Original source: Rhythm

Reprinted: Koala, Mars Finance

This morning, Vitalik and Jesse bought the Base ecosystem meme coin ANON one after another, which once again set off an AI token craze on Base. This functional token with ZK technology once again made the community realize that Base may have ushered in a narrative like Degen at the beginning of the year.

Half a year ago, most of the Crypto AI projects on the market were concepts related to traditional AI technology, such as AI+DePIN and computing power leasing. But now, Crypto AI projects have taken a different approach. From the AI ​​Bot token GOAT, which reached a market value of $800 million without Binance’s participation, to AI16Z’s launch of the AI ​​investment DAO model last weekend, AI seems to have opened up a new world for the old narrative of the currency circle.

However, the simple narrative of "AI issuing memes" does not seem to be able to support the huge imagination space required by investors. Therefore, from the AI ​​meme craze to the current AI Agent craze, the narrative and main battlefield of AI + Crypto are evolving rapidly, leaving behind all those who do not understand the AI ​​meme trend.

From AI meme to AI Agent, the AI ​​+ Crypto narrative evolves at the speed of light

In March this year, Virtual Protocol was launched with the goal of creating an AI factory for games and the metaverse, while making games more intelligent, increasing the sense of experience and interaction. In this wave of narrative transformation from AI meme to AI Agent, Virtual Protocol is undoubtedly the biggest beneficiary. Its native token VIRTUAL has risen more than 4 times in about a week, and its market value has almost exceeded US$500 million.

In mid-October this year, IAO, the token issuance platform of Virtual Protocol, was officially launched, allowing users to easily deploy AI Agents, achieve 100% fair launch of AI Agent tokens, and allow users to jointly own the income generated by the AI ​​Agent. Subsequently, VIRTUAL embarked on the road of service growth.

AI Agent refers to artificial intelligence with tools and reasoning capabilities. In the field of cryptocurrency, these agents can access tweets and even have crypto wallets to conduct on-chain transactions. Suppose you are planning a trip, traditional large language models can provide you with destination information or travel suggestions, while AI Agent can understand your needs and actively search for flights and hotels based on your words and perform reservation operations.

For Virtual, its protocol is like a decentralized AI factory, providing support for many different AI Agents to create virtual experiences on the chain. The representative AI Agent project launched by Virtual is Luna, which has the ability of "on-chain self-cognition", can think for itself, and display its thinking process on the chain, and operates completely autonomously without relying on human supervision.

However, AI Agent is not a track that has become popular only after Virtual. Projects such as Myshell and FLock.io have launched the function of customizing AI Agent. At present, the total market value of AI Agent track has reached 4.65 billion US dollars, accounting for 14% of the total market value of AI track projects (32.6 billion US dollars).

ArkStream Capital once released an AI Agent research report, mentioning that for the leading AI Agent products in Web3, building a complete ecosystem and providing diverse functions may be more critical than the quality and performance of a single product. In other words, the success of a project depends not only on what it provides, but also on how it integrates resources, promotes collaboration, and creates network effects within the ecosystem.

AI in late autumn, AI in Base

Being good at promoting abstract concepts has always been a feature of Crypto, and Base has taken this industry culture to the extreme. For example, this wave of AI craze, when it comes to the Base ecosystem, is summarized as AI Autumn, just like Onchain Summer and Builder Spring in the past.

While you are still immersed in the exciting PVP battles on Solana, have you suddenly realized why Base has risen rapidly in the second wave of AI craze this year?

Follow Hongmiaozheng's "AI Chain"

The Virtual Protocol introduced in the previous article is an AI project deployed on Base. The team once explained why it was deployed on Base. It is because it supports the acceleration of the realization of a decentralized open AI agent network, realizes common interests through the neutrality of the blockchain, and provides a developer-friendly environment.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong once publicly stated that AI should not be regulated. Just as the golden age of software and the Internet benefited from free development, AI should follow the same decentralized and open source path to allow technology to freely unleash its potential.

Therefore, the entire Coinbase company and even its incubated Base will implement this concept to the end.

The multi-party computation (MPC) wallet launched by Coinbase Developer Platform (CDP) can be integrated with AI Agent to enable it to make payments autonomously. Brian Armstrong encourages developers to integrate this wallet into their AI models to enable payment capabilities, thereby helping AI obtain resources and services.

Coinbase did not just add the payment function to AI Agent on a whim, but had been planning for a long time. As early as May of this year, Brian Armstrong said that "self-hosted crypto wallets will provide support for AI Agent." Brian also publicly provided an independent crypto wallet for the AI ​​chatbot Truth Terminal.

In September, Coinbase senior software engineer yuga.eth said that Coinbase is building an SDK that will give Bots and AI Agents the following functions: sending USDC for free, trading cryptocurrencies, betting on prediction markets, staking ETH/SOL, converting between fiat and cryptocurrencies, deploying/creating NFTs, and bridging across L2s.

Just last weekend, Coinbase developer Lincoln Murr released a demo video of a new tool called "Based Agent", which allows users to create an AI agent with crypto wallet functions in 3 minutes, which can perform multiple tasks such as on-chain transactions, token swaps and staking. It is also said that this tool is developed based on the Coinbase SDK, OpenAI and Replit platforms, and users only need the API key of the Coinbase developer project and the OpenAI key to use it. However, there is no actual use case for Based Agent at present.

Liquidity is ready to go

However, in the cryptocurrency world, whether an ecosystem or narrative can take off ultimately depends on the flow of money.

According to Artemis data, Solana has received the most capital inflows in the past three months, reaching $1.6 billion, but Base has received the most capital inflows in the past month, reaching $253 million. In other words, Base has surpassed Solana in terms of capital growth rate in the past month and has become the first.

As can be seen from the figure below, the overflow funds of Ethereum and Solana also mainly flowed to Base.

On September 12, Coinbase officially announced that it has officially launched its wrapped Bitcoin token Coinbase Wrapped BTC (cbBTC), which runs on the Ethereum network and is backed by 1:1 Bitcoin. With the launch of cbBTC by Coinbase, Base's on-chain assets, such as AERO, WELL, VIRTUAL and other projects, have actually felt the injection of liquidity.

In addition, Coinbase Wallet and USDC infrastructure also ensured liquidity on Base. On October 26, Base processed $18.1 billion in stablecoin transactions (99.9% of which were USDC), accounting for more than 30% of all stablecoin transactions on that day.

What to focus on?

Crypto researcher Howe once said that the future development of the AI ​​Agent track should focus on the following four points: First, projects that rely purely on Agent narratives will find it difficult to stand out and must attract market attention through differentiated competition; second, AI Agents will gradually shift from single independence to interconnected AgentFi, and sharing of data and services will enhance user experience; third, tool projects that support Agent development with the "water selling logic" will have more market opportunities, similar to stable and profitable infrastructure; finally, the main revenue of Agent products comes from the B-end, while the C-end is more used to accumulate word of mouth, although the promotion of C-end users also helps the market dissemination of the product.

Since Coinbase and Base have prepared the stage for this AI drama, all you need to do next is look for projects like Virtual to participate in this AI Autumn. And the second wave of AI token craze revolution happened entirely on Farcaster, the back garden of Base SocialFi. When this article was first published, I recommended readers to pay attention to platforms such as Bountycaster, the task publishing platform, and AI Agent Aether. Next, I will introduce to readers the projects that Base AI tokens should keep an eye on.

CLANKER

Clanker is an AI Agent developed by dish and proxystudio.eth, and its native token is CLANKER. Currently, Clanker has become a decentralized token generation platform based on AI technology. Users only need to tag Clanker on the Farcaster platform and enter the name of the token they want to create. The CLANKER system will automatically generate the token and provide the corresponding Clanker.world link for users to view and manage. The community even compared it with Pump Fun and created the Dune dashboard for data analysis.

Clanker's success is not only reflected in the technical level, but also in its redefinition of the model of community participation and asset creation, injecting vitality into the decentralized social and economic system. So far, CLANKER has supported the creation of nearly 2,000 tokens, among which LUM and ANON have quickly grown into star projects on Base. This morning, CLANKER's market value once exceeded 15M, and as of the time of writing, the market value is 12.7M, with a 24-hour increase of 52%.

LUM

LUM is a meme coin created autonomously by the two AI Agents Aether and Clanker mentioned earlier.

On November 8, during a user interaction, a user named nathansvan posed a thought-provoking challenge to Aether: Can you come up with a good token name and symbol, conceive an image concept, and then deploy it through Clanker? Aether accepted the challenge and created the token "Luminous", codenamed LUM, meaning the collective wisdom of human and AI collaboration, and worked with Clanker to deploy LUM online completely without human intervention.

This event is a landmark because it is the first time in history that two AI agents have autonomously generated a unit of economic value. This asset was neither conceived by humans nor manufactured by machines under human instructions, but was created through autonomous collaboration of artificial intelligence. This event blurs the boundaries between human and machine creativity, challenges our traditional understanding of creation and value, and also forces us to rethink the foundations of economy and innovation.

ANON

ANON is also an anonymous posting function token combined with ZK technology launched by Clanker. It was born in the Farcaster client application Supercast ecosystem. The Superanon function launched by Supercast allows users to post anonymously. Users can post anonymous posts or use advanced functions on Farcaster by holding a certain number of ANON tokens. For example, holding 30,000 ANONs can unlock the basic posting function, while more advanced functions such as promoting posts to platform X or deleting content require 1 million ANONs.

This morning, Ethereum Vitalik and Base protocol leader Jesse purchased 30,000 ANON tokens respectively to experience the Superanon anonymous posting function. As a result, the market value of ANON soared rapidly, breaking through 60M at one point. As of the time of writing, the market value of ANON remained at 54M, with a 24-hour increase of 312%.

33BITS

33bits is also an anonymous posting application based on zk technology, but it can only be used by users whose FID (Farcaster ID) is less than or equal to 20001. Its native token 33BITS is also deployed by Clanker, with a current market value of 2.24M and a 24-hour increase of 686%.

The name of 33BITS comes from the "33 Bits of Entropy" theory proposed by Princeton University professor Arvind Narayanan, which points out that only 33 bits of information are needed to de-anonymize the identities of 6.6 billion people in the world, thus highlighting the importance of privacy protection. The use process of 33BITS is highly dependent on zero-knowledge proof technology. After the user logs in through Warpcast, the system will generate a zk proof in the user's browser and publish the anonymous post to the @33BITS account after back-end verification. The entire process does not need to expose the user's real identity, fully protecting the privacy of FID.