Author: ShenChao TechFlow
With the violent leverage wash (temporarily) ending, altcoins are starting to recover. Looking around, the first to rebound are still Solana's AI memes, not only the already launched big names like $GOAT and $ACT, but some major trading volume AI memes on-chain are also surging uncontrollably.
Coincidentally, December 11 marks exactly two months since the birth of $GOAT, which is also when the market began to officially engage with AI memes and went crazy for them. After two months of rapid learning and accumulation, the market's focus on AI memes has gradually shifted from 'fun' to 'practical.' The previously criticized $ai16z has today surpassed an 800 million dollar market cap, successfully flipping $GOAT and $ACT. Clearly, the underlying infrastructure concept of the AI sector has captured some attention away from AI Agents.
Returning to the market, with the overall recovery of the Solana chain's market, both the quality and quantity of 'fast pass projects' have noticeably improved. In the early hours of the 11th, a Solana token named $arc achieved a market cap of 20 million dollars within 6 hours of its launch, and as of writing, it has approached a market cap of nearly 50 million dollars.
By examining the background of $arc, we find that the team is closely related to developers of an AI development framework called 'rig,' which is a true hardcore AI infrastructure concept. This overnight fast pass may also correspond to the market's changing perception of AI concept tokens.
Note: The price of meme tokens is highly volatile and carries significant risks. Investors should fully assess the risks and participate cautiously. This article is merely a sharing of information based on market trends, and the author and platform do not guarantee the completeness or accuracy of the content. Additionally, this article does not constitute any investment advice.
Is this really a coin released by the rig development team?
The declaration on the $arc official website is quite straightforward: 'we build rig, rig builds us,' directly indicating the project's direct connection with the rig framework. At the same time, two articles on the official website and Twitter briefly explain the significance of the project: 'We are undergoing a transformation regarding 'meaning.'
The team believes that LLMs (Large Language Models) are like a vast sea of meaning, where all possible concepts coexist and collide. This characteristic is gradually becoming similar to the way humans understand the world—just as our brains naturally process meaning and context when we understand memes and allusions.
Based on this understanding, the arc team is continuously developing the rig framework—an AI development framework written in Rust. This is not just an agent framework written in Rust, but a tool aimed at helping developers navigate the 'sea of meaning.' Their goal is not to replace human creativity with AI but to enhance our ability to discover patterns and establish connections, helping people better understand and utilize AI's way of processing meaning, representing a significant shift in the software development paradigm from pure logical construction to meaning processing, which is what the team refers to as 'a transformation regarding meaning.'
To put it bluntly, the two lengthy articles from the team are essentially saying: don't you like to hype AI? Well, we're about to do big things in the field of AI development.
Then at the end of the lengthy discourse, they attached the freshly minted $arc token contract.
However, with countless scams surrounding AI concepts, relying solely on the word of the arc team certainly cannot generate this level of FOMO in the market. The true point of FOMO in the market lies in the developers of the rig framework, @Playgrounds0x and Co-Founder @0thTachi, who passionately retweeted the official arc tweet to 'claim' the project, while also playing a Matrix-themed red-blue pill joke, hinting that the project will bring about significant change.
What exactly is the rig framework?
As mentioned earlier, rig (Rust Inference Gateway) is an AI development framework written in Rust. Here’s a brief introduction:
Many people may have heard of the Rust language used to write the rig framework; Solana is developed using the Rust language for smart contracts, so many top-tier developers on Solana and engineers using Rust for AI development should be quite familiar with rig.
In simple terms, rig is like an 'intelligent steward' that helps developers build and manage AI applications more easily. If we compare an AI model (like GPT-4) to a powerful engine, then rig is the gearbox and transmission system that allows this engine to operate stably and efficiently.
In the current AI framework field, Python-based LangChain has always held a dominant position. However, as the scale of applications expands, LangChain's performance has gradually become inadequate, and developers face an awkward choice:
Either use a simple but performance-limited Python framework
or directly handle complex underlying APIs.
The rig framework, with its higher execution efficiency and security brought by the Rust language, provides developers with better choices.
If we use building a house as a metaphor for AI development:
Traditional Python frameworks (such as LangChain) are like houses built with wood: they are quick to construct but have limited load-bearing capacity.
In contrast, rig is like a building constructed of reinforced concrete: while the initial investment is larger, it can support more complex structures.
With relatively solid narrative support, the trend of $arc's fast pass of 50M seems to appear more 'real' somehow.
Summary
The wave of AI Agents has brought a massive wealth appreciation effect and more practical fantasies of AI+Crypto, but it has also been accompanied by teams engaging in malfeasance and scams. In the early stages of the emerging narrative, not all those making money are truly benevolent or useful teams. However, as the concept of the sector and market understanding gradually mature, more and more genuine teams like Rig developers are launching their tokens, representing more 'regular troops' entering the field.
To borrow from the current market situation, with the ecological development brought by ai16z and Virtuals as examples, the recently emerged rig framework may also see large-scale applications in the future, bringing more practical possibilities for AI and crypto narratives, while the entry threshold for AI concepts will become increasingly high.
