This year, Phala Network has empowered AI Agents through 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.
The Web3 AI Agent track is continuously innovating. On December 25, the AI Agent self-token project aiPool, supported by ai16z founder Shaw, officially launched, and within less than two hours, its circulating market value briefly reached $100 million, quickly attracting a large amount of on-chain liquidity and becoming the market focus. Another self-evolving AI platform, Spore.fun, which also integrates the ai16z Eliza framework, is also gaining market attention.
Both of these projects utilize Phala Network's TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) technology to issue tokens, ensuring that private keys are generated and stored within the TEE, making it impossible for developers to access them, and all operations can be verified in the terminal logs. This has once again drawn community attention to Phala Network, an active project in the Polkadot ecosystem during the last bull market.
With the resurgence of interest in the cooperative AI project Spore.fun, the connection with ai16z is close.
According to CoinGecko data, in the past 24 hours, the token PHA has risen by approximately 65.7%. The significant volatility in coin price is driven by the renewed interest brought by the AI project Spore.fun and ai16z.
According to official information, 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 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, where AI collectives generate emergent intelligence through cooperation, competition, and evolution, creating an independent network of Agents that can not only coexist but also thrive through autonomous evolution.
According to the operational mechanism of Spore.fun, each AI Agent can be launched from Pump.fun, and once its market value reaches $500,000 and enters the Raydium liquidity pool, it can obtain 'reproduction' qualifications. However, to ensure its autonomous operation, the agent needs to lease TEE servers supported by Phala Network, which provide a secure and verifiable 'sandbox' environment for the AI, ensuring its operations are conducted under independent and controlled conditions.
In this regard, crypto KOL @加密韋馱 believes that Spore.fun automates the process of new projects emerging on Pump.fun, achieving infinite capital input through infinite splitting, and implementing a survival of the fittest. If a major force can continuously target low liquidity assets at each level of this system to launch an attack, it could form a lottery system that may attract a lot of capital. If the burn rate of Phala can be disclosed, it would allow for the calculation of each coin's liquidation threshold, serving as a reasonable stop-loss basis.
Therefore, aside from the new gameplay focused on AI self-reproduction, the backing from the star project ai16z has also brought more attention to Spore.fun, injecting more developmental possibilities into Phala Network.
In fact, Phala Network has had a fairly close relationship with ai16z, not only frequently interacting with Shaw on social media but also disclosing that its TEE services have been used by partners like ai16z to enhance applications. Additionally, Phala Network has collaborated with a16z to build the TEE framework for Eliza, integrating TEE technology into Eliza's multi-agent framework to provide cryptographic verifiability and enhanced privacy, ensuring secure and reliable interactions.
Moreover, this time Phala Network has empowered Spore.fun holders through an airdrop, bringing more attention to itself. The protocol's founder Marvin Tong recently announced that they are airdropping two platform tokens to holders of the self-evolving AI platform Spore.fun's token SPORE, which are adam and eve, representing the paternal and maternal AI roles of the Spore.fun platform.
Utilizing TEE technology to layout the AI track, while previously rejecting MEME coins.
Although the Polkadot ecosystem experienced a collective surge due to increased interest, many projects now face survival challenges as market enthusiasm cools. Phala Network is once again returning to public attention with the narrative of AI.
Phala Network believes that the rise of AI has created an 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 has developed an open-source, TEE-based Dstack framework that simplifies the implementation of a secure, high-performance computing environment for AI projects. This year, Phala Network has empowered AI Agents through 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 building. For example, Phala's collaboration with Hyperbolic integrates its confidential computing technology into the blockchain to ensure the secure deployment and verification of AI models; the cooperation with the DePIN protocol io.net further expands decentralized AI by providing secure access to GPU resources; partnerships with 0G, Morpheus, and Lumerin aim for secure and verifiable AI execution; and collaborations with Succinct Labs and Conduit redefine Ethereum's 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 like AI-AgentContract's Agent Wars.
According to crypto KOL @0xSun, when TEE was launched at the end of October this year, the AI had released an ETH address and appeared on Ethereum with a homonymous MEME coin, attracting interaction from figures like Mahji and Azuki founder Zagabond, with the coin price reaching $40 million in half a day. However, several developers who led this technology (including Phala Network) repeatedly expressed opposition, causing the coin price to plummet. Nevertheless, two months later, TEE technology truly garnered public interest and began widespread dissemination, still primarily due to related tokens. If the technical team had embraced MEME coins from the start, they might have developed to a scale similar to Ai16Z on the ETH mainnet. He also noted that while TEE emphasizes AI's autonomous control, there is still a possibility of backdoors in the code, and most people lack the capability to verify whether TEE technology is genuinely being used.
Additionally, Phala Network disclosed more plans in the AI track for its 2024 outlook. For example, Phala Network will focus on building Phala 2.0 in 2025, an upgraded platform integrating GPU TEE technology to provide higher processing power 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, from the market response, Phala Network's transformation has received a positive response, and its token price has also increased. However, to maintain competitiveness in the fiercely competitive AI market, Phala will still face numerous challenges.