The second half of AI tokens begins? Take stock of emerging potential projects of Crypto AI

In October 2024, Crypto began to accelerate the integration with AI since the launch of the AI ​​Agent concept by AI Meme - GOAT. Concepts such as Game+AI, DeFAI, and AIAgent hive have emerged. A number of new concept projects will appear almost a week. Until on January 18 this year, Trump announced the issuance of MemeCoin, directly draining market liquidity, and the CryptoAI bubble was burst in advance. Two days later, DeepSeek announced the open source R1 model, and after a few weeks of fermentation, the AI ​​concept stocks in the US stock market were also bursting the bubble.

A retail investor in CryptoAI, which is still buying a market value of $60 million, was once defined by the community as "a leek with insufficient IQ". This kind of trend is rampant, and the concept of US stocks' AI is plunging collectively, so the price of currency naturally died spiraled. Since then, the concept of AI has gradually become silent in Crypto.

A quarter later, CryptoAI's voice returned to the market. $zerebro rose 400% in 2 days, Agent operating system $AIOS rebounded 10 times, Dark rebounded again, and Musk's concept had a market value of more than US$40 million during the same period. Other old AI projects $ALCH, $SWARM, $GRIFFAIN, $arc, and $BUZZ also had a rise of 30%-60%. In addition to the currency price, AI's return has also brought back some new concepts.

AI ecological coin issuing platforms show their magical powers

After Pumpfun's success story, Crypto set off a trend of asset issuance platforms. When the last wave of AI Agents came, framework and AI distribution network/LaunchPad were the two highest areas of FDV. After the framework concept of the developer community similar to Ai16z developed to a certain extent, the community found that the framework could do very limited things, especially the value level capture in Crypto, so the still-living framework gradually transformed into LaunchPad. AI LaunchPad is not easy either. The reason is that LaunchPad at that time could not meet the issuance of AI products. In order to carry out the next return of the AI ​​boom, the project parties began to find solutions.

The paradise of CryptoAI infrastructure—Bittensor

Although some time ago, some time ago, someone used the mechanism vulnerability of the SN28 subnet to turn it into MemeCoin, which promoted the release of TAO into MemeCoin hype, and was eventually centralized by the foundation, and over time, the foundation will have less control over the Bittensor subnet in the future, which has caused the community to doubt that its future may become a "attention network". "Freak-thinking" who has been following the Bittensor project for a long time also published articles, believing that this is a scam.

But from an investment perspective alone, the liquidity of the Bittensor ecosystem is better than that of other AI Agent ecosystems. For example, Virtuals, because LP is paired with Virtuals, this will lead to higher volatility among liquidity providers. There will be about 3% to 7% slippage in proxy tokens within the investor investment platform. When investing funds in dTAO subnet tokens, the slippage is usually between 0.05% and 0.1%.

It is also because of this that participants in AI projects with VCs or large funds tend to make long-term investments in Bittensor. Just last week, Sami Kassab, a former Messari analyst and partner at Crucible Labs, announced that his friend Seth bloomberg, who has the same working experience, will set up a fund that provides liquidity for Bittensor.

Currently, Bittensor’s “first project party” Rayon Labs has produced several products that can be seen at a glance from the preferences of Bittensor project party, which are often more “practical” and long-term.

SN64 "Chutes" provides serverless way to easily deploy AI infrastructure. The project said that the previous AWS outage incident was the best case to explain why we need "serverless". Because if you rely on a centralized service provider, once an interruption occurs, the AI ​​application may crash due to a single point of failure, and Crypto is an industry related to Qianqiang, and the probability of losses is much greater than that of traditional AI.

SN56 "Gradients" is a platform for zero-code deployment of AI models. Users can train their own AI models (for specific use cases, image generation, custom LLM) on Gradients. The recently launched v3 has an advantage in price compared to similar products.

SN19 "Nineteen" is a fast, scalable, decentralized artificial intelligence reasoning platform.

Virtuals Protocol, the maker of AI Agent protocol

As one of the most complete AI projects that combine ecological construction with value flywheels in the last cycle, the price of Virtuals Protocol slowed down with the market's silence. What followed was a bubble worth $4.5 billion in market value burst, a drop of more than 90%, and the launcher participants also decreased significantly. But Virtuals did not give up, and in this bear market of AI, they started to build.

First of all, Virtuals has improved its project-based construction ecosystem and released the VPN plan "Virtuals Partners Network". From the beginning, Virtuals' plan was to introduce more AI people from Crypto, and the plan connects multiple ecological locations, including investors, experts, scholars and developers in various fields. Almost as long as you have an idea, from investors to market makers, marketing and even professionals, you can obtain resources from this plan. The "one-stop service" incubator can be said to be the best choice for anyone who wants to join Crypto to cooperate with Virtuals.

In order to expand the influence and interaction of AI Agents in the ecosystem, Virtuals has formulated a protocol called ACP "Agent Commerce Protocol", which can be said to be a concrete version of the previous Hive concept of Swarm, Ai16z and other projects. ACP has built a business ecosystem composed of AI agents. For AI Agents, this is a virtual country where they can interact independently, collaborate and trade with each other. It is worth mentioning that after this, Google also released a similar A2A concept. The slightly different point is that ACP is connected by smart contracts, while A2A is connected by protocols.

In April, Virtuals just launched a new model of Virgen Points and Genesis Launch Mode. Users can obtain points by investing in Sentient and Prototype Agents, holding Virtuals, pledging VADER, etc., and points are the basis for participating in the Genesis Launch Mode project. Genesis launch pad is an IDO mode project startup method, and the investment amount is obtained based on the user's Points. Not everyone can participate in this launch mode at present, but it needs to be reviewed by Virtuals.

This model has several benefits. The first is to increase the adhesion of users on your own platform through rewards. In the words of founder Ethermage, it is "our principle is to reward beliefs". Pledge points to obtain the amount of participation in Genesis projects, so that the startup is fairer, and the participants are usually better, so that the project can develop more sustainablely.

A fun project for Hackathon of Virtuals Protocol?

In addition to the projects on Genesis, Virtuals just announced the winners of this Hackson on April 21, with more than 100 project parties participating in the competition, and the review lineup is also quite luxurious, including LucaCurran, who is responsible for the development of the AI ​​and DEPIN sectors, KunPeng, who founded the Stanford blockchain community, and Anand Iyer, a partner of Canonical Crypto. "What's interesting is that Anand's tag on X is AI."

• The Intern

The Intern is an AI that helps run, and can help promote, reply and manage the community on X. He can understand the culture of the community through in-depth community learning and can use TADA to generate images. Now in partnership with Pudgypenguins, the Penguin Internship has launched and operated its own Twitter. Judging from the operating quality of Twitter, it would be a good product if it is completely operated independently by AI and can be mass-produced at this level.

• BuzzingClub

BuzzingClub is a prediction market platform. The project believes that the future of the prediction market should be in the hands of participants, rather than a central authority that "everyone should be able to create, share and express their opinions freely." Therefore, Buzzing is more free than other prediction platforms.

In Buzzing, all users can create prediction markets. "Propose topics or topics" are generated by AI, and then filter out some spam and low-quality prediction markets through AI algorithms. Finally, use AI oracles to automatically retrieve Internet search data instead of manual data to judge the results of prediction problems.

• Burnie

Burnie is a code learning platform that can improve the level of users who want to learn code in all aspects, and players can obtain rewards by completing tasks he posted.

**Inspiration is App, the sinking market layout in the post-AI

application era**

After the framework development gradually stagnated, Arc and Ai16z also transformed from becoming distribution platforms for AI Agents. Arc's distribution platform forge has disappeared since its first product AskJimmy, and Ai16z's AutoFun was launched a few days ago, but the projects currently supported are not online, so the development is still unknown. From the product framework, AutoFun seems to be more inclined to create a community-based UGC cultural platform, and it is not much different from the traditional LaunchPad in terms of value retention.

Arc plans to launch the new Agentic App Store Ryzome and the existing AIApp Store in Myshell. The former has not been officially launched yet, and the latter lacks activity, and most of the products appearing are similar.

In this case, dev.fun, which had previously appeared as AppFi concept, is more orthodox. At first glance, this one, from color matching to UI, is similar to Pumpfun, but seems to be more energetic on some level. Although from the perspective of currency price, dev.fun fell a lot in this cycle, just like other AI projects. Surprisingly, nearly 13,000 apps are currently born on this platform.

dev.fun provides the function of generating apps by chatting with AI "similar to Replit invested by YC". In addition to issuing project/Meme tokens, users can also choose trading pairs by themselves. Buidl, which currently has the most supporters, currently has 1,400 apps and has been run nearly 70,000 times.

What AI is preferred in the Crypto market now?

The most popular projects in the market are divided into several categories. One is development tools, including frameworks, AI Coplit programming tools, and MCP infrastructure. The second is consumer AI applications, including AI Agent, games, DeFAI "Alpha Signal, Fund, Automation LP", and GambleFAI. The third is decentralized AI infrastructure, such as decentralized computing, verification, storage, etc. The first two are usually more popular among retail investors, while the third is the first choice for VCs or investors. Such projects usually require quite high valuations to take on.

Development Tools

This type of project has a wider usage scenario and project concept, but it is often the first choice for Scam project parties, because for retail investors, there is no "visible" product, and the feedback cycle of such products is often longer. Whether it is "usable" or can produce viral transmission is the key. Therefore, the technical requirements for making such products are very high for a team's technology and marketing.

The MCP project Dark, which was a big fire two days ago, was one of the projects that did both. It launched DARK under the influence of MTN DAO, and delivered the "visible" game product "Dark Forest" within two weeks.

In this field, the most widely circulated in the market now is Solana's "own son" SEND AI. It has become famous for hosting the large-scale AI hackathon held by Solana, and the Solana Agent Kit is used in many products. ALCHEMIST AI has also continued to build, falling from February to a market value of US$1.4 million, and has now returned to a market value of US$14 million.

• Autonome

Autonome is a platform that provides developers and users with no code-needed to build, deploy and distribute verifiable AI Agents, produced by the Rollups protocol AltLayer. It has been active since the last cycle and has not yet issued tokens.

Consumer Artificial Intelligence

game

• Smol

Some time ago, Treasure just announced that it would shift the focus of the project from the game chain and game operations to AI+NFT. SMOL gave its first answer today. Smol announced the release of the "Virtual Companions" function, which can turn NFTs into AI Agents, and these agents will be able to use social media and play GameFi or DeFi by themselves, and have created a market for AI Agents to buy and sell skills, memory and other information.

 Real-time screenshots of community player Fairu

The first game to be launched is Abstract's on-chain RPG game Gigaverse. The community generally praised it after trying it, and the price of Treasure also rebounded accordingly. After announcing its withdrawal from the GameFi business, it fell to a market value of US$20 million, and today it returned to a market value of US$80 million. I believe that in addition to the expectations of NFT AI-based technology, the AI ​​Agent's model of playing GameFi may be more attractive. The problem of no one playing for GameFi project parties and not fun for players may be solved by asset-based AI Agent in the future.

DeFAI

Almanak

After 18 months of precipitation, Almanak announced last week on April 17 that it will implement token TGE in 2025. Almanak is an end-to-end platform that allows users to create, optimize and manage complex financial strategies using AI agents. Task functions including market data analysis, strategy formulation, optimization and high-speed execution can be automated. The team is supported by many top venture capital firms and consultants such as RockawayX, Delphi Labs, Hashkey, AppWorks, Matrix Partners, Bankless Ventures, and more.

GambleFAI

Sportstensor

Sportstensor is the SN41 subnet on dTAO. It is an AI platform for sports event prediction that allows participants “miners and validators” to collaborate on developing and optimizing sports prediction models, and participants with better models and data sets that can predict the results of sports competitions to profit. Users can interact with projects through technical participation "development model" or non-technical participation "using prediction results".

For example, in an NBA Celtics match with the Magic, the ratio is 0.92:0.08. If you bet on the Celtics "the team that the public is optimistic about" with market odds, your winning rate is about 92%. Even if such a high winning rate is over, most people's return on investment is negative after multiple bets. While teams that are optimistic about Volkswagen tend to have higher winning rates, the odds are also higher, which means that even if the prediction is correct, you will win less money. People tend to bet on teams they are optimistic about, resulting in a low winning rate for weak teams, which means that if you bet on weak teams right, you can make a lot of money.

This is the advantage of the Sportstensor model, where miners run their own machine learning models with their own data to get the best results. Sportstensor then takes its average/median and uses it as a smart indicator to identify market advantages. The difference between the odds predicted by the model and the market odds is the part that users can make profits in the long run.

DeAI Infrastructure

This type of product is almost the earliest concept of the integration of Crypto and AI. For projects such as Grass, countless similar products have appeared before, but they are difficult to continue. The key to decentralized computing power is how to optimize synchronous computing power and lower than traditional computing power providers in terms of price. The key to decentralized training is the cost of data transmission itself, which is difficult to achieve in a period of imperfect infrastructure, but once it is implemented, it will be a very potential sinking market, so it has attracted much attention from VCs.

PrimeIntellect

PrimeIntellect was co-founded by Vincent Weisser and Johannes Hagemann, who were previously members of Desci leader VitaDAO. PrimeIntellect is a platform that commercializes computing power and models. The investment lineup is quite luxurious. The seed round was led by CoinFund and Distributed Global to raise a total of US$5 million, while the second round of financing was led by Founders Fund to raise a total of US$15 million. Among them, there are also industry influencers such as Polygon Sandeep Nailwal, well-known investors and former CoinBase CTO Balaji.

Recently, Yaoshunyu, a well-known researcher at OpenAI, published an article "The Second Half". He said that we are in the midfield of the AI ​​era and are about to enter the second half. If AI in the first half solves playing games and exam solutions, then AI in the second half will build a company worth billions or trillions of dollars by building intelligent and useful products. For CryptoAI, there must be corresponding opportunities in it.

So look forward to it, welcome to the second half.