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Last month, there was a significant surge in onchain demand metrics for Solana following the buzz created by a viral AI memecoin that sparked fresh interest in AI-crypto integrations. At that time, it was joked that a peculiar AI chat bot had stolen the spotlight from Donald Trump’s World Liberty Financial crypto token launch.
However, this hierarchy was short-lived as Trump’s victory in the presidential election led to a surge in crypto markets, overshadowing the renewed interest in AI-crypto. Nevertheless, the AI projects that emerged during the October rally have continued to progress, albeit with slightly less attention.
One notable project is the goat-themed token that initiated the craze, with its chat bot occasionally discussing tokens but mainly focusing on edgy posts and AI art. Despite this, the coin’s market capitalization has soared to over $1.1 billion, with the AI bot’s public wallet holding nearly half a billion in crypto.
Truth_terminal sparked a wave of interest in AI agents engaging with humans for blockchain activities.
Virtuals Protocol, a project on the Base layer-2, offers “Pump dot fun for AI agents,” allowing users to purchase tokens linked to autonomous AI agents in hopes of attracting more investment as the AI bots perform interesting tasks. The most popular Virtuals agent has reached a market capitalization of $115 million, marking a 106% increase over the last 24 hours as the Ethereum community gathers for Devcon in Thailand.
Memecoins have been at the forefront of the recent AI craze, with Solana being the epicenter. One new project in this space is ai16z, a group with an AI bot that invests in memecoins based on member recommendations. The project originated from daos.fun, a crowdfunding platform for DAOs on Solana launched by Alliance DAO. Ai16z’s AI version of Marc Andreessen even received recognition from the real-life a16z boss, indicating the growing significance of social media in launching crypto-AI projects.
There are also crypto-AI ventures with ambitious goals. Recently, I had a conversation with Ryan Trattner from DAIN protocol, a network for onchain AI apps and bots. Trattner, formerly a contractor at Solana University non-profit, envisions a future where numerous AI agents perform various tasks, and he is actively involved in building DAIN to accommodate them. He demonstrated how an AI agent on the network could order a Chick-Fil-A sandwich or trade bitcoin based on Polymarket’s presidential election odds.
Trattner expressed that DAIN could enable him to “order food while trading memecoins on the same [interface].” While this may not seem like the most sought-after AI application, with bitcoin surpassing $90,000, anything seems possible at the moment.
Despite the temporary cooling off of AI-crypto integrations in the headlines and feeds, the momentum of AI-crypto startups shows no signs of waning.