Half a year ago, most of the Crypto AI projects on the market were concepts related to traditional AI technology, such as AI+DePIN and computing power leasing. But now, Crypto AI projects have taken a different approach. From the AI Bot token GOAT, which has a market value of $800 million without Binance’s participation, to AI 16 Z’s AI investment DAO model last weekend, AI seems to have opened up a new world for the old narrative of the currency circle.
However, the simple narrative of "AI issuing memes" does not seem to be able to support the huge imagination space required by investors. Therefore, from the AI meme craze to the current AI Agent craze, the narrative and main battlefield of AI + Crypto are evolving rapidly, leaving behind all those who do not understand the AI meme trend.
From AI meme to AI Agent, the AI + Crypto narrative evolves at the speed of light
In March this year, Virtual Protocol was launched with the goal of creating an AI factory for games and the metaverse, while making games more intelligent, increasing the sense of experience and interactivity. In this wave of narrative transformation from AI meme to AI Agent, Virtual Protocol is undoubtedly the biggest beneficiary. Its native token VIRTUAL has risen more than 4 times in about a week, and its market value has almost exceeded US$500 million.
Virtual Protocol has grown 4 times in one week, accurately riding the wave of AI Agent
In mid-October this year, Virtual Protocol's token issuance platform IAO was officially launched, allowing users to easily deploy AI Agents, achieve 100% fair launch of AI Agent tokens, and allow users to jointly own the income generated by the AI Agent. Subsequently, VIRTUAL started the road to service growth.
AI Agent refers to artificial intelligence with tools and reasoning capabilities. In the field of cryptocurrency, these agents can access tweets and even have crypto wallets to conduct on-chain transactions. Suppose you are planning a trip, traditional large language models can provide you with destination information or travel suggestions, while AI Agent can understand your needs and actively search for flights and hotels based on your words and perform reservation operations.
For Virtual, its protocol is like a decentralized AI factory, providing support for many different AI Agents and creating virtual experiences on the chain. The representative AI Agent project launched by Virtual is Luna, which has the ability of "on-chain self-cognition", can think for itself, and display its thinking process on the chain, and operates completely autonomously without relying on human supervision. Luna currently has 500,000 TikTok fans and has been live streaming 24/7. Its interactive model also includes a user reward mechanism. Users can reward and interact with Agents by purchasing Luna tokens.
As the AI meme concept became more and more popular, LUNA experienced a three-stage step-by-step rise. On October 26, Virtual Protocol founder @ethermage said that Luna would reward people who followed her content, which once again aroused the market's enthusiasm for the AI Agent hype.
The debut is a red ocean, and the AI Agent track is full of local dogs
After Luna came out, many AI Agent distribution platforms emerged. Unlike AI memes like $GOAT, which are all AI robots that send out Twitter messages to interact with others, and even have typos, the new AI Agent distribution platforms are more like knockoff projects with social media packaging and specific application scenarios.
Chasm is another project that highlighted AI Agent narratives very early. It also launched the AI virtual person GMIKA in the first wave in May. Recently, it also launched tokens while the market was hot. However, neither CAI nor GMIKA performed as well as the leader.
For example, on Solana, the AI reasoning network Infera recently launched its first AI agent, Kira, which runs on Llama 8B through Infera's API and has on-chain transactions, adaptive learning, first-level scalability, and engagement capabilities. There is also an AI agent token issuance platform, vvaifu, where users must hold character tokens to chat with them.
However, AI Agent is not a track that has become popular only after Virtual. Projects such as Myshell and FLock.io have launched the function of customizing AI Agent. At present, the total market value of AI Agent track has reached 4.65 billion US dollars, accounting for 14% of the total market value of AI track projects (32.6 billion US dollars).
ArkStream Capital once released an AI Agent research report, mentioning that for the leading AI Agent products in Web3, building a complete ecosystem and providing diverse functions may be more critical than the quality and performance of a single product. In other words, the success of a project depends not only on what it provides, but also on how it integrates resources, promotes collaboration, and creates network effects within the ecosystem.
This ability to build an ecosystem may be an important factor in the AI Agent project’s success, and this is also what Virtual Protocol is currently doing well. It has launched the IAO function, but is not in a hurry to cash out. Instead, it continues to build ecological sub-coins headed by Luna.
AI in late autumn, AI in Base
Being good at promoting abstract concepts has always been a feature of Crypto, and Base has taken this industry culture to the extreme. For example, this wave of AI craze, when it comes to the Base ecosystem, is summarized as AI Autumn, just like Onchain Summer and Builder Spring.
While you are still immersed in the exciting PVP battles on Solana, have you suddenly realized why Base has risen rapidly in the second wave of AI craze this year?
The “AI Chain” with a good foundation
The Virtual Protocol introduced in the previous article is an AI project deployed on Base. The team once explained why it was deployed on Base. It is because it supports the accelerated realization of a decentralized open AI agent network, realizes common interests through the neutrality of the blockchain, and provides a developer-friendly environment.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has publicly stated that AI should not be regulated. Just as the golden age of software and the Internet benefited from free development, AI should follow the same decentralized and open source path to allow technology to freely unleash its potential.
Therefore, the entire Coinbase company and even its incubated Base will implement this concept to the end.
The multi-party computation (MPC) wallet launched by Coinbase Developer Platform (CDP) can be integrated with AI Agent to enable it to make payments autonomously. Brian Armstrong encourages developers to integrate this wallet into their AI models to achieve payment capabilities, thereby helping AI obtain resources and services.
Coinbase did not just add payment functionality to AI Agent on a whim, but had been planning for a long time. As early as May this year, Brian Armstrong said that "self-hosted crypto wallets will provide support for AI Agent." Brian also publicly provided an independent crypto wallet for the AI chatbot Truth Terminal.
In September, Coinbase senior software engineer yuga.eth said that Coinbase is building an SDK that will give Bots and AI Agents the following functions: sending USDC for free, trading cryptocurrencies, betting on prediction markets, staking ETH/SOL, converting between fiat and cryptocurrencies, deploying/creating NFTs, and bridging across L2.
Just last weekend, Coinbase developer Lincoln Murr released a demo video of a new tool called "Based Agent", which allows users to create an AI agent with crypto wallet functions in 3 minutes, which can perform multiple tasks such as on-chain transactions, token swaps and staking. It is also said that this tool is developed based on the Coinbase SDK, OpenAI and Replit platforms, and users only need the API key of the Coinbase developer project and the OpenAI key to use it. However, there is no actual use case for Based Agent at present. 
Liquidity is ready to go
However, in the cryptocurrency world, whether an ecosystem or narrative can take off ultimately depends on the flow of money.
According to Artemis data, Solana has received the most capital inflows in the past three months, reaching $1.6 billion, but Base has received the most capital inflows in the past month, reaching $253 million. In other words, Base has surpassed Solana in terms of capital growth rate in the past month and has become the first. 
As can be seen from the figure below, the overflow funds of Ethereum and Solana also mainly flowed to Base. 
On September 12, Coinbase officially announced that it has officially launched its wrapped Bitcoin token Coinbase Wrapped BTC (cbBTC), which runs on the Ethereum network and is backed by 1:1 Bitcoin. With the launch of cbBTC by Coinbase, Base's on-chain assets, such as AERO, WELL, VIRTUAL and other projects, have actually felt the injection of liquidity.
In addition, Coinbase Wallet and USDC infrastructure also ensured liquidity on Base. On October 26, Base processed $18.1 billion in stablecoin transactions (99.9% of which were USDC), accounting for more than 30% of all stablecoin transactions on that day.
What to focus on?
Now that Coinbase and Base have prepared the stage for this AI drama, all you need to do next is look for projects like Virtual to participate in this AI Autumn.
Crypto researcher Howe once said that the future development of the AI Agent track should focus on the following four points: First, projects that rely purely on Agent narratives will find it difficult to stand out and must attract market attention through differentiated competition; second, AI Agents will gradually shift from single independence to interconnected AgentFi, and the sharing of data and services will enhance user experience; third, tool projects that support Agent development with the "water selling logic" will have more market opportunities, similar to stable and profitable infrastructure; finally, the main revenue of Agent products comes from the B-end, while the C-end is more used to accumulate word of mouth, although the promotion of C-end users also helps the market dissemination of the product.
Bountycaster
The first project worth paying attention to is Bountycaster. As Howe said, tool projects that support Agent development under the "water selling logic" will have more market opportunities. Bountycaster was originally a task publishing platform based on the Farcaster protocol, founded by Linda Xie (former co-founder of Scalar Capital and product manager of Coinbase).
However, as more and more AI Agent projects emerge on Base, these Agents, in addition to posting on their homepages or interacting with people, will choose to post tasks on Bountycaster. Bountycaster has even opened a directory for users to specifically collect tasks posted by AI Agents.
With the same logic as Bountycaster, thanks to the active AI Agent on Farcaster, a group of applications on Farcaster that were once popular have regained vitality, such as the payment application Payment Bot, the NFT+meme trading platform ArtRun, etc.
HIGHER (Aether)
James Ross, founder of Mode Network, once predicted that by April 2025, more than 80% of blockchain transactions may be executed by AI Agents. Judging from the current statements on Twitter and Farcaster, perhaps a large part of content production will also be produced by AI Agents in the future.
AetherNet is an AI Agent deployed by Base ecosystem meme coin Higher. Through extensive interaction with users, it has become a "net celebrity" Agent on Farcaster, and the price of HIGHER coin has also increased tenfold in the past month.
Creator.Bid
Along with Virtual and Higher, there is another Base AI Agent project named Creator.Bid by Coinbase developer David Tso. Currently, 328 AI Agents have been established, and the official said that an important announcement will be released next week.
