Author: Xiyou, ChainCatcher
Editor: Nianqing, ChainCatcher
In 2024, the "Crypto+AI" (Crypto AI) field achieved unprecedented breakthrough growth. At the beginning of the year, the field was only composed of a few projects, but now it has become an independent track that cannot be ignored in the crypto market.
According to the latest data compiled by ChainCatcher, the total market value of the crypto AI sector has exceeded $70 billion as of December 7, accounting for the highest proportion of 2% in the entire crypto market, with a year-on-year growth rate of 400%.
At the same time, the number of crypto AI projects has also shown explosive growth, currently exceeding 600, covering decentralized AI infrastructure, AI Dapps and other categories of products.
The total market value of crypto AI assets exceeded $70 billion during the year, and the number of related projects exceeded 600
According to the latest data from CoinMarketCap, the Crypto*AI sector has recorded 355 Tokens, and its total asset market value has exceeded $70 billion as of December 7, with a peak value reaching $70.42 billion. Currently, affected by the overall downward trend in the crypto market, as of December 23, the total market value of the crypto AI sector has fallen to $47 billion, but the 24-hour trading volume is still as high as $5 billion.
At the beginning of the year, the total market value of the crypto AI sector was only $17 billion. In less than a year, the total market value of this sector has increased by more than 400%, once again demonstrating the vigorous development and huge potential of the crypto AI field.
Daniel Cheung, co-founder of Syncracy Capital, pointed out in his opinion on December 12 that although the crypto AI sector currently only accounts for about 1% of the total crypto market value, with the continuous evolution of the market cycle and the strong momentum of AI infrastructure and AI Agent, he predicts that the market value of this sector is expected to grow tenfold.
It is worth mentioning that although the current crypto market is generally declining, on December 23, the total market value of the entire crypto market reached $3.4 trillion, and the market value of crypto AI assets still accounted for nearly 1.4% of the entire market (the peak period accounted for more than 2%), further proving its future market growth potential.
2024 can be considered a key turning point for the crypto AI field to transition from emerging to full-blown. At the beginning of the year, the crypto AI track was still in the germination stage, with only a few projects, mainly represented by the decentralized GPU project Render (RNDR), the AI infrastructure Fetch.ai (FET) and Worldcoin. However, in less than a year, the crypto AI field has been able to be divided into multiple sub-tracks, covering decentralized GPU, AI data platform, AI infrastructure and AI Agent, with hundreds of projects.
According to the crypto data platform Rootdata, the number of crypto projects containing the AI keyword has exceeded 600, and this number is still increasing.
Catalysts for Crypto AI in 2024: OpenAI narrative, VC deployment, and the outbreak of AI Agent Meme
From the data trend of the total market value of crypto AI assets, the growth in 2024 showed two significant peaks: the first peak occurred between February and March, while the second occurred after October, ushering in a stronger growth wave.
Between February and March, the growth of the crypto AI field was mainly driven by two landmark events in the AI field.
In February, OpenAI released the "text-to-video" large model Sora, a groundbreaking achievement that triggered a disruptive revolution in the AI field. At the same time, this event also greatly boosted the token price of Worldcoin, the iris recognition crypto project led by OpenAI founder Sam Altman, and in turn drove the strong growth of the entire crypto AI asset sector. During this period, quality projects such as the AI model incentive platform Bittensor (TAO) and the AI data platform Arkham (ARKM) began to receive widespread market attention, and the rise of these projects further ignited the investment enthusiasm in the crypto AI market, attracting a large number of investors to enter this promising emerging field.
Subsequently, the grand opening of Nvidia's annual AI conference GTC in March once again attracted widespread global attention and led to a surge in its market value, triggering a GPU chip speculation frenzy. At the conference, the appearance of crypto industry leaders such as Near co-founder Illia Polosukhin and Render Network founder Jules Urbach once again injected new vitality into the crypto AI field. This series of events led to the emergence of decentralized GPU concept projects like io.net.
Since then, crypto AI has officially developed into an independent track, with AI infrastructure, decentralized GPU, and decentralized AI data projects emerging one after another, bringing more choices and opportunities to the market.
In October, the growth of the crypto AI field was mainly attributed to the outbreak of the AI Agent Meme. The emergence of the token GOAT of the AI Agent project Truth Terminal triggered a frenzy of AI Agent Meme project token issuance, driving the launch of nearly a hundred AI Agent Meme coins. This trend has led to the rapid rise of AI Agent as an independent sub-track in the crypto AI field, with products covering AI Agent Meme coins, AI Agent issuance platforms (IAO) and AI Agent underlying infrastructure, and specific projects can be found in the "Systematic Review of the AI Agent Track: AI Meme, Issuance Platform and Infrastructure" released by ChainCatcher in November. According to Coingecko data, as of December 23, the total market value of the AI Agent track tokens has reached $9.8 billion, accounting for about 20% of the total market value of the entire crypto AI track (470 billion dollars), and the speculation heat is still ongoing.
If OpenAI's text-to-video tool Sora, Nvidia's market value surge and its AI summit, etc. constitute the strong external driving forces for the development of the crypto AI field, then the explosive growth of AI Agent Meme is undoubtedly the internal spark ignited by the crypto market, accelerating the rise of this field. Under the joint catalytic effect of internal and external forces, the crypto AI track has quickly become a key area in the crypto world that cannot be ignored, and its importance is becoming increasingly prominent.
In addition, the crypto AI market in 2024 has witnessed an unprecedented investment boom, with various investment institutions rushing in, and investment amounts soaring. In this field, top-tier venture capital firms in the crypto industry such as Grayscale, Delphi Venture, Coinbase Ventures, Binance Labs and a16z have all actively deployed "Crypto+AI" projects.
Among them, Delphi Ventures expressed high expectations for the combination of Crypto and AI at the beginning of the year, and invested in multiple related projects such as io.net, OG Labs and Mythos Ventures. a16z raised a new $6 billion fund focused on investing in the AI field, and selected 5 crypto AI projects in its fall crypto accelerator. In the second half of the year, institutions such as Pantera Capital, Grayscale, Binance Labs and Coinbase Ventures also announced their entry into the crypto AI field, establishing dedicated funds or increasing investment efforts. According to a report released by Messari, crypto venture capital firms injected over $213 million into AI projects in the third quarter of 2024, a 250% increase quarter-on-quarter and a 340% year-on-year increase.
"Crypto for AI" market prospects are greater than "AI for Crypto"
Currently, the crypto AI products on the market can be mainly divided into two forms: "AI for Crypto" and "Crypto for AI".
The former "AI for Crypto" refers to using AI to empower Crypto, mainly focusing on applying AI technology to encrypted products, by integrating AI elements to enhance user experience or strengthen the performance of products. For example, using AI for code optimization and security auditing: AI technology can automatically detect and analyze the code of Web3 projects, discover potential security vulnerabilities and errors, and improve the security and stability of the projects; participating in on-chain yield strategies: using AI algorithms to analyze market trends and user behavior, formulate more efficient on-chain yield strategies, and help crypto users achieve higher returns; integrating AI chatbots to answer user questions and enhance user experience; using AI agents to eliminate barriers in the on-chain user experience, such as automatic trading and asset management, so that users can more conveniently participate in the crypto market.
"Crypto for AI" focuses on using encryption technology to empower the AI industry, leveraging the unique advantages of blockchain technology to solve or improve certain aspects of the AI industry. For example, the privacy and transparency of blockchain technology can solve the privacy and security issues in the process of AI model data collection, processing, and storage; through the use of model-based asset tokenization, the community can own or use AI models in a decentralized way; through the Token technology of the blockchain, idle computing power resources can be aggregated to form a computing power market, reducing the cost of training AI models and improving the utilization efficiency of computing power resources.
In summary, the essence of Web3 technology lies in its decentralized blockchain infrastructure. Relying on the operation of the Token economic system, the autonomous execution of smart contracts, and the powerful efficiency of distributed technology, it not only ensures the precise definition of data ownership, but also greatly improves the transparency and efficiency of business models through the incentive model of Tokens. This feature is just like a panacea, providing an effective solution to the common problems in the AI industry, such as data opacity and unclear business models, which is in line with the macro concept that "AI aims to improve production efficiency, while Web3 focuses on optimizing production relations".
Therefore, industry insiders generally reach a consensus that "Crypto for AI" has a broader prospect and potential in market application compared to "AI for Crypto". This trend has also prompted more and more AI industry insiders to actively seek to use encryption technology to overcome the various challenges and difficulties faced by the AI industry.
Building a Crypto AI Ecosystem Centered on the Three Key Elements of "Data, Computing Power, and Algorithms"
Based on the three core elements of "data, computing power, and algorithms" that drive the development of large AI models, we can further subdivide them into data, computing power, and algorithm model products covering infrastructure and applications. Among them, data is the foundation for training and optimizing AI models; algorithms refer to the mathematical models and program logic that drive AI systems; and computing power refers to the computing resources required to execute these algorithms, and these three elements are also necessary conditions for the continuous updating and iteration of the models.
The specific product forms in the Crypto AI product ecosystem include the following aspects:
At the data level, Crypto AI data projects cover the collection, storage, and processing of data. First, in terms of data acquisition, in order to ensure the richness and diversity of data, some Crypto AI projects use Token economic mechanisms to incentivize users to share their personal or proprietary data, such as the Grass project using reward mechanisms to encourage data providers, Sahara AI tokenizing AI data assets and launching a dedicated data market, and Vana forming data pools to provide specialized or customized data sets for AI applications. In terms of data processing, decentralized data annotation platforms have contributed high-quality training data sets to developers, thereby improving the reinforcement learning and fine-tuning mechanisms of AI models, such as Fraction AI (completed $6 million in financing on December 18), Alaya AI, and Public AI, which provide developers with high-quality training data sets to optimize the reinforcement learning and fine-tuning of AI models. As for data storage, solutions such as Filecoin and Arweave ensure the security and persistence of data.
At the computing power level, the training and inference execution of AI models cannot be done without the support of powerful GPU computing resources. As the complexity of AI models continues to increase, the demand for GPU computing resources is also constantly rising. Facing the challenges of insufficient high-quality GPU resources in the market, rising costs, and longer waiting times, decentralized GPU computing networks have emerged. These networks create open markets and GPU aggregation platforms, allowing anyone (such as Bitcoin miners) to contribute their idle GPU computing power to execute AI tasks and receive Token rewards as compensation. Representative projects include Akash, Render, Gensyn, io.net, and Hyperbolic. Furthermore, projects like Exabits and GAIB have even tokenized physical GPUs, converting them into on-chain financial digital assets, further promoting the decentralization and liquidity of computing power.
At the algorithm model level, the current decentralized AI algorithm networks are essentially a decentralized AI algorithm service market, which connects numerous AI models with different expertise and knowledge. When a user raises a question, the market can intelligently select the most suitable AI model to provide the answer. Representative products include Bittensor, which aggregates various AI models through sub-networks to output high-quality content for users; and Pond, which selects the best decentralized models through competition scoring and incentivizes each model contributor by tokenizing AI models, thereby promoting innovation and optimization of AI algorithms.
From this, we can see that the current crypto market has built a thriving Crypto AI ecosystem centered on the three pillars of "data, computing power, and algorithms" for AI.
What are the Positive Factors for the Crypto AI Track in 2025?
However, since the AI Agent Meme market became popular in October, AI Agent-related products have become the new darling of the Crypto AI market, such as the Talus Network project, which announced the completion of a $60 million financing round in November, specifically building a framework and infrastructure for AI Agents.
Furthermore, the AI Agent Meme craze has not only ignited a new speculative hotspot in the Crypto AI track, but also gradually shifted the market's focus from the original decentralized data, GPU, and other Crypto AI infrastructure areas to the enthusiastic pursuit of AI Agent applications, such as ai16z, whose market value has already exceeded $1 billion, and this trend is still continuing to heat up.
In the recent 2025 crypto industry trend outlooks released by multiple institutions, a16z, VanEck, Bitwise, Hashed, Blockworks, Messari, Framework and other institutions have all expressed optimism about the development of the crypto and AI markets, and have specifically pointed out that AI Agent-related products will see explosive growth in 2025.
At the same time, the external AI field is also experiencing continuous heat. On December 23, Elon Musk's AI company xAI announced another $6 billion in new financing, with its valuation directly soaring to $40 billion, further boosting the prosperity of the AI market.
At the narrative level, OpenAI is experiencing a transformation from GPT to the general artificial intelligence agent AI Agent. It is reported that OpenAI plans to launch a new AI Agent product "Operator" in January 2025, which can automatically execute tasks such as writing code, travel booking, and e-commerce shopping, and is expected to ignite the AI market again like Sora did in early 2024. In addition, Nvidia's annual AI summit will also be held in March 2025, which is another focus of attention for the crypto and AI industries.
Each time the large models of Web2 companies like Nvidia and OpenAI are upgraded, it will ignite the hotspots in the AI track, attracting new capital inflows and further igniting the Crypto AI track.
At the policy level, the newly elected US President Trump has announced the appointment of former PayPal executive David O. Sacks as the White House's AI and cryptocurrency affairs officer, responsible for guiding the government in formulating policies in the fields of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies. As a person with investment experience in both the crypto and AI industries, having participated in investing in companies like Multicoin, he is naturally expected to play a role in promoting the integration of crypto and AI.
