AI Agent: Can we replicate a new boom cycle of DeFi Summer?

The AI Agent sector is experiencing rapid development, with a market capitalization that has surpassed 16.6 billion dollars, and a growth rate of up to 53.79% in the past 7 days. From Virtual to AI16Z, and then to platforms like Arc, the AI Agent ecosystem is expanding at an unprecedented speed.

Especially AI Agent projects driven by Meme culture have quickly become a new center of traffic and attention through low-threshold token issuance and trading processes. They utilize humorous expressions, highly interactive community culture, and user-friendly communication strategies, significantly lowering the participation threshold for ordinary users and attracting a large number of non-professional users to join.

This is actually another cultural rebellion against "VC Coin" and a continuation of the Meme narrative. By combining it with AI Agent, it not only lowers the participation threshold and expands the potential market size but also injects more inclusivity and sustainability into the AI × Crypto narrative.

Taking "TAO CAT" as an example, it showcases the superiority of self-evolution of AI Agents compared to traditional AI Bots, as a result of the collision of technologies from the Virtuals and Bittensor ecosystems by the Masa team. The core remains a fair issuance and community-driven economic narrative.

This easily evokes the prosperous scene of DeFi Summer: from the initial foundational applications of Compound and Uniswap to the later influx of large-scale users and the derivation of more complex on-chain trading strategies, where technological narratives and capital drives intertwine and resonate, ultimately forming a cyclical prosperity. The current popularity and market value growth of AI Memecoin-based AI Agents indeed brings a new round of narratives and imaginative space to the crypto industry.

Currently, the total market capitalization of the top 5 in the AI Agent landscape exceeds 7 billion USD, accounting for nearly 45%. Among them, the market capitalizations of the Virtual ecosystem and AI16Z ecosystem reach 4.65 billion USD and 2.37 billion USD respectively, becoming benchmark cases in the entire cryptocurrency field.

However, the current prosperity of the "AI Agent" track is still mainly dominated by AI Memecoins or issuance platforms, remaining in the early stages of the "equitable" economic narrative limited to fair asset issuance, and needs further deepening of its outreach.

Unlike DeFi, which requires users to actively learn complex financial tools, AI Agent can directly provide personalized and intelligent services to users, lowering the participation threshold. This is an interesting variable: meeting the needs of more ordinary users through intelligent solutions, making AI Agent not just a technological product but a brand new "equity" economic narrative.

AI Agent has indeed entered an economic cycle through AI Memecoin, gaining high recognition and financial attention from the market in this field, marking its official entry into the golden age. Subsequently, from meme-driven traffic centers to diversified application scenarios, from infrastructure improvement to long-term value mining, AI Agent is expected to reshape the landscape of the cryptocurrency industry and become the most innovative and influential domain.

The actual uses of AI Agent are far from limited to issuing tokens. In the task-driven AgentGPT processing flow, AI Agent has demonstrated its potential in areas such as on-chain trading strategies. Users can customize the overall target task, and the AI Agent allocates tasks based on its own resources, circulating and distributing the overall target task through a proxy layer, breaking it down into smaller tasks, and continuously executing and correcting according to the goals without human assistance, ultimately achieving the overall target.

This reflects the core vision of "intention-centered". Users only need to know the desired outcome (intention) and do not need to care about the intermediate processes and steps. AI trained on specific models can more accurately identify user intentions and infer potential purposes and needs based on user keyword information.

Combining highly intelligent AI, whether it is natural language input of intent, judgment of needs, decomposition of goals, calculation of optimal process combinations, or execution of operations, AI can exert significant advantages. A large number of intelligent trading projects involving complex cross-chain transactions have emerged in the market, efficiently discovering the optimal exchange paths and allowing users to complete optimal transactions in real-time at the best prices.

This is the most imaginative development direction for AI Agents: becoming the interactive application layer of Web3. Users do not need to understand complex systems; they can complete all on-chain operations simply by conversing with the AI Agent. It is expected to become a fundamental infrastructure of Web3, deeply integrating with blockchain, smart contracts, and other elements, giving rise to new application forms and business models, thus bringing broader imaginative space to Web3.

From a macro perspective, the AI × Crypto narrative is undergoing a self-iteration at an astonishing speed. From the initial AI Meme craze to the gradual shift towards practical and interactive AI Agents, market attention is refocusing, indicating a narrative logic transformation from random token speculation to actual technological implementation.

AI Agents are no longer just a hype, but are truly integrated into industrial logic through value capture mechanisms. For example, AI-driven KOLs, yield generation tools, trading and Alpha strategy optimization, as well as the construction of underlying infrastructure, AI technology is gradually transforming from an entertaining narrative to a tool for solving real problems.

Its value goes far beyond the currently popular AI Memecoin; it truly drives the evolution and popularization of Web3 through technological innovation and ecological integration. From this perspective, AI Agents are not just tools; they may reshape the ecological rules of the cryptocurrency market, making AI Agents more easily accepted and adopted by mainstream users.

In the crypto industry, Alpha is the point, while Beta is the plane. Alpha is usually difficult to capture, but Beta projects, which have a high degree of certainty, are relatively easier to ambush.

The AI Agent field is no exception. Although opportunities like AI Memecoin are difficult to grasp, infrastructure (Infra) as a core Beta offers a nearly obvious value capture opportunity, with a very clear narrative transmission path. Despite the wave of funding and market attention triggered by the explosion of AI Memecoin, the ultimate landscape of projects that can emerge is far from certain. However, Infra, acting as the "water seller," can almost sit firmly on the fishing platform by leveraging its first-mover ecological advantages.

The role of AI in the blockchain ecosystem is evolving from a mere tool to a productive force driving industry transformation. This not only serves existing crypto users but may also attract traditional financial users into the on-chain ecosystem by lowering barriers, building a more inclusive and sustainable economic logic: moving from elite finance that serves a few to inclusive finance that serves the majority; transitioning from the unsustainability of short-term speculation to the sustainability of long-term growth.

This represents that AI Agent Infra is expected to become a key entry point for the intelligence of on-chain applications, which also implies that projects in the same track that have not yet been fully priced by the market may hide new value reassessment space, one important direction of which is data.

A significant challenge faced by AI Agents is how to efficiently mine and utilize high-quality data. This not only determines the learning capabilities and decision-making levels of the AI Agents but also directly affects their practical application effectiveness and user experience.

For the blockchain ecosystem, Twitter data, Discord data, web crawling data, and others may hide billions of signals, containing many use cases that can be derived and realized, allowing for personalized mining and utilization. Such as tracking whale movements, analyzing "Smart Money" transactions, monitoring on-chain address interactions, filtering on-chain users with layered differentiation, and precisely reaching different player groups.

Data infrastructure is not only the support for the development of AI Agents but also the core of value creation and market promotion. As the current leader in the AI data track, the SN42 data service subnet and SN59 AI Agent arena built by Masa on Bittensor recently deserve a mention.

The AI Agent Arena is a significant step towards the AI Agent platform as a data infrastructure of Masa, making the data network no longer abstract, but enabling AI Agents in real-time, allowing them to evolve in real-time, iterating on the powerful reward mechanism of Bittensor, letting AI Agents compete in the arena. Just a few weeks after its launch, the Arena has already attracted top AI Agents from the Virtuals and creator.bid ecosystems, including the TAO CAT incubated by Masa.

Essentially, Masa is centered around "infrastructure (data) + application scenarios (arena) + token economy (AI Agent)" to attract more users and developers to operate the platform, constantly expanding the AI Agent business scenarios and stimulating platform vitality.

From a broader perspective, the narrative path of AI Agent Infra like Masa is very clear: focusing on the "adaptability" issues of AI agents on the chain, addressing the efficiency, stability, and intelligence needs of on-chain operations. If this track continues to ferment, it not only hopes to build the infrastructure for the on-chain AI ecosystem but may also drive a comprehensive upgrade of the developer ecosystem and user experience.

According to the market rotation pattern, the success of Virtual will also drive investors to pay attention to functionally complementary projects, technological innovations, or those with low valuations in the same track, especially those with strong ecosystem building capabilities and clear narrative directions. Therefore, Infra projects like Masa undoubtedly form a natural complementary logic with the token issuance function of Virtual.

The improvement of infrastructure and the maturity of technology have allowed AI Agents to transition from the uncertain Alpha stage to a profitable and scalable Beta stage. From this perspective, Infra projects like Masa are indispensable driving forces in this process.

Overall, the current wave of interest in AI Agent Infra is just the beginning, and the market's demand for on-chain intelligent infrastructure is rapidly expanding. The performance of Virtual and Masa provides us with a good reference, and there may be more projects with clear positioning, complementary functions, and valuations that have not been fully explored that will gradually be discovered by the market. Opportunities for value reassessment are often hidden in the dark lines of niche fields.

AI Agent is not the endpoint, but the starting point: In the future cryptocurrency market, AI Agent will not only be a component of the ecosystem but will also become an important driving force for the advancement of the entire ecosystem.

Infrastructure is the foundation of the ecosystem, and any major trend relies on its support. Whether it's pioneers like Virtual or potential players like Masa and other Infra, their commonality lies in embedding their value into the core of the entire ecosystem through technology and logic, and the market's recognition of this value is just a matter of time.