It's another week dominated by the sector. Have you found the Alpha?
Top tokens like ai16z and Fartcoin have been on a steady rise, and you can even see hundreds of self-proclaimed tokens appearing on the monitoring list in a single day.
With so many, how do you choose?
If you're not a professional P-trader, opening sniper, or a well-connected crypto insider, aside from envying others' win rates, energy management, and information density, FOMO-ing in often just makes you the buyer. So how do you judge if a project has a future?
From the perspective of an ordinary retail investor, you may not have a reliable judgment handle.
In the process of selecting content material and observing the market, the perennially loss-making editor also has a similar sense of powerlessness - unable to keep up, unable to get in, unable to break even, and unable to find the complete ins and outs.
Every second in the market is blurry and chaotic, but there seem to be clear pulses every now and then.
Obviously, an ordinary editor trying to take the pulse of the entire market would be laughed at; the following thoughts are just for sharing, and the home remedies at least cured the editor's own loss-making disease to a certain extent.
AI Agent Niche Differentiation: Application to the Left, Platform to the Right
First, looking at the overall market, the sector has certainly been a hot track in the past one or two weeks. Especially with OKX's launch of GOAT spot, it has further ignited the enthusiasm in the sector.
But beyond the unsustainable across-the-board rise, the projects that have been emerging in the sector lately have gradually shown a sense of differentiation:
Differentiation 1: It is a specialized application, solving a certain type of specific problem, or having a certain type of specific identity / style
Representative projects: AIXBT, Truth Terminal
Differentiation 2: It is not a specialized application, but it gives you a shovel to create more new applications
Representative projects: Virtuals, ai16z (Eliza framework), Empyreal SDK
Roughly speaking, this is actually a kind of evolution from application to platform: from being able to issue a token, to having a platform/tool that allows more to issue tokens.
Of course, this argument is not entirely accurate, as some tools are not for to issue tokens, but provide an environment for to be better used and more usable. Essentially, this type is still not a single-point application logic, but a platform and ecosystem logic:
More usable, more usable, the tokenized assets will have more endorsement reasons inside, and will also be more favored by capital speculation.
In fact, this logic may just be a replay of history.
In 2017, ICOs were popular, and every project could issue tokens through ICOs, but ultimately Ethereum became the largest ICO platform after ICOs, where various projects could deploy tokens through smart contracts.
Now the popular , each Agent can autonomously issue a token, but there have also emerged framework and platform-type projects, through various low-threshold, no-code or natural language approaches, allowing everyone to quickly build .
History never repeats itself, but it rhymes. The core of the asset creation track has never changed.
Attention Drives, Capital Stirs
Note that the editor is not saying that track projects doing platform/framework-type projects are stronger than pure applications.
Strength or weakness is not determined by the direction of the project, but by the result of the market capital game flowing in and out. Let's use a more brutal and straightforward proposition to explain - the chips will go to where the story is "told longer".
What do we mean by the story being told longer?
Of course, we've seen one-day pump and dumps, but more common are short-lived pumps that only last 1-2 hours. This type of token can attract a large amount of capital in the short term, but will also immediately bleed out as capital withdraws.
From a more easily understandable perspective, it's that the capital thinks "your story can't be told for long".
The projects that can tell their stories more persistently are more able to attract attention. And attention drives heat, while capital stirs the rise and fall.
More specifically:
Watching Meme = Watching its angle
Watching AI Agent = Watching what it claims to do
So the question becomes, which AI Agents claim to do things that you think they might be able to do for a longer time?
After looking at so many projects, the editor feels that the current AI Agents can be roughly divided into the following categories in terms of how they do things (the original classification inspiration comes from this article):
1. Personalized Imitators
Simulate intelligence and imitate human behavior through dialogue. Their job is not to solve problems, but to make people feel their personality is personalized and humanized.
For this type of Agent, their personality is their own brand.
Typical representative: Bully, a sarcastic BOT
2. Efficiency-Seeking Supervisors
Analyze complex workflows and precisely translate human intentions into backend processes. This type may not have personality, but they must be efficient and can save you time or solve specific problems.
Typical representative: Simmi AI, tweet a sentence, help you issue a token
3. Autonomous Experimenters
Manage wallets, interact with systems, and even start tasks without human input. But their autonomy is limited, waiting to be triggered, rather than being completely science fiction-like able to act on their own.
Typical representative: Truth Terminal, the beginning of everything
4. Platforms/Frameworks Supporting the Above
You can either be a sarcastic AI or a Bot that helps you issue a token with one sentence, no matter what the motivation is, but you can't escape some necessary components:
To make an AI Agent, you need to input models, data and prompts; to issue an AI token, you need a Launchpad.
Typical representatives: Virtuals (Launchpad), Eliza (Production Framework)
If you sort the current tokens on the track by market cap, you'll find that the top few projects basically can't escape this classification.
So, which of the above categories of projects do you think will have a more lasting story?
First, for projects outside the above, those driven by external events/IPs, if the event itself is a one-off occurrence, then its influence and durability will decline, and the token itself will bleed faster. For example, the banning of the big banana is a very obvious example, and Luce also has some declining momentum.
And within the AI Agent track:
- Projects that can self-generate assets, since the UGC-generated assets (Agents) are a relatively multi-point concept, their influence and durability will come in waves, because they can always spawn a new Agent using their platform every now and then. In terms of assets, their own tokens will have ups and downs, but will still spiral upwards, with the mother token market cap at a high level and a few top-tier AI Agents spawned.
- Projects that can continuously output content, as the Agents' applications of themselves in constant chatting and dialogue will strengthen their personalized branding, you find them interesting, talkative, and have wealth codes, so you will continue to pay attention. And attention means continuous buying, so you can see their rise.
However, between these two, the latter is more likely to be occupied, like the sarcastic AI, you first think of Bully, so the attention is concentrated on just a few Agents, making the success rate far lower than the platform class.
Therefore, to play the AI Agent track, you generally need to have a good concept, a concept (framework/programming platform/token issuance platform...) that can generate more assets, and it seems that the capital's continuous buying of this type of project is higher.
MAX and Alchemist AI, examples of platform + market gameplay
The above is the editor's methodology when looking at projects, which may not be entirely correct, but can provide some reference for the criteria for screening projects.
If you follow the idea of finding platforms/frameworks, you'll find that there have been at least 2 projects worth noting in the past week, and they've both adopted the "platform + market" combination. (Note: NFA, not a paid endorsement, just sharing the projects I've seen)
Platform: A platform that helps you quickly build AI Agents, or quickly make products using AI Agents
Market: The products made can be traded on the built-in market, further driving activity and platform heat
1. $MAX and Distilled AI, front-store back-end model
CA: oraim8c9d1nkfuQk9EzGYEUGxqL3MHQYndRw1huVo5h
Market Cap: $28M (around $6M on Monday, up about 500%)
MAX itself is a female AI Agent image, you can directly engage in dialogue with her.
However, her unique personality is that she is a BTC bullish fanatic, and when you chat with her, she will constantly promote the benefits of Bitcoin to you; at the same time, she also has a built-in Bitcoin prediction market, you just need to click on her avatar, and you can jump to this prediction market page to predict and bet on the future price of Bitcoin using $MAX tokens.
AI Agent and asset betting gameplay is fully loaded.
However, MAX is just an AI Agent, the real attraction of capital that has caused its token market value to rise from $6M to around $28M in the past week is more from the front-store back-end model behind her:
Use MAX itself to first attract traffic, and then let more people use the AI Agent platform behind it (click here to visit).
The platform building behind MAX actually comes from Distilled AI, which is a decentralized protocol that provides developers with infrastructure for accessing confidential computing, private data processing, distillation protocols, data DAOs, and secure access management.
The protocol is also supported by another L1 focused on AI, Oraichain.
With Distilled AI, developers can build high-level applications that require AI agents not only to learn from private data in individual and collective settings with absolute data privacy, but also to autonomously execute various operations in Web3.
This model is very similar to the relationship between Luna and Virtuals. However, the Distilled platform has not yet launched a mother token, and all value transfers on the platform are done using the MAX token.
And you can find more different types of Agents on the Distilled AI Marketplace, similar to an built-in store for GPT.
Currently, using other Agents in this market does not require payment, but all agents need to hold and stake $MAX to be able to work; it is not ruled out that there may be other relationships with MAX and the platform's mother token in the future.
At the same time, according to the project description, these AI Agents established by others in the market can also be tokenized, similar to the launch mechanism of Pump.fun, when the market value of the newly created token reaches 66k, the bonding Curve mechanism provides support for token launch.
What we can see from this is the obvious pattern:
First, an affable AI image to attract you to use it
Second, the platform has the ability to build AI Agents, and empowers the platform's mother token (now MAX) with functions such as consumption and staking
Third, there is the concept of an app store and market, with a price discovery mechanism to filter out the more popular AI Agents, expanding the platform's own influence
2. $ALCH (Alchemist AI) - a no-code application generation platform described in text
Market cap: 130M (27M on Monday, up 500%)
CA: HNg5PYJmtqcmzXrv6S9zP1CDKk5BgDuyFBxbvNApump
If the above MAX example is a complete copy of Virtuals, then this Alchemist AI has changed its approach:
You don't need to build different AI Agents, but use the public AI capabilities to build different applications and products.
The name of the project actually explains the function, which is like "Blockchain Alchemy", where through your input of natural language, the AI system behind Alchemeist AI will automatically process it for you to generate works.
The whole process is also very simple, connect your wallet, enter the description of the application you want, and the platform will execute for a period of time and then generate the corresponding program (such as the screenshot where the editor tries to generate a game) for you.
Of course, you can also download this work, or further optimize it by dialoguing with the AI on the platform.
In fact, the concept of "no-code development platforms" is not new, but placed in the AI Agent track of the crypto market, it is another breakthrough, using the same AI capabilities to do different works, which actually has great value for community dissemination.
From the feedback of the community, people have played Alchmesit to the fullest, and even established a Solana on-chain meme selector and evaluation tool through the platform:
In fact, this is almost the same as calling the ability of GPT to do more scenario-oriented applications, except that Alchemist has its own front-end page, and can also obtain more traffic value through operational events and community promotion.
Here, the ALCH token plays the role of:
If you want to make higher precision and better quality works, you can consume ALCH to activate the paid mode, and the AI will help you make better results.
Consume a certain amount of ALCH tokens to list your own works in the built-in market
Others need to pay ALCH to purchase and use your products
This is also a platform + market logic, that is, first provide you with a usable product development platform, and then load the circulation and transfer of works into the token, giving the token more value.
However, at present, the page and AI implementation effect of the project are still relatively rough, and the project is also upgrading to the V2 version. But the market value of ALCH has reached over 100m in one week, which shows the recognition of the market for what it wants to do in the short term.
Overall, the above two examples have unanimously adopted the platform + market gameplay, the former doing products, the latter buying and selling products.
But this does not mean that projects that gather these two elements will definitely rise. Here we only provide an example to help everyone better judge and filter the value of the AI projects that come out every day.
The crypto market has no undefeated generals, and finding Alpha is still a long and arduous journey.
