Market interest in AI Agent shifting

We can now simply and rudely divide the Crypto AI Agent faction into two factions: Virtuals faction and AI16Z faction. 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 expand externally, such as cooperating with the TAO ecosystem, products like $SERAPH and $TAOCAT are the result of their cooperation.

First of all, it is important to clarify that building infrastructure for AI Agents is a current trend, such as $ZEREBRO $ARC $ALCH $GRIFFAIN. Among them, the advantage of Virtuals is the token model, which has a strong correlation with the fundamental data performance and token price. This is generally referred to as ‘tokens with strong value capture capability’.

And I think the cooperation between Virtuals and TAO ecology is very sexy. Simply put, Virtuals is where AI Agent tokens are produced, and TAO is where high-quality models are incentivized with tokens. Under the incentive of $TAO, the models will become better, and the cooperation among high-quality models will become more frequent, which can better empower AI Agents. We can already see this trend happening now.

For example, $SERAPH, it is an autonomous agent powered by TAO, used to combat fraudulent artificial intelligence agents and synthetic content.

For example, @getmasafi and Virtuals collaborate, 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 the push and then register in subnet 59 to compete with other AI Agents for the emission of $TAO. The principle is still the logic of TAO. The better your AI Agent performs (indicators as shown in the figure below), the more $TAO emissions you may receive. Later, Masa will further refine the criteria for evaluating the quality of the Agent. (Then you can also pledge $MASA to vote and decide the emission of $TAO).

Through cooperation with Virtuals, subnet miners (i.e. developers of AI Agents) can easily launch their own tokens. For example, as mentioned earlier, $TAOCAT - an Agent dedicated to shilling TAO - was born this way.

In addition, Masa has also launched some additional services, such as the collaboration with the no-code platform Creator.Bid, through which we can create our own Agent. And Masa’s Data Boost service (powered by the TAO subnet 42), which can push real-time data to the Agent to help it perform better.

btw, $TAOCAT is made by the official to attract market attention. If the official is bigger, pulling up $TAOCAT and then creating some wealth effect to attract more people to play is the best solution.

In the final analysis, Virtuals has become an increasingly popular choice for infrastructure projects to issue Agent tokens, which is a huge positive flywheel. Crypto is an industry of fat protocols and thin applications, and the usual thinking is to use a small ball to carry a big ball, that is, to attract market attention to its infrastructure with the short-term bubble of applications. AIXBT/LUNA and Virtuals clearly have this kind of relationship.

Currently, the focus of the market and developers has shifted from explosive applications to infrastructure (perhaps because infrastructure can have a higher valuation).

infrastructure construction