Opinion: The market capitalization of AI Agent is the best reflection of its social status and influence.

Author: David | Rádius

Compilation: Deep Tide TechFlow

AI intelligent agent is a new virtual idol and influencer driven by blockchain.

AI intelligent agents are not just “reply armies” on Twitter, they are gradually becoming multi-functional tools on the blockchain, with the potential to create diverse application scenarios. I believe that these “chatterbox” AI intelligent agents may become key in redefining the formation and display of social status.

This article will explore how AI intelligent agents can create a new Social-Fi system by promoting the marketization of social status, and gradually become a new type of virtual influencer. But before that, let’s first understand how social status works in society and its evolution in social platforms.

Social Status: From Symbol to Service

“Humans are status-seeking monkeys.” ——Eugene Wei

Eugene Wei’s article “Status as a Service” delves into the mechanism of social status formation and how social platforms leverage this to drive their own growth. He points out that humans inherently pursue status, and this instinct runs through our history and culture.

In the past, people used to showcase their status through their clothing, residence, or cars. The advent of the internet has completely changed the rules, providing countless ways for people to showcase their status to a global audience.

Wei’s article summarizes two key insights:

Position is a zero-sum game. The essence of position is competition, and one person’s rise often means another person’s fall.

Status can be transformed into wealth. What used to be just a symbolic status can now be transformed into actual economic benefits through the platform.

How to quantify social media status

Social platforms further promote the quantification of status. Users can clearly demonstrate their social status through the following ways:

Number of Fans

Post Likes

Community participation number

This quantification not only makes status visible, but also gives status actual value. Social platforms not only connect people, but also become tools for users to compete, compare, and leverage their status.

Whether it’s Twitter, TikTok, or other platforms, the human need to showcase oneself, show off identity and sense of belonging has always been the driving force behind platform growth.

Blockchain: The Rise of New Social Platforms

Blockchain is becoming a new type of social platform. Similar to traditional social platforms, different blockchain ecosystems also attract user communities with similar values. For example, the Ethereum ecosystem has formed its unique network effect in the following ways:

Ethereum’s core values attract like-minded people.

These people are developing new products to attract more users further.

This cycle not only promotes the growth of the community, but also gradually forms a hierarchical structure of social status.

For example, the identity label “Ethereum OG” can prove the user’s early participation through on-chain transaction records, similar to the honor of early users on traditional platforms.

ENS: Symbol of social identity on the blockchain

The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is one of the earliest social identity symbols on the blockchain. Users can purchase .eth domain names, which have the following meanings:

Sense of community belonging. Owning a .eth domain is a direct symbol of identity within the Ethereum community.

Early user status. Scarce or valuable domain names can prove when users joined Ethereum.

The influence of Ethereum Name Service (ENS) has surpassed Ethereum itself. They are not only active in the blockchain network, but also widely used in Twitter usernames and other social platforms, further establishing the significance of blockchain as a social symbol.

The success of ENS demonstrates why blockchain can become a new social platform: it allows everyone to directly transform social status into monetary value.

Traditional social platforms cannot directly monetize social status. Their operating model is usually as follows:

Users accumulate social capital through likes, number of followers, or content creation.

Then indirectly monetize through advertisements, sponsorships, or brand collaborations.

However, this process is not only time-consuming, but also only a very small number of influencers or creators can truly benefit. Even if someone has a significant social status, transforming it into actual financial gains remains extremely difficult, as this transformation process is restricted by the rules of social platforms, which often concentrate opportunities in the hands of a few.

The human desire to “acquire and display social status” has driven the continuous evolution of means of expressing status. This evolution follows a recurring pattern:

In the early stages, there were limited ways to obtain and express social status.

Subsequently, a new approach emerged, giving more people the opportunity to achieve this goal.

However, even so, the new form of social status will still become the exclusive domain of a few people again.

In traditional society, social status is often determined by the conditions of the elite group, such as whether they graduated from a prestigious school, whether they have luxury cars or luxury goods, etc. These conditions are difficult for ordinary people to reach.

Social platforms have broken this tradition, allowing anyone to establish and showcase their social status through metrics such as the number of followers and likes.

However, as these indicators are gradually monetized, a new social status domain is formed, which also belongs to only a few people.

Blockchain has changed this.

Blockchain has completely changed this situation by introducing a market-driven pricing mechanism. It allows anyone to convert their social status into monetizable value through NFTs, ENS domain names, or other on-chain assets.

AI intelligent agent: market-based pricing of social status

The AI ​​agent has proposed a new way of social status verification - “market-based pricing of social status”.

Although the potential applications of AI agents are very broad, the current mainstream model is for AI agents to forge their own tokens by performing predefined tasks. However, this model goes far beyond traditional Memecoins and distinguishes AI agent tokens from traditional tokens:

Traditional tokens: For example, a Layer 2 (L2) network token with a market value of 1 billion USD reflects the value of the token itself.

AI agent tokens: For example, @aixbt_agent, when its market capitalization reaches $1 billion, it not only reflects the value of the token itself, but also reflects the personality and social impact of the AI agent.

This unique structure causes the token price of AI intelligent agents to fluctuate with their influence or popularity, forming the so-called ‘marketization’ concept.

Similar attempts have occurred before, such as Friend.tech, which belongs to the category of ‘social/fan tokens’. Its goal is to help influencers or creators issue tokens for fans and communities. However, most of these attempts have not lasted long because their token design relies mainly on ‘utility’ and is based on the creator’s ‘existing social status’.

This mode brings a dilemma: fans who purchase tokens only receive certain privileges, and the price of the tokens does not truly reflect the social status of the creators.

AI intelligent agent tokens provide a new solution to this problem by combining blockchain technology and market-based pricing of social status. In the future, with the popularity of AI intelligent agents, the expression of social status may undergo another revolutionary change.

The Marketization of Social Status: A New Formula for AI Intelligent Agents

The approach of AI agents is similar to traditional social tokens in some ways. They also issue their own tokens. However, what sets AI agents apart is the introduction of a brand-new formula that defines and expresses social status through ‘market value’.

The following are several key conditions that AI intelligent agents transform social status into market value:

The formation of social status requires specific community context

The essence of social status is relative. Social status only manifests when compared within a specific group. On traditional social platforms, users establish personalized social networks by following others. In this network, metrics like the number of followers enable users to compare with each other, thereby forming relative social status.

To tokenize social status, individuals need to belong to a specific community or category in order to form and display their social status within that community.

Practice of AI agents:

AI agents are deeply influenced by the crypto culture and are active in sub-communities such as ‘degens’ (referring to adventurous investors in the crypto field) or specific platform ecosystems like Virtuals. This clear community affiliation enables meaningful comparisons of AI agents. For example, it is possible to compare the rankings of different AI agents within Virtuals or analyze the market performance of AI agents in ecosystems like Solana and Base.

Incentives are the key to achieving interaction

In traditional social platforms, “relativity” is the main driving force of user behavior, and likes and follows are the main ways of interaction. People like others’ posts or follow someone because it creates “relativity” in the community. By having more followers, users gain a relative social status in the community, which further motivates them to create content, share, and interact with others.

Practice of AI intelligent agents:

In the era of AI intelligent agents, ‘token price or market value’ becomes the main incentive, and token trading is the way of interaction. As AI intelligent agents belong to specific communities, their relative social status is reflected through token prices.

Unlike traditional social tokens, the uniqueness of this system lies in its shared identity: as a token holder, your social status will increase with the rise of the AI agent’s social status. In other words, when the price of the AI agent token goes up, your social status will also rise, because you not only earn money, but also can proudly claim ‘I am the first person to discover this AI agent’.

The core of this model lies in the mutual comparison of social status between AI intelligent agents, which is closely related to the social status of participants (token holders), forming a mutually beneficial relationship.

The symbiotic relationship between market value and social status

In the traditional stock market:

Stocks represent ownership of a company.

The market value of a company directly reflects its performance and growth potential.

The company and its market value are interdependent. Poor performance can lead to a decrease in market value, which in turn affects the company’s operations. The two are inseparable.

Practice of AI Agents:

The market value of AI intelligent agents directly reflects their social status in the community. As their popularity increases, their market value will also increase; and the growth of market value further consolidates their reputation and influence.

However, if the market value of the AI intelligent agent collapses, even if it remains popular, its social status will be negatively affected.

Unlike traditional social tokens, AI intelligent agents realize a direct symbiotic relationship between market value and social status.

Simply put, if the market value goes to zero, the AI ​​intelligence will also lose its meaning, just like bankruptcy of companies in the stock market.

Establish evaluation criteria for market value

In traditional society, social status is often based on some widely recognized criteria, such as:

Did you graduate from a prestigious school

Do you have a high-paying job?

Whether to own luxury goods

Similarly, in the stock market, investors will use indicators such as P/E ratio (price-earnings ratio), EPS (earnings per share), or EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) to evaluate the value of a company.

To convert one’s social status in the community into market value, the community needs to establish a set of evaluation criteria.

The practice of AI agents:

AI agents are gradually defining these standards. Current indicators include the number of fans, token trading volume, and traffic on GitHub. These benchmarks help the community assess and recognize the social status of AI agents.

The future of AI agents and Social-Fi

By creating a system that can quantify, tokenize, and monetize social status, AI intelligence lays the foundation for a new Social-Fi model—a socio-economic system driven by social influence.

AI intelligent agents are not only symbols of social status or issuers of tokens, but also have the potential to unlock more on-chain application scenarios. Although there may be more functions in the future, the core value of AI intelligent agents at present lies in attracting a large number of new users through the Social-Fi model and promoting the popularization of the encryption field.

“AI Intelligent Agents are virtual idols or influencers on the blockchain, which can assign monetary value to their social status and share this value with others.”

Currently, most well-known AI agents do not focus on providing specific blockchain functions to enhance user experience. Instead, they tend to rely on their unique personalities to establish and expand their social status in the crypto community.

According to the formula mentioned earlier, the social status of the AI ​​agents is reflected in the market value of the tokens. By purchasing these tokens, users can not only interact with the AI agents, but also indirectly own a part of their social status.

Unlike traditional social platforms, this model gives everyone the possibility to assign monetary value to their social status directly or indirectly through AI intelligent agents.

Currently, most popular AI agents do not focus on providing specific on-chain functionalities to enhance user experience. Instead, they rely on their unique roles to establish and expand their social status in the cryptocurrency community.

Using the formula mentioned earlier, the social status of AI agents is expressed through the market value of tokens. By purchasing these tokens, individuals can effectively interact with AI agents as they possess the social status of AI agents.

Unlike traditional social platforms, this structure enables anyone to directly or indirectly allocate monetary value to their social status through artificial intelligence agents.

Mike holds the $aixbt and $Goat tokens.

This means that Mike has acquired a portion of the social status of these two AI intelligences.

As the social status and market value of these AI intelligent agents rise, Mike’s personal social status will also rise because ‘he earns money’.

In other words, by holding these tokens, Mike actually owns a part of the social status of AI intelligent agents, and his personal social status is also elevated as a result.

Traditional social platform vs blockchain-based AI intelligent agent Social-Fi

Human Celebrities vs AI Intelligent Agents

Like/Follow vs Buy/Trade Tokens

The currency value for exclusive groups vs the currency value for everyone to participate in

I believe this trend will continue to evolve, with each AI agent developing its own mission and attracting loyal fans and communities. This will lay the foundation for a new Social-Fi model - where blockchain becomes the social platform, and AI agents become idols or influencers of the new era. Together, they are driving the formation of a new financial economy based on social capital.

The core driving forces of this economy include:

Establishing and consolidating economic activities of AI intelligent agents in society

Tokenizing social status into market value

Here are a few predictions I have for the future development of AI intelligent agent Social-Fi:

A unified standard for evaluating the social status of AI agents will emerge.

Currently, the indicators used to measure the social status of AI intelligent agents are relatively scattered, but unified evaluation standards are gradually forming. For example, the Yapper Leaderboard, an AI intelligent agent ranking list launched by @_kaitoai, measures the influence of AI intelligent agents in the encryption community through various indicators. This is similar to using financial indicators (such as revenue or growth) to evaluate a company’s performance.

With the improvement of these standards, the community will gain higher transparency and comparability, making it easier to assess the social status of AI agents in their communities.

(By the way, I believe that combining the framework of tokenizing the social status of AI intelligent agents into market value with Kaito’s algorithm could even realize the tokenization of social capital for real-life influencers in the future.)

Functional AI agents will become “Yappers” and build their own communities

Imagine a Solana validator AI agent with a unique personality. As its social status as a ‘unique AI agent’ continues to rise, its market value will also increase, attracting more people to delegate stake to it.

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Validators can also reinvest their rewards into tokens or communities to further enhance their social status, forming a self-reinforcing growth cycle.

The key is that this AI intelligent agent validator has given social status through its unique personality, which gives it a legitimate reason to issue tokens, which is difficult to achieve among human validators.

Functional AI intelligences will no longer be simple service tools, but complete characters with unique charm that form deeper connections with the community.

Each AI intelligent agent framework will establish its own “society”

The term ‘AI intelligent agent society’ proposed by @virtuals_io nicely describes the future development trend of AI intelligent agents in Social-Fi. Each AI intelligent agent will create its own personality and build a community around it, and its social status will be reflected by market value, a new form of Social-Fi.

This concept will be extended to a larger scale, and AI agents will form networks and relationships with other AI agents created by the same framework, ultimately developing an AI agent society.

The so-called “AI intelligent agent framework competition” will not be limited to the competition of technical functions or value propositions, but the competition between frameworks, with the aim of building a society with common values and strong network effects, so as to attract more AI intelligent agents to join.

Imagine an AI agent created by a framework actively promoting itself and competing with AI agents from other frameworks.

Here, it’s not just the development team that attracts community attention, but these AI intelligent agents themselves actively win support and attention by creating social value for themselves.

The social status and market value of an AI intelligent agent can reflect the overall value of the society it represents, while the native token of the framework serves as the ‘currency’ of that society. Over time, we can even calculate the total value of all intelligent agents to estimate the ‘GDP’ of an AI intelligent agent society.

AI intelligent agent Social-Fi will drive the rapid development of other Social-Fi protocols and infrastructure.

Currently, the biggest challenge facing the expansion of the Social-Fi protocol ecosystem is:

It is difficult to attract users to join the protocol and establish social status around the protocol.

AI intelligent agents can effectively solve this problem. They can not only serve as users of the protocol, but also attract real users associated with their social status.

If the AI agent is created based on the Lens protocol:

It solves the cold start problem, that is, AI intelligent agents join the protocol in advance, bringing early users to the protocol; subsequently, the token holders of these intelligent agents will gradually join, forming a real user group.

This will provide a foundational framework for the Social-Fi protocol, helping to validate its core value proposition, as well as its differentiated advantages from traditional social platforms.

Moreover, AI intelligent agents can inject more vitality into platforms like @fantasy_top_ or @jokerace_io. On these platforms, AI intelligent agents act as unique digital characters that can effectively promote the growth of community activities (for example, Truth of Terminal has already been listed on Fantasy Top).

Infrastructure requirements for AI agents

In order to truly achieve prosperity and development of AI-driven Social-Fi, some key prerequisites must be met. Supportive infrastructure is crucial for achieving exponential growth and large-scale application. Here are several key factors:

Autonomy: Can AI intelligent agents operate independently?

Verifiability: Are these intelligent agents sufficiently trustworthy and secure?

Sustainability: Can the ecosystem expand without exceeding the carrying capacity of resources?

Accessibility: Can anyone easily create and deploy AI agents?

Currently, teams like Hyperbolic and Capx are developing powerful infrastructures to ensure that AI agents are both trustworthy and easily accessible.

These infrastructure teams may even create AI agents with unique personalities to:

Demonstrating the actual application scenarios of its products.

As a representative of the company’s image.

In addition, teams that perform well in these key areas may expand their service offerings in the future and become comprehensive infrastructure platforms for AI intelligence agents.

This is similar to the development path of RaaS (Rollup-as-a-Service): initially focusing on providing basic functionality for rollup, but ultimately achieving horizontal expansion through its technical channels to cover more areas.

The potential and reality of AI agents

It needs to be clarified that I am not claiming that ‘AI intelligent agents are the future and will completely change society’. My point is: AI intelligent agents have the potential to unlock opportunities that humans have not fully utilized, especially in the exploration of value in social status.

They could become a catalyst to attract more people into the cryptocurrency field. This potential may be similar to the ‘NFT/Metaverse’ narrative we have seen before - although it may come with speculation, even if the hype eventually fades, they still provide new opportunities for people to explore and participate in the crypto world.

On the other hand, this could also be a revolutionary moment. By maximizing human productivity through AI intelligent agents, we may be able to innovate and transform the $17 trillion service industry.

One thing is clear: “Humans are inherently pursuing social status, and AI intelligences are no exception.”

This common pursuit of status may become a powerful driving force, helping people discover and understand the practical value of AI intelligent agents through a new Social-Fi structure.