Author: Nancy, PANews
The Web3 AI Agent track is continuously innovating. On December 25, the AI Agent autonomous token project aiPool, supported by Shaw, founder of ai16z, officially launched, quickly attracting a large amount of on-chain liquidity and becoming the market focus with a market cap that briefly reached 100 million USD within two hours of going live. Another autonomous AI evolution platform Spore.fun, also integrating the ai16z Eliza framework, is under significant market attention.
The commonality between these two projects is the use of Phala Network's TEE technology to issue tokens, ensuring that private keys are generated and stored within the TEE, inaccessible to developers, and all operations can be verified in terminal logs. This has also drawn community attention to the previously active projects in the Polkadot ecosystem, Phala Network.
By leveraging the revived interest in the collaborative AI project Spore.fun, closely linked with ai16z.
According to CoinGecko, in the past 24 hours, the token PHA has increased by approximately 65.7%. Behind the significant price fluctuations is the revived interest brought by the AI project Spore.fun and ai16z.
According to official sources, 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 computing to create an ecosystem aimed at allowing AI Agents not only to survive but also to reproduce and adapt autonomously, completely free from human intervention.
Spore.fun adopts the AI Swarm concept, proposed by Shaw, the founder of ai16z and creator of the Eliza framework, inspired by natural systems such as ant colonies and neural networks. It allows AI groups to generate emergent intelligent independent Agent networks through collaboration, competition, and evolution. These AI Agents 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 the market value reaches 500,000 USD and enters the Raydium liquidity pool, it can obtain 'reproductive' qualifications. However, to ensure its autonomous operation, the agent needs to lease a TEE server supported by Phala Network, providing the AI with a secure and verifiable 'sandbox' environment to ensure its operations are conducted under independent and controlled conditions.
In this regard, crypto KOL @CryptoWeituo believes that Spore.fun automates the process of new projects emerging on Pump.fun, achieving unlimited capital inflow through infinite splitting, leading to survival of the fittest. If a main force can continuously choose low liquidity targets at each level of this system to stage a surprise pull-up, it could form a lottery system, potentially attracting a lot of funds. If the burn rate of Phala can be disclosed, it would allow calculation of the liquidation threshold for each coin, serving as a reasonable stop-loss basis.
From this perspective, in addition to the new gameplay focusing on AI self-reproduction, the star project ai16z's backing also brings more attention to Spore.fun, which injects more development possibilities into Phala Network.
In fact, Phala Network already has a close relationship with ai16z. Besides frequent interactions with Shaw on social media, it has also disclosed that its TEE services have been used by partners like ai16z to enhance applications. Additionally, Phala Network collaborated with a16z to build the Eliza TEE framework, integrating TEE technology into Eliza's multi-agent framework, providing cryptographic verifiability and enhanced privacy, ensuring secure and reliable interactions.
Additionally, Phala Network has empowered Spore.fun holders through airdrops, bringing more attention to itself. The protocol's founder Marvin Tong recently announced that he is airdropping two platform tokens to holders of the autonomous AI evolution platform Spore.fun's token SPORE, namely adam and eve, representing the paternal and maternal AI roles of the Spore.fun platform.
Utilizing TEE technology to lay out the AI track, previously rejecting MEME coins.
Although the Polkadot ecosystem experienced a collective surge amid heightened interest, many projects now face survival challenges as market enthusiasm cools. Phala Network is once again returning to the public eye leveraging the AI narrative.
Phala Network believes that the rise of AI has brought unprecedented demand for confidential computing, where secure and private data processing becomes 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 developed an open-source, TEE-based Dstack framework, simplifying 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, the TEE technology of Phala Network 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 construction. For example, Phala's collaboration with Hyperbolic integrates its confidential computing technology into blockchain, ensuring the secure deployment and verification of AI models; the partnership with DePIN protocol io.net further expands decentralized AI by providing secure access to GPU resources; collaboration with 0G, Morpheus, and Lumerin focuses on secure and verifiable AI execution; and partnerships with Succinct Labs and Conduit redefine Ethereum 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 @TEE_HEE_HE on Twitter, aimed at eliminating human intervention in AI decision-making processes and applications like Agent Wars based on AI-AgentContract.
According to crypto KOL @0xSun, when TEE was launched at the end of October this year, the AI released an ETH address and a corresponding MEME coin appeared on Ethereum, attracting interactions from figures like Mahji and Azuki founder Zagabond, with the coin price reaching 40 million USD within half a day. However, the leading developers of this technology (including Phala Network) repeatedly expressed opposition, leading to a sharp decline in the coin price. Nevertheless, two months later, the TEE technology truly sparked public interest and began to spread widely, still due to the related tokens. If the technical team had embraced MEME coins from the start, it might have developed to a scale similar to Ai16Z on the ETH mainnet. He also pointed out that although TEE emphasizes AI's autonomous control, the code could still have backdoors, and most people lack sufficient ability to confirm whether TEE technology is truly being used.
Moreover, Phala Network disclosed more layouts in the AI track for 2024. For instance, Phala Network will focus on building Phala 2.0 in 2025, an upgraded platform integrating GPU TEE technology that can provide greater processing power and enhanced security for AI and privacy protection applications; Phala Network plans to launch Phala Cloud, a platform designed for AI applications 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 risen. However, to maintain competitiveness in the 'god-tier battle' AI market, Phala will still face many challenges.
