Author: Nancy, PANews
The Web3 AI Agent track is constantly innovating. On December 25, the AI Agent self-issuance project aiPool, which was backed by a16z founder Shaw, officially launched, and its market capitalization reached $100 million within two hours, quickly attracting a large amount of on-chain liquidity and becoming the market focus. Another self-evolving AI platform Spore.fun, which is also based on the a16z Eliza framework, is also attracting market attention.
The common point of these two projects is that they use the TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) technology of the Phala Network to realize token issuance, ensuring that the private key is generated and stored in the TEE, and the developers cannot access the private key, and all operations can be verified in the terminal log. This has also caused the Phala Network, an active project in the Polkadot ecosystem in the previous bull market, to attract community attention again.
Cooperating with the AI project Spore.fun to boost its popularity, and maintaining close ties with a16z
CoinGecko data shows that in the past 24 hours, the token PHA has risen by about 65.7% at its highest. The sharp fluctuation in the coin price is due to the resurgence of popularity brought by the AI project Spore.fun and a16z.
According to the official introduction, Spore.fun is the first experiment of autonomous AI breeding and evolution. It has created an ecosystem by combining the Eliza framework, Solana's Pump.fun and TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) verified computing, aiming to allow AI Agents not only to survive, but also to self-reproduce and adapt, completely free from human intervention.
Spore.fun adopts the concept of AI Swarm, which was proposed by a16z founder and Eliza framework creator Shaw, inspired by natural systems such as ant colonies and neural networks, that is, an independent Agent network with emergent intelligence is produced through collaboration, competition and evolution of the AI group. These AI Agents not only can coexist, but also can thrive through autonomous evolution.
According to the operation mechanism of Spore.fun, each AI Agent can be launched from Pump.fun, and once the market value reaches $500,000 and enters the Raydium liquidity pool, it can obtain the "reproduction" qualification. However, to ensure its autonomous operation, the agent needs to rent the TEE server supported by the Phala Network, which provides a secure and verifiable "sandbox" environment for AI, ensuring that its operations are carried out under independent and controlled conditions.
In this regard, crypto KOL @Crypto Skanda believes that Spore.fun is equivalent to automating the process of new projects emerging on Pump.fun, realizing unlimited inflows through infinite subdivision, and conducting survival of the fittest. If there is a major force that can constantly choose low-liquidity targets to raid and pump at each level of this system, it can form a lottery system that can attract a lot of funds. If the Phala burn rate can be publicly disclosed, the liquidation threshold for each coin can be calculated, which can be a reasonable stop-loss basis.
From this, in addition to the new gameplay of AI self-reproduction, the endorsement of the star project a16z has also brought more attention to Spore.fun, which has also injected more development possibilities into the Phala Network.
In fact, Phala Network has a very close relationship with a16z. In addition to frequent interactions with Shaw on social media, it has also disclosed that its TEE service has been used by partners such as a16z to enhance their applications. In addition, Phala Network has also cooperated with a16z to build the TEE framework of Eliza, which can integrate TEE technology into Eliza's multi-agent framework, providing cryptographic verifiability and enhanced privacy to ensure secure and reliable interaction.
This time, Phala Network has also empowered the holders of the Spore.fun token SPORE through airdrops, which has also brought more attention to itself. The founder of the protocol, Marvin Tong, recently announced that he is airdropping two platform tokens, adam and eve, to the holders of the Spore.fun token SPORE, which are the paternal and maternal AI roles of the Spore.fun platform.
Leveraging TEE technology to layout the AI track, and previously rejecting MEME coins
Although the Polkadot ecosystem has experienced a collective surge in popularity, with the cooling of market enthusiasm, many projects are also facing survival challenges. Phala Network is using the AI narrative to return to the public eye.
Phala Network believes that the rise of AI has brought unprecedented demand for confidential computing, and the security and privacy of data processing have become crucial. This surge in demand has highlighted the importance of Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) in ensuring the integrity, confidentiality and security of AI operations.
To this end, Phala Network has developed an open-source, TEE-based Dstack framework to simplify the implementation of a secure and high-performance computing environment for AI projects. This year, Phala Network has empowered AI Agents through TEE technology, significantly increasing their adoption and usage, from about 150 contract executions per day at the beginning of the year to about 750,000 now.
At the same time, Phala Network's TEE technology has been integrated into major fields such as blockchain and AI, covering areas from decentralized AI model training and inference to secure Ethereum block construction. For example, Phala's collaboration with Hyperbolic integrates its confidential computing technology into the blockchain to ensure the secure deployment and verification of AI models; its collaboration with the DePIN protocol io.net further expands decentralized AI by providing secure access to GPU resources; Phala's collaborations with 0G, Morpheus and Lumerin are for secure and verifiable AI execution; and its collaborations with Succinct Labs and Conduit are to redefine Ethereum scalability and secure computing.
As early as October this year, Phala Network has developed autonomous AI Agents, such as the first fully autonomous AI Agent project @TEE_HEE_HE on Twitter, to eliminate human intervention in the AI decision-making process and applications such as Agent Wars based on AI-AgentContract.
According to crypto KOL @0xSun, when TEE was launched in late October, the AI had posted an ETH address and a MEME coin with the same name appeared on Ethereum, attracting interactions from influencers like Zagabond, the founder of Azuki, and the coin price reached $40 million within half a day. However, at that time, the several developers who were leading this technology (including Phala Network) expressed their opposition, causing the coin price to plummet. Nevertheless, two months later, TEE technology has truly sparked public interest and started to spread widely, still due to related tokens. If the tech team had embraced MEME coins from the beginning, it might have developed on the ETH mainnet to a scale similar to a16z. He also pointed out that although TEE emphasizes AI's autonomous control, the code may still have backdoors, and most people lack the ability to verify whether TEE technology is truly used.
Furthermore, Phala Network has disclosed more layouts in the AI track in its 2024 outlook. For example, Phala Network will focus on building Phala 2.0 in 2025, which is an upgraded platform integrating GPU TEE technology, providing higher processing power and enhanced security for AI and privacy protection applications; Phala Network plans to launch the Phala Cloud platform designed for AI applications to simplify the deployment and management of TEE applications.
Overall, the market response indicates that Phala Network's transformation has received a positive response, and its token price has also risen. However, to maintain competitiveness in the "god-level battle" of the AI market, Phala will still face many challenges.
