Recently, AI Pool has become a hot topic in the AI Agent track, and AI Pool is believed to have opened up the asset-ization of AI Agents. The founder of AI Pool is Skely, who is also a member of ai16z. Interestingly, Skely's X has been frozen since the start of the pre-sale until the time of writing. Under these circumstances, the first project of the AI Pool pre-sale, Meteora, managed to raise over 30,000 SOL overnight, and even after the pre-sale was announced to be closed, there were still people continuously sending money to AI. What is AI Pool? How is AI pre-sale different from previous pre-sales? The following text will explore these questions.
Core Mechanism of AI Pool
Pre-sale is not a new entry point for the market. According to the founder Skely, this AI Pool pre-sale is mainly aimed at solving the problem of market distrust, mainly in two aspects. The first aspect is that AI Pool prevents artificial pre-sales and the project owner running away with the funds. This pain point is deeply hated by veteran market players, and many have suffered losses in this regard. The second aspect is a more fair pre-sale method for retail investors, as the current traditional pre-sales are mainly won by snipers/bots, and the "pumpfun" PVP model makes it even more hopeless for retail investors.
It must be said that Skely has touched on the pain points of retail investors, and from the perspective of solving problems, Skely's approach is well-received. Next, AI Pool has proposed its own logic for solving these problems. AI Pool adopts Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) technology. In fact, TEE is not a new technology, so why has it attracted market attention again? This time, AI Pool is based on the long-standing project @PhalaNetwork, which has innovated by combining AI runtime environment, smart contract scheduling, and decentralized consensus governance, which is an innovative attempt to address the on-chain asset custody problem. How does AI Pool specifically solve this?
First, through TEE technology, AI Pool allows AI to independently generate private keys, manage private keys, and execute any signatures only within the TEE environment, thus fundamentally preventing the phenomenon of project owners running away with the funds. Secondly, through TEE technology, AI Pool achieves interaction between the internal chain and the external chain, and realizes offline calculation, through the contract with Phala. This mechanism can prevent the capital pool from being maliciously sniped, and effectively avoid various fraud risks including high dynamic transactions, which is a fairer participation method for retail investors. This is also one of the important means used by @aipool_tee to protect project security. The founder of ai16z, Shaw, praised it highly and said that this gameplay could potentially disrupt the token issuance mechanism of "pumpfun". Even when Skely's account was frozen, Shaw said that bots would deploy AI Pool tokens, and was very optimistic about the project. As a result, the market's enthusiasm was reignited, and the community believes that Bome 2.0 is about to be born.
The core mechanism of the AI Pool pre-sale is as follows: Fundraising, users send SOL to the AI wallet (pre-sale address opRyDjuRetWnsP 78 FNFTPEnAJX 7 AkjuD 6 GTP 7 tsqHXd), the amount is 1-10 SOL (less than 1 SOL is considered a donation); AI Pool issues tokens through the TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) technology of @PhalaNetwork; AI Pool manages liquidity through Metoria and distributes tokens independently.
Source: Ai Pool TEE News
Tokens Issued by AI Pool
The first token issued by AI Pool is METAV, which raised over 30,000 SOL, with the top 3 addresses accounting for 82% of the excess funds. As of the time of writing, most of the METAV tokens in the top 3 addresses have been sold. The feature of METAV is that there is a transaction tax in the token pool, with a rate of 20% between buying and selling. Currently, the founder's X account on the platform has not been unlocked after manual review, and 10% of the METAV tokens have not been airdropped yet.
METAV's market capitalization peaked at $80 million, but has since fallen back to $38.1 million. There are two voices in the METAV community: one believes that this is the first token issued by AI Pool, so some community members are still firmly optimistic; the other believes that the METAV tax rate is too high, and the pool is also locked (currently over $20 million locked), making it difficult for funds to flow in.
Compared to METAV, the subsequent tokens issued by AI Pool have not performed as well as METAV in terms of community sentiment and market capitalization. For example, the second token issued, GFC, currently has a market capitalization of only $710,000, and its main narrative is to provide funding for DEI, with general community sentiment.
How Far Can the AI Pool Issuance Mechanism Go?
Currently, the AI Pool issuance mechanism is not perfect. Taking the METAV issuance as an example, there were different problems from the start of the fundraising to the end of the fundraising. At the start of the fundraising, the project's planning was not clear, and most community users participated with a "try their luck" mentality; after the fundraising ended, community users could still transfer coins to the AI address, without a more user-friendly mechanism; after the fundraising ended, there were also many problems with token issuance. For example, users who transferred 1 SOL were forcibly donated. There were also many large holders who received METAV tokens with delays, and some large holders have still not received tokens and were forcibly locked.
As the emergence of a new thing, the market's attitude is tolerant. AI Pool is an innovative form of AI Agent asset-ization. The founder Skely also believes that this is an innovative experiment, and he has previously stated in a tweet that AI Pool's current main profit model is to charge a small amount of handling fees through the Metoria liquidity pool, but the specific proportion is still unknown. In V2 and subsequent versions, they plan to allow the AI agent to fully achieve self-governance, and even integrate DAO governance, and the handling fees generated by AI Pool will also benefit all participants. In addition, to prevent malicious operations, a whitelist mechanism will be added.
From Skely's plan, it seems that the various problems that appeared in V1 can be clearly solved. The success of the first token METAV issued by AI Pool is due to Shaw's strong support, as well as the fact that the founder Skely is also a member of ai16z, which has implicitly injected some new traffic into METAV. However, it should be noted that AI Pool is currently in the initial stage, and many mechanisms are not yet perfect. The openness of the code is not transparent, and whether the project truly adopts TEE technology needs to be verified.
It is worth noting that the market has immediately responded to the above problems of AI Pool. The focEliza community of the ai16z developer community has proposed the ability to quickly perceive and fix the problems existing in the operation of AI Pool. The focEliza community has proposed to publicly view and verify the verifiable logs of the TEE AI agent through technical means, just like a blockchain browser, and has published the experience link. The focEliza community has even proposed a full-chain AI Agent, as shown in the figure below. Can ai16z and BTC, ETH also generate more intersections? These visions look really cool!
Source: @CP 2426 _
Summary
The development of AI Agents has undergone various narrative evolutions. Currently, AI Agents can realize the issuance of a variety of virtual assets such as text/music/Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), achieve interaction between Agents, and also have cases combined with real life, and can also help humans with investment research and analysis. From virtual environments to integration with real life, from infrastructure to application agents, AI Agents are exploring different areas.
However, from the current perspective, more AI Agents are relying on the narrative of MEMEs. Many projects, after the emergence of new narratives, have gradually withdrawn from the market as their market capitalization has declined and community sentiment and attention have also declined. However, it is gratifying to see that with the continuous evolution of AI Agents, we can observe more exciting on-chain worlds, and indirectly drive the continuous innovation of underlying technologies. For example, the further exploration of the market trust issue by the focEliza of the ai16z developer community after this AI Pool.
Ultimately, perhaps we will truly see AI Agents being applied to all aspects of our lives, AI Agents benefiting humanity, and driving a leap-forward development of society.
