking at the purchasing process, the initial approach was to use multiple addresses for dispersed purchases, and once the heat of Swarms rose, all tokens were consolidated into several addresses, becoming the smart money in the eyes of on-chain hunters.
27% of addresses purchased multiple AI Agents. Who is driving AI Agents behind the scenes?
In addition to analyzing the token addresses of Swarms, PANews also conducted a comparative analysis of the top 1,000 holding addresses for six addresses including Fartcoin, GRIFFAIN, ZEREBRO, ai16z, arc, and swarms. In the analysis, it can be seen that among the 6,000 addresses involved in the analysis, 1,647 addresses reappeared, which means that about 27% of the addresses purchased multiple AI Agent-related tokens, with ZEREBRO seeming to be the most favored token among AI large holders, with 405 addresses purchasing this token. Next are arc (368 addresses) and ai16z (334 addresses).
Among these addresses, the address with the highest holdings, DJnHztNmw1H56uYm98PNu5eVZ5yhi9482rZ9zA22TUUz, currently holds AI theme tokens worth about $49.86 million, of which the amount held in ai16z alone is about $42.7 million. Moreover, this is not the entirety of the address's holdings; as early as a month ago, this address had already profited tens of millions of dollars by purchasing tokens like ZEREBRO and GRIFFAIN.
Additionally, 3xzTSh7KSFsnhzVvuGWXMmA3xaA89gCCM1MSS1Ga6ka6 also holds AI-related tokens worth about $42.84 million, with the on-chain holding value exceeding $73 million. According to social media information, this address is likely the wallet address of the early AI Agent address Truth Terminal.
In addition, there are many similar addresses. Among the statistical data, the 1,647 large addresses holding AI-related tokens are worth over $1.58 billion, with about 29 addresses holding more than $10 million in AI assets, and these 29 addresses hold approximately $690 million.
Rather than saying AI Agent may be the hottest trend in 2025, it is more accurate to say that AI Agent is essentially a better story theme in the eyes of large investors.
Analyzing trading behavior outweighs tracking smart money addresses.
With the continuous deepening of on-chain data analysis, tracking smart money seems to have become a popular topic. However, from the perspective of large holders, when laying out chips in the early stages, they do not want too many retail investors to enter the market and seize low-price chips. Therefore, constantly changing wallets and making dispersed purchases have become the basic operations of these trading large holders.
In this way, blindly chasing smart money will gradually become ineffective and may even become a target for malicious harvesting. However, from multiple analyses of the operations of large holders, even using new addresses and making dispersed purchases, there are still management difficulties and issues with fund aggregation. Therefore, in most cases, large holders still need to consolidate the funds of various wallets into one or a few wallet addresses for easier management, and they can also stimulate more following users to enter the market by making small purchases during peak periods. Second, to rapidly gather purchases in the early stages, these early planners had to concentrate their purchases in a specific time period. Although the amounts were relatively dispersed, such regular purchases could still serve as an indicator. After all, their investment amounts are often between hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars; without a certain level of trading determination, they generally wouldn't make frenzied purchases.
Overall, for general retail investors, if one insists on chasing smart money through on-chain tracking, it may be more effective to pay attention to on-chain behavior rather than chasing smart money addresses. Of course, there is an important premise: think like a large investor about what kind of themes will make a good story; otherwise, in the face of endless new tokens, blind chasing is no different from searching for a needle in a haystack.
