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A month in the past, Solana’s onchain demand metrics spiked to all-time highs after a viral AI memecoin set the buying and selling world alight with contemporary curiosity in AI-crypto integrations. The joke on the time was {that a} bizarre AI chat bot had upstaged Donald Trump’s World Liberty Monetary crypto token launch.
That order of issues wouldn’t final lengthy nonetheless, as Trump’s presidential election win despatched crypto markets surging and overshadowed the resurgent AI-crypto curiosity. Nonetheless, the AI tasks spawned and spotlighted throughout October’s rally have continued apace, even when their star now shines rather less brightly.
There’s nonetheless the goat-themed token that began all of it, whose chat bot will sometimes publish about tokens on X however spends most of its time consumed with edgy posts and uncanny valley AI artwork. That hasn’t stopped its coin from surging to over $1.1 billion in market capitalization nonetheless, leaving the AI bot’s public pockets with nearly half a billion-worth in crypto.
Truth_terminal set off a wave of curiosity surrounding AI brokers who work together with people to do some sort of blockchain motion.
Virtuals Protocol is one such challenge on the Base layer-2. “Pump dot enjoyable for AI brokers” lets customers buy tokens related to autonomous AI brokers in hopes of the AI bots attracting extra funding as they do extra fascinating issues. The most well-liked Virtuals agent has sprung to $115 million in market capitalization, a 106% enhance over the previous 24 hours as a lot of the Ethereum neighborhood gathers for Devcon in Thailand.
However memecoins are the middle of the late AI hype, and Solana is the middle of memecoins. One new challenge on this area is ai16z, a gaggle that has an AI bot which invests in memecoins primarily based on the suggestions of its members. The challenge got here out of daos.enjoyable, a brand new crowdfunding mechanism for DAOs on Solana spun up at Alliance DAO. Ai16z’s AI model of Marc Andreessen additionally drew a social media shoutout from the true life model of the a16z boss, which is seemingly turning into an vital part of launching a crypto-AI challenge.
There are additionally crypto-AI outfits with grander ambitions. This week, I spoke to Ryan Trattner from DAIN protocol, which is a community for onchain AI apps and bots. Trattner, who was previously a contractor on the Solana College non-profit, thinks that the longer term will comprise many AI brokers doing various things, so he’s serving to construct DAIN to accommodate all of them. He demonstrated to me how an AI agent on the community can order a Chick-Fil-A sandwich and the way a unique one might commerce bitcoin primarily based on Polymarket’s presidential election odds.
Trattner mentioned DAIN might let him “order meals in the identical [interface] the place I’m buying and selling my memecoins.” That doesn’t strike me as essentially the most in-demand use for AI, however then once more, with bitcoin capturing above $90,000, every thing appears to be on the desk proper now.
So regardless that the headlines and X feeds appeared to have cooled on AI-crypto integrations for the second, these AI-crypto startups don’t appear to be dropping steam.
