Author: Nancy, PANews
The Web3 AI Agent track continues to innovate. On December 25, the AI Agent autonomous token issuance project aiPool, supported by ai16z founder Shaw, officially launched. Within less than two hours, its circulating market value briefly reached $100 million, rapidly attracting significant on-chain liquidity and becoming a market focus. Another autonomous AI evolution platform, Spore.fun, which also combines the ai16z Eliza framework, is also receiving considerable market attention.
Both projects share the commonality of utilizing Phala Network's TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) technology to issue tokens, ensuring that private keys are generated and stored within the TEE, inaccessible to developers, and all operations can be verified in terminal logs. This also drew community attention to Phala Network, an active project in the Polkadot ecosystem during the last bull market.
Rebounding from the popularity of the collaborative AI project Spore.fun, closely linked with ai16z.
CoinGecko data shows that in the past 24 hours, the token PHA rose by approximately 65.7%. The significant price fluctuation is backed by the resurgence of interest in the AI project Spore.fun and ai16z.
According to official sources, Spore.fun is the first experimental platform for autonomous AI reproduction and evolution. It combines the Eliza framework, Solana's Pump.fun, and TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) verification computation to create an ecosystem aimed at allowing AI Agents not only to survive but also to autonomously reproduce and adapt, completely free from human intervention.
Spore.fun adopts the AI Swarm concept, proposed by ai16z founder and Eliza framework creator Shaw, inspired by natural systems such as ant colonies and neural networks. This means that an independent network of AI agents emerges through collaboration, competition, and evolution, where these AI Agents not only coexist but also thrive and develop through autonomous evolution.
According to the operation mechanism of Spore.fun, each AI Agent can be launched from Pump.fun. Once the market value reaches $500,000 and enters the Raydium liquidity pool, it can obtain the qualification for 'reproduction'. However, to ensure its autonomous operation, the agent needs to rent a TEE server supported by Phala Network, which provides a secure and verifiable 'sandbox' environment for AI, ensuring its operations are conducted under independent and controlled conditions.
In this regard, crypto KOL @Crypto Vaid believes that Spore.fun automates the emergence of new projects on Pump.fun, achieving unlimited capital inflow through infinite splitting and conducting survival of the fittest. If a main force can continuously target low liquidity assets at every level of this system, it could form a lottery system, potentially attracting significant capital. If the Phala burn rate can be publicly disclosed, it would help calculate the liquidation threshold for each token, serving as a reasonable stop-loss basis.
From this perspective, in addition to the new gameplay focused on AI self-reproduction, the backing of star project ai16z has also brought more attention to Spore.fun, injecting more development possibilities into Phala Network.
In fact, Phala Network has a close relationship with ai16z. In addition to frequent interactions with Shaw on social media, it has disclosed that its TEE services have been used by partners such as ai16z to enhance applications. Furthermore, Phala Network has collaborated with a16z to build the TEE framework for Eliza, integrating TEE technology into Eliza's multi-agent framework, providing cryptographic verifiability and enhanced privacy, thus ensuring secure and reliable interactions.
Furthermore, Phala Network has also empowered Spore.fun holders through airdrops, bringing more attention to itself. The protocol's founder, Marvin Tong, recently announced that they are airdropping two platform tokens to holders of the autonomous AI evolution platform Spore.fun's token SPORE, namely adam and eve, which represent the paternal and maternal AI roles of the Spore.fun platform.
Using TEE technology to layout the AI track, previously rejecting MEME tokens.
Although the Polkadot ecosystem experienced a collective surge in popularity, many projects are facing survival challenges as market enthusiasm cools. Phala Network is once again returning to the public eye by leveraging AI narratives.
Phala Network believes that the rise of AI has brought unprecedented demand for confidential computing, where secure and private data processing has become crucial. This surge in demand highlights the importance of Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) in ensuring data integrity, confidentiality, and security in AI operations.
To this end, Phala Network developed an open-source, TEE-based Dstack framework, simplifying the implementation of secure, high-performance computing environments for AI projects. This year, Phala Network has empowered AI Agents with TEE technology, significantly increasing their adoption and usage, from approximately 150 contract executions per day at the beginning of the year to about 750,000 now.
At the same time, Phala Network's TEE technology has been integrated into major fields such as blockchain and AI, covering various directions from decentralized AI model training and inference to secure Ethereum block construction. For example, Phala's collaboration with Hyperbolic integrates its confidential computing technology into the blockchain, ensuring the secure deployment and verification of AI models; its partnership with DePIN protocol io.net further expands decentralized AI by providing secure access to GPU resources; collaborations with 0G, Morpheus, and Lumerin focus on secure and verifiable AI execution; and partnerships with Succinct Labs and Conduit redefine Ethereum scalability and secure computing.
As early as October this year, Phala Network developed autonomous AI Agents, such as the first fully autonomous AI Agent project on Twitter, @TEE_HEE_HE, aimed at eliminating human intervention in the AI decision-making process and applications based on AI-AgentContract, like Agent Wars.
According to crypto KOL @0xSun, when TEE launched at the end of October this year, the AI released an ETH address and appeared on Ethereum with the same name MEME token. This attracted interactions from figures such as Majin and Azuki founder Zagabond, with the token price reaching $40 million within half a day. However, several developers leading this technology (including Phala Network) expressed opposition multiple times, causing the token price to plummet. Nevertheless, two months later, the TEE technology truly captured public interest and began spreading widely, still due to the related tokens. If the technical team had embraced MEME tokens from the beginning, they might have developed projects on the ETH mainnet similar to Ai16Z. He also pointed out that while TEE emphasizes AI's autonomous control, the code may still have backdoors, and most people lack the ability to verify whether TEE technology is genuinely being used.
Additionally, Phala Network disclosed more plans in the AI track in its 2024 outlook. For instance, Phala Network will focus on building Phala 2.0 by 2025, which is an upgraded platform integrating GPU TEE technology, providing higher processing capacity and enhanced security for AI and privacy protection applications; Phala Network plans to launch a platform designed for AI applications, Phala Cloud, to simplify the deployment and management of TEE applications.
Overall, market reactions suggest that Phala Network's transformation has received a positive response, and its token price has risen. However, to maintain competitive strength in the 'divine battle' of the AI market, Phala will still face many challenges.
