Author: Nancy, PANews
With the gradual improvement of infrastructure and the gradual landing of application scenarios, the crypto AI Agent ecosystem is becoming increasingly prosperous, showing a brand new market development trajectory, and liquidity and user participation are continuously rising. In this wave of AI Agent enthusiasm, ai16z and Virtuals Protocol are undoubtedly the two most representative projects, and their ecosystems have attracted various capital eager to dig for gold.
ai16z and Virtuals dominate the AI Agent market, contributing more than half of the market share.
Although the AI Agent ecosystem is rapidly rising in the crypto market, attracting a large amount of attention and capital, its market structure still appears singular, mainly relying on the promotion of a few leading projects.
According to the latest data from Cookie.fun, as of December 30, the overall market capitalization of AI Agents has reached $11.68 billion, with a growth rate of nearly 39.1% over the past seven days. This growth trend indicates the rapid growth of the AI Agent ecosystem in the crypto market.
From the perspective of ecological scale, the entire crypto AI Agent ecosystem exhibits a clear head effect, mainly dominated by the two projects, Virtuals and ai16z. Specifically, the market capitalization of the Virtuals ecosystem reaches $5.01 billion, while ai16z stands at $1.63 billion, with the two accounting for 56.8% of the AI Agent market share. This also means that the current growth and development of AI Agents rely more on the construction of these two leading projects.
At the same time, in terms of type, the market capitalization of Virtuals exceeds that of customized AI Agents, which stands at $4.67 billion, while other categories have a cumulative market capitalization of $1.8 billion.
From the on-chain distribution perspective, Base and Solana are the two main battlegrounds for AI Agents. The market capitalization of AI Agents on Base is approximately $5.76 billion, while the market capitalization on Solana is $5.47 billion, together contributing 96.1% to the overall market. The cumulative market capitalization of other on-chain projects is only $920 million, further indicating that the AI Agent ecosystem is still in its infancy.
Although Base and Solana are comparable in market size for AI Agents, the ecological composition of the two is significantly different. The main project in the Base ecosystem is Virtuals, with 86.9% of projects coming from this ecosystem. In contrast, ai16z accounts for nearly one-third of the market share on Solana, indicating that the AI Agent ecosystem on Solana is more diverse and enriched compared to Base.
Presenting different ecological development paths, but the market concentration is still significant.
With the rise of Virtuals and ai16z, their ecological projects have also become the focus of market investors' attention and betting.
According to data from daos.fun, as of December 30, the net asset value (NAV) of ai16z is approximately $23.355 million, covering over 1,400 tokens. Among these tokens, there are only three with a market capitalization exceeding $1 million, namely ELIZA, fxn, and degenai, which together account for 84.3% of the total market capitalization; there are six tokens with a market capitalization between $100,000 and $1 million, and the remaining tokens all have a market capitalization of less than $100,000. This distribution indicates that ai16z's token portfolio exhibits a relatively concentrated characteristic, where a few high-value tokens dominate the overall asset scale, while most tokens have a more diversified market capitalization, showing that this ecosystem is still in a highly differentiated state.
Compared to ai16z, the quality of Virtuals ecosystem projects is relatively high, and recently it has been discussed more due to its market capitalization surpassing that of the star AI project Bittensor (TAO). However, there still exists a certain structural imbalance within the Virtuals ecosystem.
According to the Virtuals official website, as of December 30, there are currently about 510 projects in the Virtuals ecosystem. Among them, four projects have a market capitalization of over $100 million, namely AIXBT, G.A.M.E, Luna, and VaderAI, accounting for 19.2% of the overall ecosystem; there are 99 projects with a market capitalization between $1 million and $100 million, and about 60% of the remaining projects have a market capitalization of less than $100,000. The Virtuals ecosystem has gained more market recognition, but there are certain concentration issues in its ecological development.
Regarding the different AI Agent development paths of ai16z and Virtuals, Web3 independent researcher Haotian previously pointed out that ai16z is more open-source, resembling an 'Android-style' developer ecological alliance route. However, due to the extreme lack of token economics for ai16z tokens, the tokens in its portfolio lack a reasonable assessment model, making it difficult to form a synergy in the short term. Nevertheless, this will be addressed after a systematic Tokenomics is established. Meanwhile, each member of the ai16z portfolio has its unique strengths, with the potential for growth coming from the developer community. The first thing founder Shaw aims to do is to lead the scattered portfolio towards a super open-source growth flywheel driven by a technology-driven open-source community.
In a recent interview with PANews, Shaw revealed that ai16z will announce a new token economics proposal around January 1, 2025, which will include LP pairing mechanisms, DeFi function integration, and other content.
Comparison between Virtuals and ai16z, source: @0xgangWhat.
In contrast, Virtuals is relatively closed. Haotian pointed out that Virtuals has taken an 'Apple-style' ecological expansion route, more like an AI Agent 'star-making factory.' Due to the complete token economics of Virtuals in its early stages, users need to stake the VIRTUAL token to create AI Agents, and purchasing new AI Agent tokens requires consuming VIRTUAL tokens. Therefore, as more AI Agents are issued on Virtuals, the demand for Virtuals tokens increases, naturally generating a positive growth flywheel effect. However, since Virtuals focuses on asset issuance platforms and provides a standard AI Agent framework, it leads to a heavier homogeneity of AI Agents on the platform. The issuance of assets by Virtuals, rather than breakthroughs in technology ecosystems, is essentially a limitation of a closed ecosystem.
From pure MEME to on-chain applications, AI Agents are innovating market operation models.
The hype around Virtuals and ai16z reflects an increasing attention to AI Agents and is also an important manifestation of the evolution of MEME.
“AI is the main theme of human technology and productivity enhancement in the next 20 years, and it can be integrated into all categories of Crypto, including DeFi, GameFi, NFT, and Desci. During the rapid growth phase, a large number of new applications and new technologies will emerge, all of which can be applied in Crypto,” crypto KOL 0xWizard believes that combining AI with new targets may recreate an on-chain asset market value and even rebuild a total crypto market value.
“From the initial pure MEME like GOAT, to chat-capable AI Agents, then to on-chain funds like ai16z, and finally to new asset issuance platforms like Virtual and Spore, each step is getting closer to application. The essence of this round of on-chain market is that new 'application projects' bypass exchanges and VCs, achieving profit redistribution directly through the on-chain issuance of new assets. At the same time, project parties do not need to flatter VCs or scramble for resources and pay tolls to exchanges; they can directly 'stroll' on-chain to see if the market is willing to pay.” Crypto KOL pointed out @Michael_Liu93.
Haotian also believes that the environment has changed, and the logic of capturing market value is also changing, mainly reflected in the following points: (1) from the previous stacking of many infrastructures detached from actual market demand to using AI Agent applications to verify market demand; (2) past VC funding rounds have led to increasingly narrow secondary profit margins, but now projects built in the form of open-source Public Goods can directly finance from the secondary market, allowing AI Agents to manage assets autonomously, bringing greater imaginative space to the projects; (3) the past methods of obtaining early users and traffic through airdrops have brought subsequent operational pressure; opening in a MEME-like secondary manner can suit the continuously growing Tokenomics (LP fees, transaction taxes, reserved share releases, etc.); (4) after breaking the endgame of listing coins on CEX, it will gradually trend towards DEX as the main focus, giving quality projects a higher chance to 'rise from the grassroots'; (5) establishing new market operation rules, projects that do not integrate with the community and do not consistently focus on frontline products will generally find it difficult to emerge.
