Author: Frank, PANews
AI Agent has become a hot topic in current on-chain trading. From ai16z to Virtual, then to Swarms, in just one month, the AI Agent sector has once again derived new sub-ecosystems in the MEME field. Facing the continuously derived AI Agent tokens, which will break through the encirclement, and which are merely fleeting concepts? There may be multiple angles to consider, but the flow of funds on-chain and the changes in main forces may still be the most important indicators.
PANews has taken the recently popular Swarms token as the main analysis target and compared it with the large holder addresses of six AI Agent tokens with higher market capitalizations, attempting to once again 'carve a boat to seek a sword' to glimpse some secrets. The data scope of this analysis includes: the initial purchase and sale conditions of the top 1000 holding addresses of Swarms tokens (data time截止 to January 6, 2025, 24:00), and the address overlap conditions of six AI-related tokens with a market capitalization exceeding $100 million, including Fartcoin, GRIFFAIN, ZEREBRO, ai16z, arc, and Swarms (data time截至 to January 7, 2025, 14:00), as well as trading records from the internal market.
Some have quietly laid out at the bottom price, while others have followed suit to enter the market.
First, from the timeline of large holders entering the market, most large holders started entering after January 2, 12 days after the token's creation. From the timing, many large holders of Swarms also began buying only after the Swarms ecosystem started to heat up, failing to complete early布局.
Looking at Swarms' price curve, if purchased before December 27, the price has mostly maintained below $0.02, with nearly a 30-fold increase from the current highest price of $0.6. Analyzing the initial purchase prices of these addresses, there are 202 addresses that bought in the price range of $0.01 to $0.05, followed by the most addresses buying in the range of $0.3 to $0.4.
The distribution of these two data points means that early Swarms布局者 purchased at the bottom price in batches during the period of price collapse, and this buying was also relatively dispersed, not concentrated in a unified time period. The benefit of this is that they could acquire chips at a lower price. Meanwhile, another group of large holders began to enter the market significantly after the discussion around Swarms heated up, but these large holders' holding prices do not have a significant competitive advantage.
This distribution of chips may explain why the Swarms market appears to have significantly large short-term fluctuations. If early large holders sell at high points, new large holders will have higher costs. Once a large sell-off occurs, it easily triggers the sensitive nerves of both parties, resulting in a sharp decline.
However, considering the distribution of chips, the main chip distribution of Swarms is relatively dispersed. In the analysis of the top 1000 holding addresses, there are not many tokens coming from the same address; most addresses' initial token sources are primarily on-chain exchanges. Therefore, there is little evidence of early large holders acquiring a large amount of chips and distributing them across multiple addresses.
Additionally, through comparison of internal trading addresses, it was found that addresses that had purchased internally early on are basically not appearing among the current top 1000 holding addresses. Therefore, the early chip allocation of this token has mostly completed.
From the overall data, the average initial purchase price of Swarms tokens is $0.17, the average initial selling price is $0.23, the average initial purchase amount per address has reached $37,600, and the average initial selling amount is about $28,200. Comparing the buying and selling conditions of individual addresses, the average initial selling price of these addresses is approximately 2.43 times the buying price.
The largest holder has made a profit of $25 million without selling.
Compared to other MEME tokens, the average initial purchase amount mentioned above is significantly higher, primarily due to the influence of some large holder addresses. The address with the highest initial inflow amount is Dsjzh2oj3HxyPefjQr5qqvbR5NrMnvBgptGLSQ3t8T5i, which transferred approximately $4.13 million from another address on December 31, with subsequent transfers adding up to about $500,000. The current holding value is $27.33 million.
The address that transferred in, 5HfrnyodRraAw63aRVPueD5Er4D1sRKMZBMx9LBbhUAs, started making large purchases as early as 8:22 AM on December 20, and continued buying, spending a total of $1.89 million to purchase 54.95 million Swarms at an average price of about $0.034, currently with a profit of about $25.44 million.
According to tracking, the earliest associated purchase of this address began at 7:13 AM (the opening time of Swarms is about 6:45 AM on December 20). Notably, the associated fund address of this address began buying ai16z tokens as early as October 27, with a profit multiple of about 36 times.
Additionally, another address, 5NQTp9jHbzS4N9yKMWxwm8pPZW3RFSFPze3Edwss7iLe, transferred in about $3.63 million worth of Swarms tokens on January 4. Based on on-chain tracking, this address also purchased in a dispersed manner through several addresses around January 2, ultimately consolidating the tokens into one address, with the current holding value of about $5.26 million.
There is also an address H1zFMUjYLzJwcfgXEtwiJ2ykvxmBr7JW6afW29PkcEAe that used a similar method, with a holding of about $2.27 million, but the initial source of this address's tokens came from Bitget exchange, followed by multiple purchases on-chain.
The initial inflow amount of these three addresses combined reaches approximately $10.53 million. Looking at the purchasing process, they initially used multiple addresses for dispersed buying and then consolidated all tokens into a few addresses after the Swarms hype increased, becoming smart money in the eyes of on-chain hunters.
27% of addresses purchased multiple AI Agents. Who is pushing AI Agents behind the scenes?
In addition to analyzing the token addresses of Swarms, PANews also conducted comparative analysis on the top 1000 holding addresses of six addresses including Fartcoin, GRIFFAIN, ZEREBRO, ai16z, arc, and Swarms. In the analysis, it can be seen that among the 6,000 participating addresses, 1,647 addresses reappear, meaning about 27% of addresses purchased multiple AI Agent-related tokens, among which ZEREBRO seems to be the most favored token by AI large holders, with 405 addresses purchasing this token. Next is arc (368 addresses) and ai16z (334 addresses).
Among these addresses, the highest holding address DJnHztNmw1H56uYm98PNu5eVZ5yhi9482rZ9zA22TUUz currently holds AI-themed tokens worth about $49.86 million, of which the holding amount of only ai16z is about $42.70 million. Moreover, this is not the entirety of the holdings of this address; as early as a month ago, this address had profited tens of millions of dollars by purchasing tokens like ZEREBRO and GRIFFAIN.
Additionally, the address 3xzTSh7KSFsnhzVvuGWXMmA3xaA89gCCM1MSS1Ga6ka6 holds approximately $42.84 million worth of AI-related tokens, with the on-chain holding value of this address exceeding $73 million. According to social media information, this address should be the wallet address of the early AI Agent address, Truth Terminal.
In addition, there are many similar addresses. In the statistics, the 1,647 large holder addresses hold AI-related tokens worth over $1.58 billion, with about 29 addresses holding over $10 million in AI holdings, totaling approximately $690 million.
Rather than saying AI Agent may be the hottest trend in 2025, it might be more accurate to say that AI Agent is essentially a better story material in the eyes of large capital investors.
Analyzing trading behavior is much more important than tracking smart money addresses.
With the continuous deepening of on-chain data analysis, tracking smart money seems to have become a popular academic field. However, from the perspective of large holders, when laying out positions early on, they do not want too many retail investors to enter the market and compete for bottom-priced chips. Therefore, constantly changing wallets and diversifying purchases have become basic operations for major traders.
Thus, blindly chasing smart money will gradually become ineffective and may instead be targeted for malicious harvesting. However, analysis of the operations of holding large holders shows that even when using new addresses and diversifying purchases, there are difficulties in management and issues with fund aggregation. Therefore, in most cases, large holders still need to consolidate funds from various wallets into one or a few wallet addresses for easier management, and they can also stimulate more following users to enter the market through small purchases during peak periods. Secondly, to quickly gather purchases in the early stages, these early layout holders had to concentrate their large purchases within a certain time period. Although the amounts were relatively dispersed, this regular purchasing could still become a sign. After all, their investment amounts often range from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars; without a certain level of trading determination, they generally would not buy wildly.
In summary, for general retail investors, if they insist on tracking on-chain to chase smart money, perhaps focusing on on-chain behavior effects will be far more effective than chasing smart money addresses. Of course, there is also an important prerequisite: thinking like large holders about what kind of themes will make a good story. Otherwise, in the face of endless new tokens, blind chasing is akin to finding a needle in a haystack.
