Is the AI Agent currently in the "2020-2021" prosperity cycle of the DeFi Summer?
"Clinging to the sword in the boat" is often the most effortless way of forecasting - looking solely from the data dimension, the total locked value (TVL) of DeFi grew from $600 million in January 2020 to $26 billion in December 2020, an increase of over 40 times in just one year, while the market capitalization of the AI track is currently $44 billion, which also means that if it can truly replicate the prosperity cycle of DeFi, its potential market value may exceed $1 trillion.
So the question is, is the AI Agent really experiencing a similar "2020-2021" prosperity cycle like the DeFi Summer? Besides AI Memecoins, what other projects will become the driving force of this track's prosperity cycle?
The Prosperous Cycle of the Fiery AI Agent
According to Cookie.fun's statistical data, as of January 1, 2025, the overall market value of the AI Agent sector has exceeded $16.6 billion, with a growth rate of as high as 53.79% in the past 7 days. Against the backdrop of the overall crypto market fluctuations, the AI Agent ecosystem, from Virtual to AI16Z, and then to Arc, is expanding at an unprecedented speed.
Especially the AI Agent projects driven by Meme culture, relying on their low-threshold token issuance and trading processes, have quickly become the new center of traffic and attention. They have greatly reduced the participation threshold of ordinary users through humorous expressions, highly interactive community culture, and user-friendly promotion strategies, successfully attracting a large number of non-professional users to join.
In plain terms, this is actually another kind of cultural rebellion against the "VC coins", and a continuation of the Meme narrative, but by combining with AI Agent, it not only reduces the participation threshold, but also expands the potential scale of the market, and injects more inclusiveness and sustainability into the AI × Crypto narrative.
Including the recently eye-catching "TAO CAT", as the crystallization of the Masa team's collision of the Virtuals and Bittensor ecosystems, it uniquely demonstrates the superior self-evolution of AI Agent compared to traditional AI Bots, with a core of fair issuance and community-driven economic narrative.
Interestingly, during the writing process, TAOCAT was just selected for the new Binance Alpha project, followed by a significant price increase, and MASA also showed a rising trend.
This easily reminds people of the prosperous scene of the DeFi Summer: from the basic applications of Compound and Uniswap at the beginning to the subsequent large-scale user influx and the derivation of more complex on-chain trading strategies, the interweaving and resonance of technological narratives and capital drivers eventually formed a cyclical prosperity. Therefore, at least the current popularity and market value growth of AI Memecoin-based AI Agent has indeed brought a new round of narrative and imagination space to the crypto industry.
However, how far this prosperity cycle can go remains to be seen. AI Memecoin is just the beginning, and the subsequent development depends on whether AI Agent can become a long-term cornerstone of the crypto industry, rather than just a short-term fad.
For example, in the current AI Agent landscape, the total market value of the top 5 projects exceeds $7 billion, accounting for nearly 45%, among which the Virtual ecosystem and the AI16Z ecosystem have reached $4.65 billion and $2.37 billion respectively, indeed becoming industry benchmark cases in the entire crypto field.
But essentially, the current prosperity of the "AI Agent" track is still mainly based on AI Memecoin or issuance platforms, and is still in the initial stage of the "equity" economic narrative of fair asset issuance. It needs to further expand its reach, and if we look back on the previous crypto cycle, we will find that although DeFi has driven a large amount of capital to flow into the blockchain field, the user threshold of DeFi is still relatively high, requiring financial knowledge and operational skills, which to some extent limits its large-scale popularization.
The emergence of AI Agent has opened up a new narrative in the crypto field with a lower threshold and higher potential - unlike DeFi, which requires users to actively learn complex financial tools, AI Agent can directly provide personalized and intelligent services to users, reducing the participation threshold.
This is one of the interesting variables, that is, by meeting the needs of more ordinary users through intelligent solutions, AI Agent is not only a technical product, but also a new "equity" economic narrative.
As Slowmist founder Yu Xian tweeted: "Another special sense of alienation: the most important role of AI Agent in the Crypto industry may ultimately be to issue a token to stimulate and incentivize that. In non-Crypto industries, the big players have long been far ahead, including defining some interoperability protocols, and making increasingly user-friendly AI applications, while most of the Crypto industry's attention is still on tokens."
Therefore, the AI Agent has indeed entered a prosperous cycle through AI Memecoin, winning high recognition and capital attention from the market for this field, and also marking its formal entry into a golden age: from the traffic center driven by Meme to diversified application scenarios, from the improvement of infrastructure to the exploration of long-term value, the AI Agent is expected to reshape the landscape of the crypto industry and become the most innovative and influential field in the crypto industry.
The "Alpha" and "Beta" of AI Agent
If we trace back the origins, we will find that although the current AI Agent is just about token issuance and imagination value capture, the real landing is closely related to on-chain transaction attributes.
After all, the actual use of AI Agent is far beyond just token issuance - even in the task-driven AgentGPT processing flow, AI Agent has already shown its potential in on-chain trading strategies:
Users can customize the overall task goal, and then the AI Agent will allocate tasks based on its own resources, decomposing the overall task goal into a series of small tasks through the flow and distribution of proxy-layer tasks, and continuously executing and correcting them without human assistance to achieve the overall goal.
In other words, it is the core vision of "intent-centric", where users only need to know what the desired result (intent) is, without having to care about the intermediate processes and steps, and in many cases, the user's intent is complex, and the expression of intent may not be accurate, while the AI trained with specific models can more accurately identify the user's intent and infer the user's potential purpose and needs based on the user's keywords and other information.
In this process, combined with highly intelligent AI, whether it is the natural language input of intent, the judgment of needs, the decomposition of goals, the calculation of the optimal process configuration, or the execution of operations, AI can play a huge advantage. The market has also emerged a large number of smart trading projects involving cross-chain complex transactions, which can efficiently discover the optimal exchange path and allow users to complete the optimal transaction in real-time at the best price.
This is the truly imaginative direction of AI Agent development - the real value lies in becoming the interaction application layer of Web3, where users do not need to understand the complex system, but can complete all on-chain operations by communicating with the AI Agent, thus becoming the underlying infrastructure of Web3, deeply integrated with blockchain, smart contracts and other technologies, to create new application forms and business models, and bring broader imagination space to Web3.
So from a macro perspective, the rapidly developing AI × Crypto narrative is completing its self-iteration at an amazing speed - from the initial AI Meme craze to the gradually shifting focus on practical and interactive AI Agent, the market's attention is being re-focused, which also means that the market is transforming from random token speculation to the narrative logic of actual technology landing.
AI Agent is no longer just a hype, but has truly integrated into the industry logic through value capture mechanisms, such as AI-driven KOL, revenue generation tools, trading and Alpha strategy optimization, as well as the construction of underlying infrastructure. AI technology is gradually shifting from an entertaining narrative to a tool for solving real problems.
Its value goes far beyond the currently popular AI Memecoin, but through technological innovation and ecological integration, it is truly driving the evolution and popularization of Web3. From this perspective, AI Agent is not just a tool, they may reshape the ecological rules of the crypto market, making AI Agent more accessible and adoptable for mainstream users.
Any "long slope and deep snow" track, infrastructure is never absent
In the crypto industry, Alpha is a point, and Beta is a surface. Alpha is usually difficult to capture, but Beta projects with high certainty are more easily ambushed.
The AI Agent field is no exception. Although opportunities like AI Memecoin are difficult to grasp, the infrastructure (Infra) as the core of Beta is almost a clear value capture opportunity, and the narrative transmission path is extremely clear - although the outbreak of AI Memecoin has triggered a frenzy of capital and market attention, the final pattern of the projects that can break out is far from determined, while Infra as the "water seller" can almost sit on the fishing platform with the first-mover ecological advantage.
As mentioned above, from the perspective of the role of AI in the blockchain ecosystem, it is upgrading from a simple tool to a productive force driving industry transformation. This not only serves the existing crypto users, but may also attract traditional financial users to enter the on-chain ecosystem by lowering the threshold, building a more inclusive and sustainable economic logic:
From the elitist finance serving the minority, to the inclusive finance serving the majority; from the unsustainable short-term speculation, to the sustainable long-term growth.
This represents that AI Agent Infra is likely to become a key entry point for the intelligentization of on-chain applications, and also means that projects in the same track that have not been fully priced by the market may hide new value revaluation space, one of the important directions of which is data.
It is well known that a major challenge facing AI Agent is how to efficiently explore and utilize high-quality data, which not only determines the learning ability and decision-making level of AI Agent, but also directly affects the actual application effect and user experience.
Especially for the blockchain ecosystem, data from Twitter, Discord, web crawlers, etc. may hide billions of signals, containing many derivable use cases, which can be personalized for mining and utilization - such as tracking whale dynamics, analyzing "Smart Money" transactions, monitoring on-chain address interactions, screening and differentiating on-chain users, and precisely reaching different player groups, etc.
Therefore, data infrastructure is not only the support for the development of AI Agent, but also the core of its value creation and market promotion. Interestingly, as the leader in the AI data track, Masa recently built the SN 42 data service subnet and the SN 59 AI Agent arena on Bittensor, which is worth a mention.
The AI Agent arena is a big step taken by Masa as the data Infra towards the AI Agent platform, making the data network no longer abstract, but can empower AI Agent in real-time, allowing them to evolve and iterate with the powerful reward mechanism of Bittensor, and let the AI Agent compete in the arena. Just a few weeks after its launch, the AI Agent arena has already attracted the participation of top AI Agents from the Virtuals and creator.bid ecosystems, including TAO CAT incubated by Masa.
Therefore, essentially Masa is centered on "infrastructure (data) + application scenario (arena) + token economy (AI Agent)" to attract more users and developers to operate the platform and continuously expand the business scenarios of AI Agent, stimulating platform activity.
From a broader logic, the narrative path of Masa-like AI Agent Infra is very clear - focusing on the "adaptability" issue of AI agents on-chain, solving the efficiency, stability and intelligence needs of on-chain operations, if this track continues to ferment, it not only has the potential to build the infrastructure of the on-chain AI ecosystem, but may also drive the comprehensive upgrade of the developer ecosystem and user experience.
According to the market rotation rules, the success of Virtual will also drive investors to focus on functionally complementary, technologically innovative or undervalued projects in the same track, especially those with strong ecosystem building capabilities and clear narrative directions. So projects like Masa naturally form a complementary logic with Virtual's token issuance function.
And the improvement of infrastructure and the maturity of technology have enabled AI Agent to enter the profitable and scalable Beta stage from the uncertain Alpha stage, so from this perspective, Infra projects like Masa are indispensable drivers in this process.
The fact that TAOCAT was selected as a new Binance Alpha project, as mentioned earlier, also provides empirical evidence for the logic of my analysis, further strengthening the potential for unexpected value growth opportunities for infrastructure projects (such as MASA) as market attention gradually shifts to the AI Agent track.
In general, the heat of this round of AI Agent Infra is just the beginning, the market demand for on-chain intelligent infrastructure is still expanding rapidly, and the performance of Virtual and Masa provides a good reference for us. More projects with clear positioning, functional complementarity, and undervalued valuation may be gradually discovered by the market, and the opportunities for value revaluation are often hidden in the subtle lines of niche areas.
Epilogue
AI Agent is not the end, but the beginning: in the future crypto market, AI Agent will not only be a part of the ecosystem, but will become an important driving force for the entire ecosystem to move forward.
Infrastructure is the foundation of the ecosystem, and any major trend cannot do without its support, whether it is pioneers like Virtual or potential players like Masa, their common point is to embed their value into the core of the entire ecosystem through technology and logic, and the market's cognition of this value is just a matter of time.
