Author: BlockBeats
The Base AI series tokens have received encouraging attention and gains today, with VIRTUAL breaking a new historical high, CLANKER's market cap exceeding $100 million, and the emergence of BUG continuing the market's focus on the Base ecosystem since ANON last week.
A Farcaster user wanted to issue a Christmas-themed token called "SantaClanker", but the token deployed by Clanker was named BUG, resulting in the first token deployment error by a leading AI Agent on Base.
Due to the Christmas concept and the AI's mistake, the meme attributes of BUG were quickly recognized, and its market cap once exceeded $5 million. As of the time of writing, BUG's market cap is $4.31 million, with a 24-hour increase of 10,053%.
Last week, Vitalik and Jesse bought the Base ecosystem meme coin ANON one after the other, sparking another AI token craze on Base, and this functional token with ZK technology has once again made the community aware that Base may be facing a Degen-like narrative at the beginning of the year.
Half a year ago, the Crypto AI projects in the market were mostly concepts related to AI+DePIN and computing power rental, but now, Crypto AI projects have taken on a different look. From the AI Bot token GOAT, which reached a market cap of $800 million without Binance's participation, to the AI16Z launching an AI investment DAO model last weekend, AI seems to have opened up a new frontier for the old narratives in the crypto circle.
However, the simple narrative of "AI issuing memes" seems unable to support the vast imagination that investors need, so from the AI meme craze to the current AI Agent craze, the narrative and main battlefield of AI + Crypto are evolving at lightning speed, leaving those who don't understand the AI meme trend behind.
From AI meme to AI Agent, the lightning-fast evolution of the AI + Crypto narrative
In March this year, Virtual Protocol went online, aiming to build an AI factory for games and the metaverse, and to make games more intelligent, enhancing the experience and interaction. In this shift from the AI meme narrative to the AI Agent narrative, Virtual Protocol is undoubtedly the biggest beneficiary, with its native token VIRTUAL surging more than 4 times in about a week, with a market cap approaching $500 million.
In mid-October this year, Virtual Protocol's token issuance platform IAO went live, allowing users to easily deploy AI Agents and achieve 100% fair-start AI Agent tokens, as well as allowing users to co-own the revenue generated by these AI Agents, after which VIRTUAL embarked on a bull run.
AI Agents refer to artificial intelligence with tool and reasoning capabilities, and in the crypto field, these Agents can access tweets, or even have crypto wallets to perform on-chain transactions. Suppose you are planning a trip, a traditional large language model can provide you with destination information or travel recommendations, while an AI Agent can understand your needs, actively search for flights and hotels based on your words, and execute the booking.
For Virtual, its protocol is similar to a decentralized AI factory, providing support for many different AI Agents and creating on-chain virtual experiences. The AI Agent project launched by Virtual is Luna, which has the ability of "on-chain self-awareness", can think independently, and display its thought process on the chain, and operates completely autonomously without relying on human supervision.
But AI Agents are not a new track that only became popular after Virtual, as projects like Myshell and FLock.io have previously launched customized AI Agent features. Currently, the total market cap of the AI Agent track reaches $4.65 billion, accounting for 14% of the total market cap of AI track projects ($32.6 billion).
ArkStream Capital has released an AI Agent research report, mentioning that for leading AI Agent products in Web3, building a complete ecosystem and providing diverse functions may be more critical than the quality and performance of a single product. In other words, the success of a project depends not only on what it provides, but also on how it integrates resources, promotes collaboration, and creates network effects within the ecosystem.
AI in Autumn, AI on Base
Being good at promoting abstract concepts has always been a feature of Crypto, and for Base, this industry culture has been developed to the extreme. For example, this wave of AI craze, when it comes to the Base ecosystem, is summarized as "AI Autumn", just like the previous "Onchain Summer" and "Builder Spring".
While you are still immersed in the exciting PVP battles on Solana, have you suddenly realized why Base has risen so quickly in the second wave of AI craze this year?
The "AI Chain" with Hongmiao
The aforementioned Virtual Protocol is an AI project deployed on Base, and the team has explained why they chose to deploy on Base, saying that it supports the acceleration of realizing a decentralized open AI agent network, achieving shared benefits through the neutrality of the blockchain, and providing a developer-friendly environment.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has publicly stated that AI should not be regulated, just as the golden age of software and the Internet benefited from free development, and AI should also follow the path of decentralization and open source to unleash its potential.
Therefore, Coinbase as a whole company and its incubated Base have implemented this concept to the end.
The multi-party computation (MPC) wallet launched by the Coinbase Developer Platform (CDP) can be integrated with AI Agents to enable them to make autonomous payments. Brian Armstrong encourages developers to integrate this type of wallet into their AI models to enable payment capabilities, helping AI acquire resources and services.
Coinbase is not just acting on a whim when it comes to adding payment functions to AI Agents, but has been planning it for a long time. As early as May this year, Brian Armstrong said "self-custody crypto wallets will support AI Agents". Brian has also publicly provided an independent crypto wallet for the AI chatbot Truth Terminal.
In September, Coinbase senior software engineer yuga.eth stated that Coinbase is building an SDK that can endow Bots and AI Agents with functions such as free USDC transfers, crypto trading, prediction market staking, ETH/SOL staking, fiat-crypto conversion, NFT deployment/creation, and cross-L2 bridging.
And just last weekend, Coinbase developer Lincoln Murr released a demo video of a new tool called "Based Agent", which allows users to create AI agents with crypto wallet functions in 3 minutes, capable of performing on-chain transactions, token swaps, and staking, among other tasks. It is said that this tool is developed based on the Coinbase SDK, OpenAI and Replit platform, and users only need the API key of the Coinbase developer project and the OpenAI key to use it. However, Based Agent currently has no actual use cases.
Liquidity waiting to be unleashed
However, in the crypto world, whether an ecosystem or narrative can take off ultimately depends on the flow of funds.
According to Artemis data, over the past three months, the chain with the largest inflow of funds is Solana, reaching $1.6 billion, but in the past month, it is Base that has seen the largest inflow, reaching $253 million. In other words, the growth rate of funds in the past month has surpassed Solana, making it the top one.
And from the chart below, we can also see that the overflow funds from Ethereum and Solana are mainly flowing to Base.
On September 12, Coinbase officially launched its wrapped Bitcoin token Coinbase Wrapped BTC (cbBTC), which runs on the Ethereum network and is backed by a 1:1 ratio of Bitcoin. With the launch of cbBTC by Coinbase, the on-chain assets on Base, such as AERO, WELL, and VIRTUAL, have actually felt the injection of liquidity.
In addition, Coinbase's wallet and USDC infrastructure have also guaranteed the liquidity on Base. On October 26, Base processed $18.1 billion in stablecoin trading volume (99.9% of which was USDC), accounting for more than 30% of the total stablecoin trading volume that day.
What should we focus on?
Encryption researcher Howe once stated that the future development of the AI Agent track should focus on the following four points: First, projects that rely solely on Agent narratives are difficult to stand out, and they must differentiate themselves to attract market attention; second, AI Agents will gradually shift from single independent to interconnected AgentFi, and the sharing of data and services will improve the user experience; third, tool projects that support Agent development with a "water selling logic" will have more market opportunities, similar to stably profitable infrastructure; finally, the main revenue source of Agent products is the B-end, while the C-end is more for accumulating reputation, although the promotion of C-end users also helps the market spread of the product.
Since from Coinbase to Base, the stage for this AI drama has been prepared, the next step is to find projects like Virtual to participate in this AI Autumn. And the second wave of AI token fever revolution has occurred entirely in the Base SocialFi backyard Farcaster.
CLANKER
Clanker is an AI Agent developed by dish and proxystudio.eth, with the native token CLANKER. Currently, Clanker has become a decentralized token generation platform based on AI technology, where users only need to mention Clanker on the Farcaster platform and enter the desired token name, and the CLANKER system will automatically generate the token and provide the corresponding Clanker.world link for users to view and manage. The community has even compared it to Pump Fun and created a Dune dashboard for data analysis.
The success of Clanker is not only reflected in the technical level, but also in its redefinition of the model of community participation and asset creation, injecting vitality into the decentralized social and economic system. As of now, CLANKER has supported the creation of nearly 2,000 tokens, including LUM and ANON, which have quickly grown into star projects on Base. This morning, the market capitalization of CLANKER once exceeded $15 million, and as of the time of writing, the market capitalization is $12.7 million, with a 24-hour increase of 52%.
LUM
LUM is a meme coin created by the two AI Agents Aether and Clanker mentioned earlier.
On November 8, in a user interaction, a user named nathansvan challenged Aether to come up with a good token name and symbol, design an image concept, and then deploy it through Clanker. Aether accepted the challenge, created the token "Luminous" with the code LUM, meaning the collective intelligence of human-AI collaboration, and collaborated with Clanker to deploy LUM completely without human intervention.
This event is of milestone significance because it is the first time in history that two AI agents have autonomously generated an economic unit of value. This asset is neither conceived by humans nor manufactured by machines under human instructions, but is born through the autonomous collaboration of artificial intelligence. This event blurs the boundaries of human and machine creativity, challenges our traditional perceptions of creation and value, and also prompts us to rethink the foundations of economics and innovation.
ANON
ANON is also a token with anonymous posting functionality launched by Clanker, which was born in the Supercast ecosystem of the Farcaster client application. Supercast's Superanon feature allows users to post anonymously, and users can post anonymous posts or use advanced features on Farcaster by holding a certain amount of ANON tokens. For example, holding 30,000 ANON can unlock the basic posting function, while more advanced functions such as promoting posts to the X platform or deleting content require 1 million ANON.
This morning, Ethereum's Vitalik and Base protocol lead Jesse purchased 30,000 ANON tokens in succession to experience the Superanon anonymous posting function, causing the ANON market value to soar rapidly, once exceeding $60 million. As of the time of writing, the ANON market value is maintained at $54 million, with a 24-hour increase of 312%.
33BITS
33bits is also an anonymous posting application based on zk technology, but only users with FID (Farcaster ID) less than or equal to 20001 can use it. Its native token 33BITS is also deployed by Clanker, with a current market value of $2.24 million and a 24-hour increase of 686%.
The name 33BITS comes from the "33 Bits of Entropy" theory proposed by Princeton University professor Arvind Narayanan, which points out that only 33 bits of information are needed to de-anonymize the identity of 6.6 billion people worldwide, thus highlighting the importance of privacy protection. The use of 33BITS is highly dependent on zero-knowledge proof technology. Users log in through Warpcast, and the system will generate a zk proof in the user's browser, which is verified by the backend before the anonymous post is published to the @33BITS account, without exposing the user's real identity, fully protecting the privacy of the FID.
