We can now simply and roughly divide the Crypto AI Agent faction into two major factions: the Virtuals faction and the AI16Z faction. The influence of AI16Z radiates from Solana to the entire blockchain ecosystem, including $HEU on Base, which belongs to the AI16Z faction. Of course, Virtuals also has external expansion, such as cooperation with the TAO ecosystem, like $SERAPH and $TAOCAT, which are the products of its cooperation.
First, we need to make it clear that building AI Agent infrastructure is a current trend, such as $ZEREBRO, $ARC, $ALCH, and $GRIFFAIN. The advantage of Virtuals is the token model, and its fundamental data performance is strongly correlated with token prices. We generally call this "the token has relatively strong value capture ability".
Moreover, I think the cooperation between Virtuals and the TAO ecosystem is very sexy. Simply put, Virtuals is the place to produce AI Agent tokens, and TAO is the place to use tokens to incentivize high-quality models. Under the incentive of $TAO, the models will become better, and the collaboration between high-quality models will also become more frequent, which can better empower AI Agents. We can now see this trend happening.
For example, $SERAPH is a self-governing agent driven by TAO, used to combat fraudulent AI agents and synthetic content.
For example, the cooperation between @getmasafi and Virtuals, Masa launched the Subnet59 Agent Arena on TAO. The main focus of this subnet is on AI Agents. We can create our own AI Agents on Twitter and then register them on Subnet59 to compete for the $TAO emissions. The principle is still the TAO logic, the better your AI Agent performs (as shown in the figure below), the more chance you have to get more $TAO emissions. Masa will further refine the indicators for evaluating the quality of Agents later. (At that time, you can also pledge $MASA to vote and decide the $TAO emissions)
Through cooperation with Virtuals, subnet miners (i.e., AI Agent developers) can easily launch their own tokens. For example, the aforementioned $TAOCAT - a dedicated Agent for shilling TAO - was born this way.
In addition, Masa has also launched some additional services, such as cooperation with the no-code Creator.Bid, where we can create our own Agents through Creator.Bid. And Masa's Data Boost service (from TAO Subnet42) can push real-time data to Agents to help them perform better.
By the way, $TAOCAT is officially made by themselves to attract market attention. If the official has a bigger vision, they can pump $TAOCAT and create a wealth effect to attract more people to participate.
At the end of the day, Virtuals has become the choice for more and more infrastructure projects to issue Agent tokens, which is a huge positive flywheel. Crypto is an industry of fat protocols and thin applications, and the usual approach is to use the short-term bubble of applications to attract the market's attention to its infrastructure. AIXBT/LUNA and Virtuals are obviously such a relationship.
Currently, the market and developers' focus has shifted from killer applications to infrastructure (perhaps because infrastructure can have a higher valuation).
Killer application appears -> Infrastructure building -> More applications appear -> Blockbuster application born -> Massive user adoption -> Widespread adoption
