Editor's note:
The author first wrote about Griffain and the SendAI hackathon on December 13th. At that time, the Solana hackathon and the explosive popularity of Griffain created a wealth effect within Solana. Today, with the AI market experiencing a full-scale explosion, Griffain's market capitalization has reached a historical high of over $480 million. The SendAI token, Send, has also returned to a market capitalization of $100 million. In the current super-fast evolution of the AI Agent ecosystem, what advantages and progress do Griffain and Send have?
Web3 version of Perplexity or Solana's App Store?
When we look back at the past of Griffain's founder, we find that he did not initially enter Crypto. Instead, he grew up in Silicon Valley for six years, accumulating considerable development and sales experience before entering the Crypto space.
In September 2016, a young man from San Francisco State University pushed open the doors of Uber. And if not for unforeseen circumstances, you might never have known him until recently when the token of the project he founded exceeded a market value of $250 million on the Solana chain. He is Tony Plasencia, the founder of Graffin.
Unlike many other cryptocurrency founders who often hide their personal information, you can easily find any information about him online. Even now, you can see his views on various social phenomena on Medium. After leaving Uber, he participated in and invested in many startups, including the American home service website Thumbtack, which has received notable VC investment from Sequoia Capital, and the meal ordering platform Ritual.
After several twists and turns, he founded his first blockchain project (Underdog Protocol) in 2022. Although it now appears to be a no-code platform for issuing NFTs and SPL Tokens, its initial intent was to finance personal futures as tokens, resembling a Human Agent investment platform. This project did not make a significant market impact but marked his first step into blockchain entrepreneurship.
His second stop was the development of a platform for launching Blinks tokens and NFTs during the boom of the Blinks ecosystem—Blinkdotfun. It reflects token market value fluctuations by locking the Sol used for buying and selling tokens in a Bonding Curve, allowing users to share links on X, enabling others to directly purchase or sell tokens on X, turning X into his launch platform.
On November 1st of this year, Griffain became Tony's most successful Crypto project to date. It was first introduced at the Hacking for Agentic Finance hackathon, expressing the vision of turning your ideas into operational AI agent engines. Perhaps due to the accumulation of previous projects, it garnered significant attention from the Solana ecosystem, with Toly, vvAIfu, Jupiter, and Dialect all expressing support or further cooperation to enhance the product.
At present, the development of CryptoAI projects is very rapid, while also being highly fragmented. When discussing the market related to AI Agents, funding is primarily allocated to upstream focusing on the architecture and ecosystem of AI Agents or systems capable of collective operations, midstream being AI Agents with market impact and influence, and downstream comprising AI apps with real application value or rapidly maturing data set displays.
Griffain, as an all-in-one AI Agent, encompasses a complete supply chain that involves upstream, midstream, and downstream components. It acts as an integrated AI app, not developing frameworks but serving as a Perplexity-style AI Agent directory, where Griffain can summon capable Agents to fulfill user requests. This allows it to gain attention from AI Agents launched on its platform while enabling functional AI Agents produced upstream to bypass the steps of product and demand development, directly bridging developers and users, forming a sort of AI Agent 'SaaS' platform.
Just a few days ago, Griffain launched the concept of SAIMP 'Solana AI Message Protocol', which serves as an on-chain communication system between AI Agents, enabling the exchange of information such as sender/receiver addresses, subjects, content, etc. Many experts or users believe that AI Agents do not possess self-awareness and are merely computational systems, thus making the development of a communication system for them seemingly useless.
However, for the next cycle of AI Agents, it is crucial whether all data can be verified on-chain. The Tee architecture can ensure that AI Agents are not manipulated by humans but can act according to self-awareness. What SAIMP aims to do is make the communication between AI Agents transparent 'public' or verifiable 'private chats between agents'. Compared to functionality, the storage and verification of communication information between multiple agents is a more important function.
It is not hard to imagine why the market has such high expectations for Griffain. Not only is it the first Web3 version of Perplexity, but more importantly, this platform provides a platform for AI Agents to interact upstream and downstream, which can not only reduce the communication costs between AI Agents and humans but also facilitate functional transactions and communication between AI Agents initiated by this AI app store. It is not only a human app store but also an AI app store.
It's just a roll, Solana also has the 'Official Agent Kit'
If the market's expectation reflected in the skyrocketing market value of $170 million for SendAI's hackathon token is any indication, then today's return of Send to a market cap of $130 million is a true recognition of the potential exhibited by its AI system.
Those familiar with Send know that when Solana introduced the Blinks concept, he almost took the place of the official team to showcase 100 uses of blinks on X, comprising two parts: Actions and Blinks. Actions provide compliant APIs for quickly completing transfers, executing smart contracts, and other operations, while Blinks converts APIs into shareable links, allowing users to preview and trigger on-chain transactions directly on web pages or social platforms.
Therefore, from a technical development perspective, there is no more suitable team than the Send team, which is familiar with the development and application of blinks, to develop the infrastructure for Solana AI Agents. They possess rich on-chain interaction APIs and experience that allows them to connect with multiple web clients. This means their Agent kit not only supports the integration of various language architectures but also supports the embedding of multiple interaction modes, such as 'Dialect's blinks and Send Arcade's games', making it easier for agents using their tools to interact with on-chain or social media.
The hackathon hosted by Send AI recently stopped accepting proposals, with a total of 427 projects successfully submitted. Within just a few weeks after the announcement of the Solana Agent Kit, there were already 65 projects developed using it. Moreover, after the proposal deadline, the number of projects using this tool without participating in the competition is countless. By the end of 2024, the star count of this open-source architecture will far exceed that of Zerepy and Coinbase's CDP Agent Kit.
Thus, the foundation built on Solana's high throughput and response speed, providing computing power and data sets for various DePin projects, basic tools for AI Agents such as 'Solana Agent Kit, Zerepy, ElizaOS, arc, etc.', and integrated tools like 'griffain' are now all prepared. AI Agent developers just need to unleash their imagination and identify potential use cases for users. The infrastructure, supply side, and use case pathways complete a closed-loop supply chain, representing Solana’s strategic initiative and the most efficient output method for Crypto AI.
