We can now roughly divide the Crypto AI Agent faction into two major factions: Virtuals and AI16Z. AI16Z's influence 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, and $SERAPH $TAOCAT are the products of its cooperation.
First of all, we need to make it clear that building AI Agent infrastructure is a popular trend, such as $ZEREBRO $ARC $ALCH $GRIFFAIN. The advantage of Virtuals is the token model, and its fundamental data performance is strongly correlated with the token price. We generally call this "tokens have strong value capture capabilities."
And I think the cooperation between Virtuals and TAO ecosystem is very sexy. Simply put, Virtuals is where AI Agent tokens are produced, and TAO is where tokens are used to incentivize high-quality models. Under the incentive of $TAO, models will become better, and collaboration between high-quality models will become more frequent, which will also better empower AI Agents. Now we can already see this trend happening.
For example, $SERAPH is an autonomous agent powered by TAO to combat fraudulent AI agents and synthetic content.
For example, @getmasafi cooperated with Virtuals, Masa launched the Subnet 59 Agent Arena on TAO. The main focus of this subnet is AI Agent. We can create our own AI Agent on Twitter, and then register on Subnet 59 to compete with other AI Agents for $TAO emissions. The principle is still the logic of TAO. The better your AI Agent performs (the indicators are shown in the figure below), the more $TAO emissions you will have. Later, Masa will further refine the indicators for judging the pros and cons of Agents. (At that time, you can also pledge $MASA to vote and decide the emission of $TAO)
By cooperating with Virtuals, subnet miners (that is, AI Agent developers) can easily launch their own tokens. For example, $TAOCAT mentioned above, an Agent dedicated to shilling TAO, was born in this way.
In addition, Masa has also launched some additional services, such as cooperation with the code-free Creator.Bid, through which we can make our own Agents. And Masa's Data Boost service (provided by TAO subnet 42), which can push real-time data to Agents to help Agents produce better output.
BTW, $TAOCAT is created by the official to attract market attention. If the official pattern is bigger, it would be the best solution to pull up $TAOCAT and create some wealth effect to attract more people to play.
In the final analysis, Virtuals has become the choice of more and more infrastructure projects to issue Agent tokens, which is a huge positive flywheel. Crypto is an industry with fat protocols and thin applications. The usual idea is to use small balls to lead big balls, that is, to use the short-term bubble of applications to attract the market's attention to its infrastructure. AIXBT/LUNA and Virtuals are obviously in this relationship.
Currently, the focus of the market and developers has shifted from blockbuster applications to infrastructure (perhaps because infrastructure can have a higher valuation).
Popular applications emerge -> Infrastructure construction -> More applications emerge -> King-level applications are born -> Users use them on a large scale -> Mass adoption
