Author: TechFlow
With the (temporary) end of the violent deleveraging, the altcoins have started to warm up, and a quick look shows that the AI Memes on Solana are still the first to rebound, not only the $GOAT and $ACT that have been launched by major institutions, but also some high-volume AI Memes on the chain have been rising uncontrollably.
Coincidentally, December 11th marks the two-month anniversary of the birth of $GOAT, which is also the two-month period when the market started to formally engage with and go crazy for AI Memes. After two months of rapid learning and precipitation, the market's focus on AI Memes has gradually shifted from "fun" to "practical". The previously controversial $ai16z has today broken through an $800 million market cap, successfully flipping $GOAT and $ACT. Clearly, the underlying infrastructure concepts in the AI sector have captured some of the attention of AI Agents.
Talking about the market, with the overall market on the Solana chain warming up, the "speed-through" players, whether in quality or quantity, have clearly felt better. In the early hours of the 11th, a Solana token called $arc was launched and reached a market cap of $20 million in 6 hours, reaching a peak of nearly $50 million as of the writing.
By looking into the background of $arc, we found that the $arc team is strongly associated with the developers of a framework called "rig", a true hardcore AI infrastructure concept. This overnight speed-through may also be just right for the market's changing perception of AI concept tokens.
Note: Meme token prices are highly volatile and carry high risks. Investors should fully assess the risks and participate cautiously. This article is solely based on market hot spots to share information, and the author and platform do not guarantee the completeness and accuracy of the content, nor does this article provide any investment advice.
Is it really the rig development team that issued the token?
The official website manifesto of arc states quite bluntly: "we build rig, rig builds us" directly indicating the direct connection between the project and the rig framework. At the same time, through the two articles on the official website and official Twitter, the project's significance is briefly explained: "We are experiencing a revolution in the meaning".
The team believes that LLMs (large language models) are like a vast sea of meaning, where all possible concepts coexist and collide with each other. This feature is gradually similar to the way humans understand the world - just as our brains can naturally process meaning and context when we understand memes and allusions.
Based on this understanding, the arc team is continuously developing the rig framework - an AI development framework written in the Rust language. This is not just an agent framework written in Rust, but a tool to help developers navigate the "sea of meaning". Their goal is not to replace human creativity with AI, but to enhance our ability to discover patterns and make connections, to help people better understand and utilize the way AI processes meaning, representing a major shift in the software development paradigm from pure logical construction to meaning processing, which is the "revolution in the meaning" the team is talking about.
In plain terms, the team's two lengthy articles are just saying: you guys like to hype AI, right? Well, now we're going to do big things in the AI development field.
And then they tacked on the freshly baked $arc token contract at the end of the long-winded discourse.
But after all, there are countless scams around the AI concept these days, and the market can't be FOMO'd just by the word of the arc team alone. The real FOMO point is that the developers of the rig framework, @Playgrounds0x and Co Founder @0thTachi have enthusiastically retweeted the arc official tweet, claiming the project, and also played a Matrix-style red and blue pill meme, hinting that the project will bring about an earth-shattering change.
What is the rig framework?
As mentioned earlier, rig (Rust Inference Gateway) is an AI development framework written in the Rust language, and here is a simple introduction to it:
The Rust language in which rig was written is something many people should have heard of - Solana uses Rust to develop smart contracts, so many Solana big shots and engineers using Rust for AI development should be familiar with rig.
Simply put, rig is like a "smart butler" that helps developers more easily build and manage AI applications. If we compare an AI model (like GPT-4) to a powerful engine, then rig is the transmission and drivetrain that allows that engine to run stably and efficiently.
In the current AI framework field, the Python-based LangChain has been the dominant player. But as the scale of applications grows, LangChain's performance has become a bit inadequate, and developers face an awkward choice:
Either use a simple but performance-limited Python framework
Or directly handle the complex underlying APIs
The rig framework, with its higher execution efficiency and security brought by the Rust language, gives developers a better choice.
If we use house building as an analogy for AI development:
Traditional Python frameworks (like LangChain) are like houses built with wood: quick to build, but limited in load-bearing capacity
While rig is like a steel-reinforced concrete skyscraper: the upfront investment is larger, but it can support more complex structures
With a relatively solid narrative, the $arc's $50 million speed-through seems a bit more "real".
Summary
The wave of AI Agents has brought about a huge wealth appreciation effect and more practical imagination of AI+Crypto, but it has also been accompanied by team misconduct and scammers. In the early stages of emerging narratives, those who make money are not necessarily the truly kind and useful teams. But as the sector concept and market awareness gradually mature, more truly capable teams like the Rig developers are starting to issue their own tokens, representing the entry of more "regular troops".
To use the current market situation as an example, with the development of the ecosystem brought by ai16z and Virtuals, the rig framework that has just appeared on the market's radar may also see large-scale applications in the future, bringing more practical possibilities to the AI and crypto narrative, and the entry threshold for the AI concept will also become higher and higher.
