As a decentralized AI trading fund based on Solana, ai16z combines AI agents and community governance, showcasing the innovative potential of AI Investment DAOs.
On the weekend of October 27, the meme project ai16z, draped in the 'a16z concept', attracted widespread market attention, reaching a market capitalization of $80 million just one day after its release. Like GOAT, it not only sparked excitement among the degens but also thrilled many investors, while the underlying DAOS.FUN opened the community's imagination for 'AI Investment DAO'.
What is ai16z?
On the weekend of October 27, a meme token called ai16z rapidly spread in the community, initially seeming like just another concept-hijacking project. Surprisingly, this project received 'endorsement' from a16z founder Marc Andreessen. Marc tweeted, sharing the concept image of ai16z and linking to its official Twitter.
Previously, it was because Marc donated $50,000 worth of Bitcoin to Andy, the founder of Truth Terminal, as support funding that Truth Terminal was able to 'call' the meme giant GOAT, which caused the market to exhibit extreme enthusiasm for products endorsed by Marc.
ai16z is a decentralized AI trading fund based on the Solana blockchain. As an 'AI Investment DAO', the core of ai16z is to use AI agents to acquire market information, analyze community consensus, and automatically conduct token trading both on-chain and off-chain.
This new model aims to combine tokenized operations with AI trading strategies and decentralized governance, providing investors with more transparent and trustworthy investment opportunities.
The founder of ai16z is @shawmakesmagic. Interestingly, according to him, Marc's article showed him how startups or venture capital operate, which was very important to him.
Many community members believe that ai16z has made progress in fair issuance of DAO investments and crypto projects, making Marc's confidence in ai16z appear more reasonable. Everyone believes that the integration of AI and venture capital will significantly change the market landscape moving forward.
Holders of ai16z can not only participate in the governance of the project but also receive profits from the fund. Users holding 100 or more ai16z tokens can interact with the AI agent, influencing its trading decisions; the more shares of ai16z a user holds, the more weight the AI gives to their opinions. Interestingly, this project also has a strong connection with another token called degenai.
Degenai is an AI agent token developed by the same team as ai16z. Simply put, degenai is the robot itself, an AI agent, while ai16z is a redeemable fund.
Users do not communicate directly with ai16z for investment decision-making; instead, they first converse with the Degen Spartan AI to indirectly influence ai16z's final decision, and part of the investment returns from ai16z is also used to buy back degenai.
However, it seems that most of the messages in the Degen Spartan Telegram channel are still just pop-up notifications about buying degenai on-chain.
However, this does not hinder the market's enthusiasm for investing in new concepts. A tweet from a16z's co-founder quickly pushed ai16z's market cap to $80 million, generating a speculative premium far exceeding its net asset value on the address (around $70,000 at that time). Of course, the FOMO sentiment did not last long, and both ai16z and degenai faced a 'halving' this morning.
Through the analysis of on-chain data, the community seems to have uncovered the conspiracy group behind these two meme tokens. According to @tocuee, this conspiracy group has also operated and issued many other meme tokens related to AI concepts. Among them, LOTUS also made it into the popular token rankings on DexScreener this morning.
What is DAOS.FUN behind ai16z for fundraising?
After the concept of 'AI Investment DAO' gained popularity, the issuing platform DAOS.FUN behind ai16z also attracted attention.
This is an innovative meme token launch platform aimed at providing investors on the Solana blockchain with a more transparent and fair environment. Unlike pump.fun, DAOS.FUN operates on an invitation basis, meaning only selected projects can issue tokens on the platform. This 'official selection' mechanism can relieve users of the burden of token selection.
The projects on DAOS.FUN need to reach their target fundraising amount before they can start trading, and all participants have the same entry cost. This is different from pump.fun.
The steps to issue investment DAOs on DAOS.FUN include:
Fundraising: Creators have one week to raise the required amount of SOL. This fundraising is a fair issuance of DAO tokens, where everyone can obtain the same price.
Trading: After fundraising ends, the founders will be responsible for investing SOL into their favorite Solana protocols, and the token will be publicly traded on a virtual AMM. This allows the price of DAO tokens to fluctuate based on the fund's trading activities. The upward potential of this curve is unlimited, but its downward potential is limited to the market cap of the fundraising. As long as the market cap of the token exceeds the original fundraising amount, users can sell their DAO tokens at any time.
Funds Maturity: When the fund matures, the DAO wallet is frozen, and the SOL from profits will be returned to token holders. Users can destroy their DAO tokens to redeem the underlying assets of the DAO, or if its market cap is higher than the fundraising amount, they can directly sell the tokens through the curve mechanism.
After a weekend of FOMO-driven speculation, a bunch of new investment DAOs erupted on the DAOS.FUN leaderboard, all showing astonishing growth. Naturally, those ranking at the top are two DAO tokens primarily riding on the coattails of a16z and Sequoia Capital.
It is worth noting that DAOS.FUN not only follows the track and style of products like Pump.fun and Moonshot, but also originates from the same school. After DAOS.FUN gained popularity, people quickly found that it was also a product incubated by AllianceDAO. This year, AllianceDAO has incubated multiple killer products, directly igniting the meme track and becoming the biggest dark horse fund in this cycle.
AI DAO, a new narrative following AI memes?
Since GOAT opened up a new track for AI memes, AI meme tokens have been emerging one after another, mostly revolving around the functionalities of certain robots, such as dancing, trading, etc.
However, ai16z opened up a new direction for AI DAOs, showing how AI robots can achieve decentralized and automated investment decision-making, and how they can communicate with humans holding AI tokens to collaboratively improve investment decisions.
The new concept immediately sparked the imagination of the crypto community. Many past members focused on DAO organizations began discussing the new growth opportunities brought by DAOS.FUN after integrating AI.
Even the VCs couldn't hide their excitement for this new direction, with many investors expressing their new expectations for the AI Investment DAO field. Of course, the loudest voices come from the co-founders of AllianceDAO.
Through decentralized governance and public trading strategies, users can understand the AI's decision-making process more transparently. The interests of token holders are directly linked to the AI DAO; even if the fund incurs losses, the shares held by investors will not be abandoned.
The 'trustless' mechanism aligns closely with the original vision of the crypto world—achieving true decentralized trading without intermediaries. For most crypto investors, it is an exciting new concept, but how long the pioneer ai16z can run remains to be seen.
