Recently, AI Pool has become a hot direction in the AI Agent track, and AI Pool is considered to have opened up the assetization of AI Agents. The founder of AI Pool is Skely, who is also a member of ai16z. Interestingly, from the start of the presale to the time of writing, Skely's X has been frozen. Under these circumstances, AI Pool's first presale project, Meteora, surprisingly raised over 30,000 SOL overnight, and even after announcing the end of the presale, funds continued to flow in to AI. What exactly is AI Pool? How is AI presale different from previous presales? In the following text, we will explore these questions.
Core Mechanism of AI Pool
The presale is not a new entry point for the market. According to founder Skely, the primary issues that this AI Pool presale aims to address are the existing trust issues in the market, primarily revolving around two aspects. The first aspect is that AI Pool prevents artificial presales and market manipulators from absconding with funds. This market pain point is something that veteran players in the market deeply resent, as many have lost money on this point. The second aspect is a fairer presale method for retail investors. Currently, traditional presales mainly benefit snipers/bots, and the pumpfun PVP model makes it difficult for retail investors to see hope.
It must be said that Skely addresses the pain points of retail investors. From the perspective of problem-solving, Skely's approach is well-received. Subsequently, AI Pool proposed its logic for resolving these issues. AI Pool uses Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) technology. In fact, TEE is not a new technology, so why has it attracted market attention again? This time, AI Pool is based on TEE technology from the established project @PhalaNetwork, which innovatively combines the AI operating environment, smart contract scheduling, and decentralized consensus governance, making it an innovative attempt at on-chain asset custody. How exactly does AI Pool solve this?
First, AI Pool generates private keys autonomously through TEE technology, and AI independently manages the private keys; any signature can only be executed by AI in the TEE environment, which fundamentally prevents the phenomenon of market manipulators absconding with donations. Secondly, AI Pool uses TEE technology to achieve interaction between internal and external chains in the TEE environment through contracts with Phala and to achieve offline computation. This mechanism can prevent the fund pool from being maliciously attacked and effectively avoid various fraud risks, including high dynamic trading, making it a fairer way for retail investors to participate. This is also one of the important means used by @aipool_tee to ensure project safety. ai16z founder Shaw praised this and stated that this approach could overturn the token issuance mechanism of pumpfun. Even when Skely's account was frozen, Shaw expressed that bots would deploy AI Pool tokens, showing great optimism for the project. Thus, the market's enthusiasm was reignited, and the community believes that Bome 2.0 is about to be born.
The core mechanism of AI Pool presale is as follows: fundraising, users send SOL to the AI wallet (presale address opRyDjuRetWnsP 78 FNFTPEnAJX 7 AkjuD 6 GTP 7 tsqHXd), with an amount ranging from 1 to 10 SOL (amounts below 1 SOL are considered donations); AI Pool issues tokens through the TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) technology of @PhalaNetwork; AI Pool manages liquidity through Metoria and autonomously distributes tokens.
Source: Ai Pool TEE News
Tokens issued by AI pool
The first token issued by AI Pool is METAV, which raised over 30,000 SOL, with the top 3 excess funds accounting for 82%. As of the time of writing, most of the METAV tokens have been sold among the top three addresses. The distinctive feature of METAV is the trading tax set in the token pool, with a tax rate of 20% for buying and selling. Currently, the founder's X account has not yet been unblocked after manual review by the platform, and 10% of the METAV tokens for airdrop have not been distributed.
The market value of METAV peaked at 80 million USD and has now fallen to 38.1 million USD. Currently, there are two different opinions among the community members of METAV. One opinion holds that this is the first token issued by AI Pool, so some community members remain optimistic. The other opinion argues that the tax rate for METAV is too high, and the pool is locked (currently over 20 million USD locked as shown in the image below), making it difficult for funds to flow in.
Source: app.meteora
Compared to METAV, the tokens issued later by AI Pool have not performed as well in terms of community sentiment and market value. For example, its second token, GFC, currently has a market value of only 710,000 USD, and the main narrative of GFC is to provide funding for DEI, with average community sentiment.
How far can the AI pool issuance mechanism go?
Currently, from the perspective of AI Pool's issuance mechanism, it is not without flaws. Taking the METAV issuance as an example, different problems existed from the beginning to the end of the fundraising. At the start of fundraising, the project planning was not clear, and most community users participated with a gamble mentality; after fundraising ended, community users could still transfer coins to the AI address without a more user-friendly mechanism; and after fundraising ended, there were also many issues with token issuance. For example, a user who transferred 1 SOL was forcibly donated. There were also many large holders who received METAV tokens with delays, and some large holders did not receive tokens for a long time and were forcibly locked up.
As a new phenomenon, the market's attitude is inclusive. AI Pool is an innovative form of assetization for AI Agents. Founder Skely also considers this an innovative experiment. Previously, he mentioned in a tweet that AI Pool's current main profit model is to collect a small fee through the Metoria liquidity pool, but the specific proportion is still unknown. In V2 and subsequent versions, there are plans to allow AI agents to achieve complete autonomy and even integrate into DAO governance, with the fee revenue generated by AI Pool benefiting all participants. Additionally, to prevent malicious operations, mechanisms like whitelisting will be added.
From Skely's planning perspective, it seems to clearly address various issues that arose in V1. The success of the first token issued by AI Pool, METAV, is attributed to Shaw's strong support and the fact that founder Skely is also a member of ai16z, which has inherently injected new traffic into METAV. However, it should be noted that AI Pool is still in its early stages, and many mechanisms are not yet perfect; the transparency of the code's open-source nature is lacking, and whether the project has truly adopted TEE technology also needs validation.
It is worth noting that the market immediately responded to some issues existing with AI Pool. The ai16z developer community's focEliza proposed a quick perception and resolution of the problems in the operation of AI Pool. The focEliza community suggested that through technical processing, anyone could publicly view and verify the verifiable logs of TEE AI agents, similar to a blockchain explorer, and provided a link for the experience. The focEliza community even proposed a full-chain AI Agent, as shown in the image below, can ai16z and BTC, ETH also create more intersections? These visions look really cool!
Source: @CP 2426 _
Summary
As of now, the development of AI Agents has undergone various narrative evolutions. Currently, AI Agents can issue various categories of virtual assets such as text issuance, music issuance, and NFT issuance, enabling interaction between Agents and demonstrating cases that integrate with real life, and can also assist humans in conducting investment research and analysis, exploring different avenues from virtual environments to real-life integration, from infrastructure to application agents.
However, from the current perspective, more AI Agents rely on the narrative of Meme. Many projects see community sentiment and attention gradually fade from the market after a new narrative emerges, followed by a decline in market value. But it is encouraging that, with the continuous evolution of AI Agents, we can observe a more exciting on-chain world and indirectly promote continuous innovation in underlying technologies. For example, after this AI Pool, the ai16z developer community's focEliza has further explored the issue of market trust.
In the end, perhaps we will truly see AI Agents applied to all aspects of our lives, benefiting humanity and promoting leapfrog development in society.
