Author: TechFlow
Trends are cyclical, and the same applies to cryptocurrencies. Tired of the PumpFun pvp, the market has found its way back to the old tricks of the beginning of the year - pre-sales, but this time with a new twist of AI narrative.
In the early hours of today, Twitter user Skely (@123skely) tweeted to announce the launch of the pre-sale for the AI token project AI-Pool (@aipool_tee). Perhaps the identity of @ai16zdao members gave Skely some endorsement, as the pre-sale managed to raise over 10,000 $SOL in less than two hours, and over 35,000 $SOL in half a day.
The pre-sale frenzy was hot at the beginning of the year, with many projects raising tens of thousands of $SOL, but few ultimately achieved good results. Given that the market has already become disillusioned with this type of play, what's different this time?
AI-Managed Pre-Sale Pump.fun?
In simple terms, the project AI-Pool in this pre-sale is a "pay-to-earn Fi" managed by an AI proxy.
Skely stated in the tweet that in the early pre-sale pay-to-earn model (such as slerf, bome, etc.), if the project could be successfully launched after raising a large amount of funds, it would naturally be a win-win. But essentially, this kind of pay-to-personal-wallet model is a huge test of human nature, and even if the DEV doesn't have malicious intentions at the beginning, the temptation of more and more money is irresistible, as the GM.AI case has shown.
The current pumpfun model does avoid some of the centralized malicious acts. But now it has been overwhelmed by bots at every step: fake reviews, opening snipers, trend followers... Even if the launch is mechanically fair, for retail investors, the opportunity to truly participate fairly in trading is becoming less and less, as they not only have to compete with humans, but also with 24/7 online bots.
In short, these participation methods are absolutely not fair for retail investors. Since they can't outpump the bots, and the humans in the pre-sale model often break their promises, why not let AI manage the pre-sale process?
How does AI-Pool work?
This is a smart token issuance system built on a trusted execution environment (TEE). Its core is an AI agent running in the TEE, which ensures its running environment cannot be hacked or tampered with through special security mechanisms. The system uses a carefully designed private key management scheme to ensure that private keys are never exposed to humans, thereby fundamentally ensuring the security of the system.
In daily operation, the system accepts two forms of funding: small donations (less than 1 SOL) and larger investments (1 SOL or more). These funds will flow into smart wallets managed by the AI agent. The AI agent will use these funds to launch new token projects on the Meteora liquidity pool and reward qualified investors through airdrops.
Throughout the process, each wallet operation generates a remote attestation credential, which is used not only to verify the legitimacy of the operation, but also to ensure that the wallet derivation and access permissions are traceable and secure.
Skely also emphasized that this series of developments was completed through the ELIZA framework of ai16z.
Core mechanisms of the project:
Fund Receiving: Users send SOL directly to the AI agent's wallet address (opRyDjuRetWnsP78FNFTPEnAJX7AkjuD6GTP7tsqHXd), minimum 1 SOL, maximum 10 SOL:
- Amounts below the minimum will be treated as donations
Security Guarantee: Through @PhalaNetwork's TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) technology:
- Private keys are generated and stored in the TEE
- Developers cannot access the private keys
- All operations can be verified in the terminal logs
Liquidity Management:
- AI will create liquidity pools on Metoria (rather than PumpFun)
- Transaction fees flow directly back to the AI wallet
- Qualified participants will receive token distributions
Skely also mentioned in the tweet that this pre-sale is not completely risk-free:
The project is currently in the V1 version, and 10% of the supply will be sent to a custodial wallet (publicly visible). These funds will be used for future potential exchange listings, or other integrations (cross-chain LP pools, etc.), or burned. Technically, the developers can push code changes to modify the rules, but this requires an execution period of about 24 hours. Of course, once the tokens are launched and locked, they cannot be changed.
He also mentioned that in V2 and future versions, the team hopes to make the AI agent in the project completely autonomous, possibly operating in a DAO form, so that everyone can benefit from the fees flowing into the AI agent's wallet, and also introduce some whitelist technology, and blacklist those who try to snipe or manipulate the system.
Market FOMO Pays, but Issuance Mechanism Details Criticized
Looking at the speed of the market's payments, this pre-sale was indeed successful. The pre-sale address received over 35,000 $SOL in just half a day, worth nearly $7 million, even though the pre-sale was capped at 10 $SOL per address, some still paid in over 500 $SOL.
Pre-sale address:
opRyDjuRetWnsP78FNFTPEnAJX7AkjuD6GTP7tsqHXd
And Skely himself didn't expect this pre-sale to create such FOMO, and stopped the pre-sale when the account was close to 30,000 $SOL, saying that any additional payments would only be used as LP (but the specific hard cap, and how the excess $SOL will be distributed, is still unclear).
However, while the money has been paid, this pre-sale has some serious issues that have left users dissatisfied:
Just let people pay, but Skely didn't set a hard cap for this pre-sale from the beginning, causing the SOL in the pre-sale address to keep increasing, which may dilute the share of early payers, and people's unease and dissatisfaction are gradually increasing. Some Twitter users also directly stated: After all that, isn't it still just a pre-sale disguised with an AI shell? The money can only be withdrawn if it's real.
The distribution mechanism is unclear, Skely said in the tweet that the tokens will be distributed to "worthy people", but this standard is too subjective, and Skely doesn't seem to have further explained this statement.
Some people have also dug up that the project's Twitter @aipool_tee has been renamed multiple times, and the previous name (cable) was not very nice.... However, Skely later tweeted that the project account has indeed been renamed multiple times, but this was just to find a more suitable name, nothing more.
Summary
Possibly because of the large amount of money collected but the mechanism still unclear, Skely has already caused some dissatisfaction among community members. As of the writing of this article, Skely's Twitter account has been shown to be frozen and banned.
But before the account was banned, Skely tweeted that the tokens will be issued on December 24th UTC, and the exact issuance time will not be announced to prevent excessive sniping.
Regardless of whether this pre-sale is the team's genuine attempt to create some substantive applications, or yet another AI scam, let's hope that this time it's not the retail investors who willingly contribute their money that get hurt......
