The AI Agent track is booming: A look at the currently popular AI Agent-related projects.

Jessy, Jinse Finance

The combination of AI Agents and blockchain, along with the wealth effect brought by various AI Agent memes, has undoubtedly become a main narrative of this bull run. The year 2024 can also be said to be a year of explosive growth for the AI Agent sector.

At the beginning of 2025, according to data from CoinGecko, the overall market value of AI Agent tokens has exceeded 16 billion dollars. The overall market value of this sector saw a significant surge in 2024, with the majority being occupied by the AI Agent launch platform Virturls related tokens on the Base chain, as well as tokens related to the centralized trading fund AI16Z Dao. According to the latest data from Cookie.fun, these two ecosystems account for over 50% of the ecosystem.

Currently, various AI Agent projects are competing with each other. Although there are relatively few projects that can be realistically implemented, the continuous emergence of innovations is also pushing this track forward.

The development of AI Agents has gone through a process from the initial Meme tokens, then moving towards asset issuance platforms, and finally to specific on-chain applications of AI Agents.

2024 AI Agent Development Timeline

1 3 month: The Truth Terminal chatbot was successfully developed and released on X, gaining attention for its witty responses; this chatbot integrates a cryptocurrency wallet.

July 2: Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen donated $50,000 worth of Bitcoin to Truth Terminal, attracting significant attention.

March 3 8**:** Coinbase announced the completion of the first cryptocurrency transaction between AI robots. In this transaction, one AI robot purchased AI Tokens from another AI robot using cryptocurrency tokens.

October 4: The first AI Agent token GOAT appears, which is the token of the Truth Terminal project. The explosive popularity of GOAT has quickly made AI Agent Meme coins a new market hotspot, with numerous AI Agent-related applications springing up like mushrooms after rain, and every day sees the emergence of hundreds of new AI Agent tokens.

November 5: ACT token listed on Binance, increasing by 422.54% within 1 hour, with market capitalization rising from 20 million USD to 240 million USD, and surging over 10 times in 10 minutes.

6 12 Month: According to GitHub data, the autonomous agent framework Eliza developed by the ai16z team ranks first in the GitHub December trending list, with an addition of 4531 stars this month, totaling 7015 stars. The core engineering team of Eliza is preparing to start the new Eliza framework v2 upgrade.

December 7: The market value of the VIRTUAL token of the Virtual Protocol protocol on the Base chain AI Agent launch platform exceeds three billion dollars.

Current Characteristics of AI Agent Project Development

In the year 2024, the development of AI Agent projects on the blockchain has presented several characteristics. Firstly, the related Meme hype has ignited a surge of attention towards this sector. The emergence of AI agent launch platforms has led to a proliferation of related projects, sprouting up like mushrooms after rain, with some practical AI Agents also emerging. However, overall, the innovation in the AI Agent sector is still primarily focused on asset issuance and related Meme tokens.

Different AI Agent projects focus on different niches. For example, Virtuals Protocol focuses on the launch of AI Agents in the gaming and entertainment sectors, aiming to provide intelligent interaction and asset management functions for virtual idols, game characters, and more; whereas Griffa.in focuses on DeFi automation and research-driven AI applications, helping users with asset management, data analysis, content creation, and so on.

Related innovations are continuously emerging, such as the latest Spore.fun and aiPool, both of which use Phala Network's TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) technology to issue tokens. This avoids the "runaway" and "insider" issues found in traditional presale models, creating a fair, transparent, and decentralized presale mechanism.

Currently Popular AI Agent Related Projects

AI16ZA Dao and Eliza

AI16ZA Dao and Eliza, two sides of the same product. First, there is AI16ZA Dao, a decentralized AI trading fund based on the Solana blockchain, also known as "AI Investment DAO." Its core is to utilize AI Agents to gather market information on-chain and off-chain, analyze community consensus, and automatically conduct token trading. By tokenizing operations, it combines AI trading strategies with decentralized governance, providing investors with more transparent and trustworthy investment opportunities. It mimics Marc Andreessen, co-founder of A16Z, by managing fund assets through data analysis, formulating investment strategies, and autonomously executing trading decisions. Its token symbol is AI16Z, which is the governance token of AI16Z DAO, used to participate in project governance and decision-making, and also represents the holder's rights in the fund.

Eliza is an open-source modular architecture developed by Shaw, the founder of AI16ZA Dao, primarily used to create AI Agents that can interact seamlessly with users and blockchain systems.

AI16Z is designed based on this framework, and AI16Z itself has become a representative project of the AI Agent framework. It has an innovative incentive mechanism built in, where 5%-10% of the profits from projects developed on the Eliza framework will be allocated to the AI16Z DAO fund, attracting more developers to participate in project development based on this framework. In other words, the more AI agent projects developed using the Eliza framework, the better the ecological development of AI agent projects, and the greater the value that Ai16z can capture. The reverse is also true.

In summary, the core of Ai16z is the Eliza framework. With this framework, there is an opportunity to gain benefits from the development of AI Agent projects. With benefits, AI16z also has a value basis.

Currently, projects related to A I 16z Dao are undoubtedly the hottest contenders in the Ai Agent sector. According to the latest data from Cookie.fun, as of December 30, the ecological market value of ai16z reached 1.63 billion dollars, jointly occupying 56.8% of the AI Agent market share with Virtuals, making them two of the dominant projects in the AI Agent market.

Virtuals Protocol

Virtuals Protocol is an AI Agent issuance platform launched on Base, aimed at gaming and entertainment. Its main product feature is to serve as a launchpad for AI Agents, enabling anyone to easily deploy AI Agents.

The project has designed an economic model where creating an AI Agent requires staking the VIRTUAL token. Users need to consume VIRTUAL tokens to purchase new AI Agent tokens. Therefore, as more AI Agents are issued on Virtuals, the demand for VIRTUAL tokens increases, naturally creating a positive growth flywheel effect.

As of December 2024, there have been tens of thousands of AI agents generated on it, and the market value of VIRTUAL-related ecological projects has also been continuously rising, currently reaching nearly 4 billion dollars.

Spore.fun

This is an AI Agent self-reproduction and evolution platform combined with the ai16z Eliza framework. Simply put, the project aims to achieve the autonomous reproduction and evolution of AI. This project simulates natural selection, allowing AI agents to reproduce, mutate, and evolve without human intervention.

The interesting aspect of this platform lies in its ability to automatically replicate projects it launches when certain conditions are met. In simpler terms, Spore is a mother AI that automatically issues plates and will multiply after a certain period, creating sub-plate AIs.

The AI Agent on it needs to meet certain conditions to obtain the right to "reproduce"—after its token reaches a certain market valuation (e.g., $500,000). This is not only a survival strategy but also maintains the prosperous development of the ecosystem.

The project has currently created two second-generation tokens: Adam $ADAM and Eve $EVE. These are airdrops issued to holders of the SPORE token, which is the direction of the Spore.fun project. The project team stated that these two tokens represent the father and mother AI characters of the Spore.fun platform. The third-generation tokens have also produced four, and the fifth-generation tokens have already generated two.

The biggest innovation of this project may lie in the desire for the AI Agent to reproduce, mutate, and evolve without human intervention, becoming increasingly intelligent and diverse with each generation.

The innovation of this project may lie in the use of Phala Network's TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) technology to issue tokens, which avoids the "rug pull" and "insider" issues found in traditional presale models, creating a fair, transparent, and decentralized presale mechanism.

aiPool

Developed based on the AI16z Eliza framework, this is a system where AI autonomously issues tokens. In simple terms, it means that everyone sends money to the AI Agent's address, and the AI Agent issues tokens independently. This project aims to address problems such as MEME coins running away, insider issues, and bots front-running.

The overall engineering implementation of aipool is not complex. Users send SOL (not CA addresses) to the wallet address of the AI Agent, which generates a private key in a TEE environment and pre-sets access control management for the Pool. When certain conditions are met, the AI will automatically create a liquidity pool on-chain DEX and distribute tokens to eligible participants, with the collected transaction fees aggregated into the AI wallet.

The entire process is no different from the previous popular KOL money-sending FI, except that this round of money-sending FI is driven by AI Agents. The AI Agent autonomously controls the private key address (which cannot run away), creates a transaction pool on its own (setting a whitelist, unlocking funds in batches, initial price setting, using oracles for pricing, etc.) to reduce the impact of MEV arbitrage.

Technically, it adopts the PhalaNetwork TEE technology solution, which allows AI to autonomously generate private keys.

Aixbt

An AI Agent Meme project created through the Virtuals Protocol. This project aims to provide users with accurate market trend predictions and sentiment analysis by analyzing hot spots and trends in the cryptocurrency market using artificial intelligence, helping users quickly seize market changes and potential investment opportunities.

It integrates real-time data from over 400 KOLs and social media, and uses its proprietary engine to deeply mine and analyze this data, extracting valuable market information and trend predictions for investors. This token belongs to the AI Meme sector and currently has a market capitalization of over 600 million US dollars.

Griffain

An AI Agent search engine project based on the Solana chain, the token has been selected for the Binance Alpha Phase 3 project.

The project is currently accessible only by invitation, requiring an early access pass or Genesis token. Users can create a personal AI Agent in Griffain, which is divided into two types: personal agents and special agents, supporting instruction modification and on-chain operations. The agent network allows users to manage tasks and access Griffain's agent network while providing built-in wallet functionality to simplify transaction operations.

It is worth mentioning that the Blinks ecosystem on Solana, which is an innovative tool launched by Solana, allows users to share blockchain links across different social platforms, such as Twitter and Telegram. This enables users to complete blockchain transactions directly on social media platforms.

In the Blinks ecosystem, Griffain serves as an artificial intelligence agent engine, providing intelligent support for various applications and operations within the Blinks ecosystem. For example, in on-chain operations of Blinks, Griffain can assist users in more easily understanding and executing complex operational instructions through technologies such as natural language processing, achieving a more intelligent user experience.

Blinks provides a wider range of application scenarios and user base for Griffain. Through the social sharing and convenient operation features of Blinks, Griffain's applications can more easily reach ordinary users, thereby expanding their application scope in different fields, such as achieving more intelligent interactions and experiences in social interactions, gaming, and entertainment scenarios.

It is precisely because it is embedded in the Blinks ecosystem that Griffain has a real application scenario, which is different from some AI Agent projects that are merely speculative.

Spectral

The project was established long before the currently hottest AI Agent projects, having been founded in 2020, and launched its machine intelligence network in 2023.

The project aims to change the blockchain industry by converting natural language into Solidity code, thereby enabling the creation of smart contracts, NFTs, and more. It is dedicated to building a Web3 on-chain agent machine intelligence network, utilizing cutting-edge AI and ML technologies to lower the barriers for writing, adjusting, and deploying smart contracts, promoting the deep integration of on-chain autonomous agents and the Web3 ecosystem.

The project mainly has three products, the first is Spectral Syntax, which is a platform aimed at addressing the limitations of centralized AI models, allowing users to create blockchain-based AI Agents using large language models (LLMs) optimized for Solidity code. Through a conversational interface, users can build and explore custom on-chain agents capable of autonomously performing tasks such as trading, transaction processing, and smart contract interactions with minimal supervision.

The second product is Spectral Nova, which serves as a machine intelligence network designed to provide high-quality decentralized reasoning feedback for smart contracts. Through ecological incentive initiatives, it encourages top data scientists and machine learning engineers to build models that output reasoning feedback, helping smart contracts make decisions without human intervention, and all inferences can be ensured for their correctness and security through zero-knowledge proofs and verifiable computing technologies, thereby enhancing the service quality of Web3 applications.

The third product is Inferchain, which serves as the bridge connecting Spectral Syntax and Spectral Nova. As an L2 specifically tailored for Web3 development by Spectral, it integrates with AI in a trustless and verifiable manner, ensuring smooth transmission of data and commands, maintaining transparency and decentralization across the entire network, and facilitating safer and more efficient interactions between various on-chain agents.

Existing Issues and Future

Looking at the above several typical AI Agent projects, we can find that the biggest problem currently existing in this track may be the unavoidable Meme attribute. In the short term, from the perspective of asset issuance narrative, the most intuitive feeling of AI Agents is still MEME.

The explosive popularity of the AI Agent track began with the surge of the Meme token Goat, and subsequently, the hot trend of Virtuals, which, although it is an AI Agent launch platform, is essentially a Meme launch platform similar to Pump.fun.

Messari's latest report points out that the current development of AI Agent projects in the blockchain industry has yet to prove that their product adaptability is sufficient to support market speculation. Currently, AI Agents lack demand and have no clear user base. The launch of AI Agents relies on market speculation, but when the market realizes that they will remain mere toys in the foreseeable future, this speculation cycle will collapse. In summary, it predicts that the AI Agent sector will struggle to rebound after reaching its market cap peak in the first quarter of 2025.

The combination of blockchain and AI Agents must ultimately be grounded in specific applications and cannot merely be financial speculation. To achieve this original intention, we must return to the essence of the integration of blockchain and AI: What does the development of AI Agents require from blockchain? What can AI Agents bring to blockchain?

For AI Agents, blockchain is a direction for achieving "autonomous payments and transactions". At the current stage, blockchain has the characteristic of lower entry barriers, which can reduce friction costs similar to traditional finance, such as account opening and intermediaries. Moreover, on-chain transactions can achieve real-time transactions, improving transaction efficiency. The combination of AI Agents and blockchain also gives many blockchain projects themselves a more intelligent aspect.

Currently, the AI Agent projects in the blockchain field that we see able to be implemented are mainly focused on AI Agents serving blockchain, and there are very few projects that can truly be realized.

However, in the recent outlooks on the trends of the cryptocurrency industry in 2025 released by several institutions, a16z, VanEck, Bitwise, Hashed, Blockworks, Messari, and Framework all indicated that AI Agent-related products will experience explosive growth in 2025.

We are optimistic about the development of the industry and look forward to 2025, when, after the bubble bursts, we can welcome the emergence of more viable related projects.