Author: Web3 farmer Frank
Is AI Agent now in the "2020-2021" boom cycle of DeFi Summer?
"Looking for the sword in the boat" is often the most worry-free way of prediction - from the data dimension alone, the total locked value (TVL) of DeFi has increased more than 40 times from US$600 million in January 2020 to US$26 billion in December 2020 in just one year, and the market value of the AI track is currently US$44 billion, which means that if it can really replicate the boom cycle of DeFi, the potential market value may exceed US$1 trillion.
So the question is, is AI Agent really experiencing a boom cycle similar to DeFi Summer in 2020-2021? In addition to AI Memecoin, what other projects will become the driving force of this boom cycle?
AI Agent boom cycle
Cookie.fun statistics show that as of January 1, 2025, the overall market value of the AI Agent sector has exceeded US$16.6 billion, with an increase of 53.79% in the past 7 days. Against the backdrop of the entire crypto market being in a volatile period, the AI Agent ecosystem is expanding at an unprecedented rate, from Virtual to AI16Z, to Arc and other platforms.
In particular, AI Agent projects driven by Meme culture have quickly become new centers of traffic and attention with their low-threshold coin issuance and transaction processes. Most of them have greatly lowered the participation threshold for ordinary users through humorous expressions, highly interactive community culture, and communication strategies close to users, and have successfully attracted a large number of non-professional users to join.
To put it bluntly, this is actually another cultural rebellion against "VC coins" and a continuation of the Meme narrative. However , combined with AI Agent, it not only lowers the threshold for participation and expands the potential size of the market, but also injects more inclusiveness and sustainability into the AI × Crypto narrative.
This includes "TAO CAT", which has shown impressive growth recently. As the result of the collision of the two major ecosystem technologies of Virtuals and Bittensor by the Masa team, it has ingeniously demonstrated the superiority of self-evolution of AI Agent compared with traditional AI Bot. The core is still the economic narrative of fair issuance and community-driven.
Interestingly, during the writing process, TAOCAT was selected as one of Binance Alpha's new projects, which was followed by a significant increase in its price, and MASA was also affected by this and followed the upward trend.
This easily reminds people of the prosperous scene of DeFi Summer: from the initial basic applications of Compound and Uniswap to the subsequent large-scale influx of users and the derivation of more complex on-chain trading strategies, the technical narrative and capital-driven interweaving and resonance eventually formed a cyclical prosperity . Therefore, at least for now, the popularity and market value growth of AI Agent based on AI Memecoin have indeed brought a new round of narrative and imagination space to the crypto industry.
However, how far this boom cycle can last, AI Memecoin is just the beginning. The follow-up depends on whether AI Agent can become the long-term cornerstone of the encryption industry, rather than just a short-term trend.
For example, in the current AI Agent landscape, the total market value of the top five exceeds US$7 billion, accounting for nearly 45%. Among them, the market value of Virtual Ecosystem and AI16Z Ecosystem reached US$4.65 billion and US$2.37 billion respectively, which have indeed become industry benchmark cases in the entire encryption field.
But in essence, the current prosperity of the "AI Agent" track is still dominated by AI Memecoin or issuance platforms. It is still in the early stages of the "equal rights" economic narrative limited to fair asset issuance. It needs to further deepen its reach. Looking back at the last encryption cycle, we will find that although DeFi has driven a large amount of funds to flow into the blockchain field, the user threshold of DeFi is still relatively high, requiring financial knowledge and operational skills, which to a certain extent limits its large-scale popularization.
The emergence of AI Agent has opened up a new narrative for the crypto field with lower barriers to entry and higher potential . Unlike DeFi, which requires users to actively learn complex financial instruments, AI Agent can directly provide users with personalized and intelligent services, lowering the threshold for participation .
These are some interesting variables, namely, meeting the needs of more ordinary users through intelligent solutions, making AI Agent not only a technical product, but also a new "equal rights" economic narrative.
As SlowMist founder Yu Xian tweeted: "Another special sense of separation: the ultimate (perhaps) most important role of AI Agent in the Crypto industry is to issue tokens to stimulate incentives. In non-Crypto industries, the big players have long been far ahead, including defining some interoperability protocols and making increasingly useful AI applications, while most of the attention in the Crypto industry is still on tokens."
Therefore, AI Agent has indeed entered a boom cycle with the help of AI Memecoin, winning high market recognition and financial attention to this field, which also marks that it has officially entered a golden age: from Meme-driven traffic centers to diversified application scenarios, from the improvement of infrastructure to the mining of long-term value, AI Agent is expected to reshape the landscape of the encryption industry and become the most innovative and influential field in the encryption industry.
AI Agent "Alpha" and "Beta"
If we trace back to the source, we will find that although the current AI Agent is only about token issuance and imaginative value capture, its real implementation is still closely related to the transaction attributes on the chain.
After all , the practical use of AI Agent is far more than just issuing coins. As early as in the task-driven AgentGPT processing flow, AI Agent has demonstrated its potential in on-chain transaction strategies :
Users can customize the overall goal task, and then the AI Agent will allocate tasks according to its own resources. The overall goal task is broken down into small tasks through the flow and allocation of tasks at the agent layer, and is continuously executed and corrected according to the goal without human assistance, ultimately achieving the overall goal.
To put it simply, the core vision is "intent-centric". Users only need to know what results (intentions) they want, and do not need to care about the intermediate processes and steps . In many cases, users' intentions are complex and the expressions of intentions may not be accurate. AI trained with specific models can more accurately identify user intentions and infer users' potential purposes and needs based on their keyword information.
In this process, combined with highly intelligent AI, whether it is natural language input of intentions, or judging needs, breaking down goals, calculating the optimal process combination, and executing operations, AI can play a huge role. At present, a large number of smart trading projects involving complex cross-chain transactions have emerged in the market, which can efficiently discover the optimal exchange path and allow users to complete the best transaction in real time at the best price.
This is the development direction of AI Agent with the most imagination space - the real value lies in becoming the interactive application layer of Web3. Users do not need to understand complex systems, they only need to talk to AI Agent to complete all on-chain operations . It is expected to become the underlying infrastructure of Web3, deeply integrated with blockchain, smart contracts, etc., giving birth to new application forms and business models, and bringing broader imagination space for Web3.
So from a macro perspective, the AI × Crypto narrative, which is developing at the speed of light, is completing its self-iteration at an astonishing rate - from the initial AI Meme craze to the gradual shift to practical and interactive AI Agents, the attention of the entire market is being refocused, which also means that the market's narrative logic is transforming from random token speculation to actual technology implementation.
AI Agent is no longer just a hype gimmick, but has truly been integrated into the industry logic through value capture mechanisms, such as AI-driven KOLs, revenue generation tools, trading and Alpha strategy optimization, and the construction of underlying infrastructure . AI technology is gradually transforming from entertaining narratives to tools for solving practical problems.
Its value goes far beyond the currently popular AI Memecoin. It truly promotes 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 crypto market, making AI Agents more easily accepted and adopted by mainstream users.
Infrastructure is always needed for any track with long slopes and thick snow
In the crypto industry, Alpha is a point and Beta is a surface. Alpha is usually difficult to capture, but Beta projects with high certainty are easier to be ambushed.
The AI Agent field is no exception. Although Alpha opportunities such as AI Memecoin are difficult to grasp, infrastructure (Infra), as the core of Beta, is an almost obvious value capture opportunity, and the narrative transmission path is extremely clear. Although the outbreak of AI Memecoin has set off a frenzy of funds and market attention, the final landscape of projects that can succeed is far from certain. As a "water seller", Infra can almost sit back and enjoy the benefits by leveraging its first-mover ecological advantage.
As mentioned above, from the perspective of the role change of AI in the blockchain ecosystem, it is upgrading from a simple tool to a productivity that drives industry change. This can not only serve existing crypto users, but also attract traditional financial users to enter the on-chain ecosystem by lowering the threshold, and building a more inclusive and sustainable economic logic:
From elite finance serving a few to inclusive finance serving the majority; from the unsustainability of short-term speculation to the sustainability of long-term growth.
This means that AI Agent Infra is expected to become a key entry point for the intelligentization of on-chain applications. It also means that projects in the same field that have not yet been fully priced by the market may hide new value reassessment space, one of the important directions of which is data.
As we all know, an important challenge facing AI Agents is how to efficiently mine and utilize high-quality data. It not only determines the learning ability and decision-making level of AI Agents, but also directly affects the effectiveness of their actual applications and user experience.
Especially for the blockchain ecosystem, Twitter data, Discord data, web crawler data, etc. may hide billions of signals, and contain many use cases that can be derived and implemented, which can be fully personalized for mining and utilization - such as tracking the dynamics of giant whales, analyzing "Smart Money" transactions, monitoring on-chain address interactions, screening layered and differentiated on-chain users, accurately reaching different player groups, etc.
Therefore, data infrastructure is not only the support for the development of AI Agent, but also the core of its value creation and market promotion. Interestingly, as the leader in the current AI data track, the SN42 data service subnet and SN59 AI Agent Colosseum built by Masa on Bittensor not long ago are quite worth mentioning.
AI Agent Colosseum is a big step forward for Masa, a data infra, towards an AI Agent platform, making data networks no longer abstract, but empowering AI Agents in real time, allowing them to evolve in real time, iterating Bittensor's powerful reward mechanism, and allowing AI Agents to compete in the Colosseum. Only a few weeks after the Colosseum went online, it has attracted the participation of top AI Agents from the Virtuals and creator.bid ecosystems, including TAO CAT incubated by Masa.
Therefore, in essence, Masa is centered on "infrastructure (data) + application scenarios (colosseum) + token economy (AI Agent)", attracting more users and developers to operate the platform, continuously expanding AI Agent business scenarios, and stimulating platform activity.
From a larger logic perspective, the narrative path of AI Agent Infra such as Masa is very clear - focusing on the "adaptability" problem of AI agents on the chain, and solving the efficiency, stability and intelligence requirements of on-chain operation. If this track continues to ferment, it will not only be expected to build the infrastructure of the on-chain AI ecosystem, but may also drive a comprehensive upgrade of the developer ecosystem and user experience.
According to the law of market rotation, Virtual’s success will also drive investors to pay attention to projects in the same track with complementary functions, technological innovation or low valuations, especially those with strong ecosystem building capabilities and clear narrative direction. Therefore, Infra projects like Masa undoubtedly form a natural complementary logic with Virtual’s token issuance function.
The improvement of infrastructure and the maturity of technology have enabled AI Agent to move from the uncertain Alpha stage to the profitable and scalable Beta stage. Therefore, from this perspective, Infra projects like Masa are an indispensable driving force in this process .
The selection of TAOCAT into the new phase of Binance Alpha projects mentioned above also adds real evidence to the logic of my analysis, and further reinforces that as market attention gradually shifts to the AI Agent track, infrastructure projects (such as MASA) may usher in unexpected value growth opportunities.
In general, this round of AI Agent Infra’s popularity is just the beginning. The market demand for on-chain intelligent infrastructure is still expanding rapidly. The performance of Virtual and Masa provides us with a good reference. In the future, there may be more projects with clear positioning, complementary functions, and under-valued valuations that will be gradually discovered by the market. Opportunities for value revaluation are often hidden in the dark lines of niche areas.
Conclusion
AI Agent is not the end, but the starting point: In the future crypto 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 its support is indispensable behind any major trend. Whether it is a pioneer like Virtual or potential Infra players like Masa, what they have in common is that they use technology and logic to embed their own value into the core of the entire ecosystem. It is only a matter of time before the market recognizes this value.
