Article reprinted from: Frank
Author: Frank, PANews
AI Agents have become an unavoidable hotspot in current on-chain trading. From ai16z to Virtual, and then to Swarms, in just a month, the AI Agent track has derived a new segmented ecosystem within the MEME field. Faced with continually emerging AI Agent tokens, which can break through the encirclement and which are just fleeting concepts? There may be multiple angles to consider, but on-chain capital flow and major changes may still be the most important consideration indicators.
PANews took the recently hot Swarms token as the main analysis object and conducted a comparative analysis of the large holder addresses of six high-market-cap AI Agent tokens, attempting once again to 'carve a boat to seek a sword' and glean some secrets from it. The data range for this analysis includes: the initial purchase and selling conditions of the top 1000 holding addresses of Swarms tokens (data time cut off at 24:00 on January 6, 2025), the overlapping conditions of addresses related to six AI-related tokens with market caps over 100 million USD including Fartcoin, GRIFFAIN, ZEREBRO, ai16z, arc, and Swarms (data time cut off at 14:00 on January 7, 2025), and analysis of internal trading records.
Some quietly lay out at the bottom price, while others follow the trend to enter the market.
Firstly, from the timeline of large holders entering the market, most large holders began entering after January 2, which was 12 days after the token's creation. In terms of timing, many large holders of Swarms also started buying only after the Swarms ecosystem began heating up, failing to complete early layouts.
However, from Swarms' price curve, if purchased before December 27, the price remained below 0.02 USD, and there is nearly a 30-fold increase from the current highest price of 0.6 USD. Analyzing the initial purchase prices of these addresses, 202 addresses bought in the price range of 0.01 to 0.05 USD, while the addresses buying in the range of 0.3 to 0.4 USD were the most numerous.
The distribution of these two data points implies that the early layout players of Swarms made batch bottom-price purchases during the period of price decline, and such purchases were also relatively scattered, not concentrated in a single unified time frame. The benefit of this is that they can acquire chips at lower prices. Meanwhile, another batch of large holders began to enter the market significantly after the discussion heat of Swarms increased, but the holding prices of these large holders do not possess a significant competitive advantage.
This kind of chip distribution may explain why Swarms appears to have large short-term fluctuations. If early large holders sell at a high point, new large holders' costs are relatively high, and once a significant sell-off occurs, it can easily trigger sensitive nerves on both sides, leading to sharp short-term declines.
However, judging from the chip distribution, the main chip distribution of Swarms is relatively scattered. In the analysis of the top 1000 holding addresses, there are not many tokens coming from the same address, and most addresses' initial token sources are mainly from on-chain exchanges. Therefore, there is little evidence of early large holders obtaining a large amount of chips and then spreading them to multiple addresses.
Additionally, through comparing domestic trading addresses, it was found that the addresses that purchased early in the domestic market have basically not appeared in the current top 1000 holding addresses. Therefore, the early chips of this token have essentially completed rotation.
From the overall data, the average initial purchase price of Swarms tokens was 0.17 USD, the average initial selling price was 0.23 USD, and the average initial purchase amount per address reached 37.6 thousand USD, with the average initial selling amount being approximately 28.2 thousand USD. When comparing the buying and selling conditions of individual addresses, the average initial selling price of these addresses was about 2.43 times the buying price.
The highest large holder made 25 million USD in profit without selling.
Compared to other MEME tokens, the average initial purchase amount mentioned above is significantly higher, mainly due to the influence of some large holder addresses, with the address having the highest initial transfer amount being Dsjzh2oj3HxyPefjQr5qqvbR5NrMnvBgptGLSQ3t8T5i, which transferred in about 4.13 million USD on December 31 from another address, followed by several transfers of about 500,000 USD, with the current holding value being 27.33 million USD.
The address that transferred in, 5HfrnyodRraAw63aRVPueD5Er4D1sRKMZBMx9LBbhUAs, began making large purchases as early as December 20 at 8:22 AM, continuously buying afterward, spending a total of 1.89 million USD to purchase 54.95 million Swarms tokens at an average price of about 0.034 USD, currently realizing a profit of about 25.44 million USD.
According to tracking, the earliest associated purchase of this address started at 7:13 AM (the opening time of Swarms was around 6:45 AM on December 20). It is worth mentioning that the associated funding address of this address began purchasing ai16z tokens as early as October 27, with a profit multiple of about 36 times.
In addition, another address 5NQTp9jHbzS4N9yKMWxwm8pPZW3RFSFPze3Edwss7iLe transferred in approximately 3.63 million USD worth of Swarms tokens on January 4. Based on on-chain traces, this address also purchased in a decentralized manner across several addresses around January 2, ultimately consolidating the tokens into one address, which currently holds a value of about 5.26 million USD.
Another address H1zFMUjYLzJwcfgXEtwiJ2ykvxmBr7JW6afW29PkcEAe also used similar methods, holding about 2.27 million USD, but the initial token source of this address came from Bitget exchange, followed by multiple on-chain purchases.
The initial transfer amount of these three addresses combined reached approximately 10.53 million USD. Looking at the purchase process, the initial approach was to purchase in a decentralized manner across multiple addresses, and once the popularity of Swarms increased, all tokens were consolidated into a few addresses, becoming smart money in the eyes of on-chain hunters.
27% of addresses purchased multiple AI Agents; who is behind the push for AI Agents?
In addition to analyzing Swarms' token addresses, PANews also conducted comparative analysis on the top 1000 holding addresses of six addresses: Fartcoin, GRIFFAIN, ZEREBRO, ai16z, arc, and swarms. In the analysis, it can be seen that among the 6000 addresses involved, 1647 addresses appeared repeatedly, meaning that about 27% of addresses purchased multiple AI Agent related tokens, with ZEREBRO seemingly being the favorite token among AI large holders, having 405 addresses purchasing it. Next was 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 USD, among which the holding amount of ai16z alone is approximately 42.7 million USD. Moreover, this is not the entirety of this address's holdings; as early as a month ago, this address had already profited tens of millions of USD through purchases of tokens like ZEREBRO and GRIFFAIN.
Additionally, the address 3xzTSh7KSFsnhzVvuGWXMmA3xaA89gCCM1MSS1Ga6ka6 also holds AI-related tokens worth about 42.84 million USD, with the on-chain holding value exceeding 73 million USD. 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. Among the statistics, the 1647 large holder addresses hold AI-related tokens valued at over 1.58 billion USD, among which about 29 addresses hold AI tokens worth over 10 million USD, totaling approximately 690 million USD.
Rather than saying AI Agent may be the hottest trend in 2025, it is more accurate to say that AI Agent is essentially a better story theme in the eyes of large capital investors.
Analyzing trading behavior is 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 study, but from the perspective of large holders, they do not wish for too many retail investors to enter the market during the early chip layout, seizing bottom-priced chips. Therefore, constantly changing new wallets and decentralized purchases have become the basic operation for major players.
In this way, blindly chasing smart money will gradually become ineffective and may instead become a target of malicious harvesting. However, in analyzing the operations of holding large holders multiple times, even when using new addresses and decentralized purchases, there are still management difficulties and issues with fund consolidation. Therefore, in most cases, large holders still need to consolidate the funds from various wallets into one or several 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 collect and buy in the early stages, these early layout players had to concentrate on making large purchases within a certain time frame; although the amounts were dispersed, such regular purchases may still become a signal. After all, their investment amounts often range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of USD, and without a certain level of operational determination, they generally won’t make crazy purchases.
In summary, for ordinary retail investors, if they insist on tracking on-chain to chase smart money, focusing on on-chain behavior may yield much better results than chasing smart money addresses. Of course, there is an important premise: think like large holders about what kind of themes will be a good story; otherwise, facing endless new tokens, blind chasing is no different from searching for a needle in a haystack.
