Base AI series tokens all saw encouraging attention and upward trends on the 26th, with VIRTUAL breaking its historical high, CLANKER's market cap exceeding $100 million, and the emergence of BUG continuing the market's focus on the Base ecosystem following ANON last week.
A Farcaster user wanted to issue a Christmas-themed token called "SantaClanker", but the token deployed by Clanker was named BUG instead, so the top AI Agent on Base experienced its first token deployment error.
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 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, triggering another AI token craze on Base, and this functional token with ZK technology has once again made the community aware that Base may be ushering in 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 style. From the AI Bot token GOAT, which reached a market cap of $800 million without Binance's participation, to the AI investment DAO model launched by AI16Z last weekend, AI seems to have opened up a new frontier for the old narratives in the crypto world.
However, the simple narrative of "AI issuing memes" seems unable to support the vast imaginary space required by investors, 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 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 interactivity. In this transition 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 its 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 realize 100% fair-launched AI Agent tokens, as well as allowing users to co-own the income generated by these AI Agents, after which VIRTUAL embarked on its upward trend.
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, and execute booking operations.
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 thinking process on-chain, and operates completely autonomously without relying on human supervision.
However, AI Agents are not a track that only became popular after Virtual. Projects like Myshell and FLock.io have previously launched customized AI Agent functions. 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 top 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 the late autumn, AI in 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 rapidly in this second wave of AI craze this year?
The "AI Chain" of the Red and Green Faction
The Virtual Protocol introduced earlier is precisely the AI project deployed on Base, and the team has explained why they chose to deploy it on Base, which is because it supports the acceleration of the realization of a decentralized open AI agent network, achieving common interests through the neutrality of the blockchain, while providing a developer-friendly environment.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has publicly stated that AI should not be subject to regulation, just as the golden age of software and the Internet has benefited from free development, AI should also follow the same path of decentralization and open source, allowing technology to unleash its potential freely.
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 the AI Agent to enable it to make autonomous payments. Brian Armstrong encourages developers to integrate this type of wallet into their AI models to enable payment capabilities, thereby helping AI acquire resources and services.
As for the addition of payment functions to the AI Agent, Coinbase is not just a whim, but has been planned for a long time. As early as May this year, Brian Armstrong had stated that "self-hosted crypto wallets will provide support for 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 the following functions: 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 new tool demo video called "Based Agent", which allows users to create AI agents with crypto wallet functions in 3 minutes, capable of on-chain transactions, token swaps, and staking, among other tasks. It is said that this tool is 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, the Based Agent currently has no actual use cases.
The Liquidity Ready to Burst
However, in the crypto world, whether an ecosystem or narrative can take off ultimately depends on the flow of funds.
According to Artemis data, the chain with the largest inflow of funds in the past three months is Solana, reaching $1.6 billion, but in the last month, it is Base that has the largest inflow, reaching $253 million. That is, the rate of fund increase in the past month has surpassed Solana and become the first.
And from the chart below, we can also see that the excess funds from Ethereum and Solana have also mainly flowed to Base.
On September 12, Coinbase officially announced the launch of its wrapped BTC token Coinbase Wrapped BTC (cbBTC), which is executed on the Ethereum network and backed by 1:1 BTC. 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, the Coinbase wallet and USDC infrastructure also guarantee the liquidity on Base. On October 26, Base processed $18.1 billion in stablecoin trading volume (of which 99.9% was USDC), accounting for more than 30% of the total stablecoin trading volume that day.
What Should We Focus On?
Crypto researcher Howe has 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 will find it difficult to stand out, and they must differentiate themselves to attract market attention;
Secondly, AI Agents will gradually shift from single independent to interconnected AgentFi, and the sharing of data and services will enhance the user experience;
Furthermore, tool projects that support Agent development with a "water selling logic" will have more market opportunities, similar to profitably stable 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 dissemination of the product.
Since Coinbase and Base have already prepared the stage for this AI drama, all we need to do is find projects like Virtual to participate in this AI Autumn. And the second wave of AI token hype revolution will take place entirely in the Base SocialFi backyard Farcaster. When this article was first published, we recommended readers to pay attention to the task release platform Bountycaster and the AI Agent Aether, and next we will introduce the projects that readers should keep an eye on in this wave of Base AI tokens.
CLANKER
Clanker is an AI Agent developed by dish and proxystudio.eth, with its native token CLANKER. Currently, Clanker has become a decentralized token generation platform based on AI technology, where users only need to mark 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 established 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 cap of CLANKER briefly exceeded $15 million, and as of the time of writing, the market cap is $12.7 million, with a 24-hour increase of 52%.
LUM
LUM is a meme coin created autonomously by the two AI Agents Aether and Clanker mentioned earlier.
On November 8, in a user interaction, a user named nathansvan challenged Aether: Can you come up with a good token name and symbol, conceive an image concept, and then deploy it through Clanker? Aether accepted the challenge, created the token "Luminous" with the code LUM, representing the collective intelligence of human-AI collaboration, and collaborated with Clanker - completely without human intervention - to deploy LUM online.
This event is a milestone because it is the first time in history that two AI agents have autonomously generated a unit of economic value. This asset was neither conceived by humans nor manufactured by machines under human instructions, but was born through the autonomous collaboration of artificial intelligence. This event blurs the boundaries of human and machine creativity, challenges our traditional understanding of creation and value, and also prompts us to rethink the foundations of economics and innovation.
ANON
ANON is also a token with an anonymous posting function combined with ZK technology, launched by Clanker, born in the Supercast ecosystem of the Farcaster client application. Supercast's Superanon feature allows users to post anonymously, and users can release anonymous posts on Farcaster or use advanced features by holding a certain amount of ANON tokens. For example, holding 30,000 ANON can unlock the basic posting function, while higher-level functions such as promoting posts to platform X or deleting content require 1 million ANON.
This morning, Ethereum's Vitalik and Base protocol lead Jesse separately purchased 30,000 ANON tokens to experience the Superanon anonymous posting function, causing the ANON market value to soar rapidly, once breaking through 60M, and as of the time of writing, the ANON market value remains at 54M, with a 24-hour increase of 312%.
33BITS
33bits is also an anonymous posting application based on zk technology, but only users with a Farcaster ID (FID) less than or equal to 20001 can use it. Its native token 33BITS is also deployed by Clanker, with a current market value of 2.24M 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 33BITS usage process is highly dependent on zero-knowledge proof technology. After logging in through Warpcast, the system will generate a zk proof in the user's browser, and after backend verification, the anonymous post will be released to the @33BITS account. The entire process does not require exposing the user's real identity, fully protecting the privacy of the FID.
