Market interest shifting towards AI Agent

Simply and rudely divide the Crypto AI Agent factions into two factions: Virtuals faction and ai16z faction.

Author: Yuzhong Kuangshui

We can now simply and rudely divide the Crypto AI Agent faction into two major factions: Virtuals faction and AI16Z faction. The influence of AI16Z radiates from Solana to the entire blockchain ecosystem, including $HEU on Base, which belongs to the AI16Z faction. Of course, Virtuals also have external expansion, such as cooperation with the TAO ecosystem, and products of cooperation like $SERAPH and $TAOCAT.

First of all, it is clear that building the infrastructure for an AI Agent is a current trend, such as $ZEREBRO $ARC $ALCH $GRIFFAIN. Among them, the advantage of Virtuals lies in the token model, which shows a strong correlation between fundamental data performance and token prices. This is generally referred to as 'tokens with strong value capture capabilities'.

And I think the collaboration between Virtuals and TAO ecosystem 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 collaboration between high-quality models will become more frequent, enabling AI Agents to perform better. We can already see this trend happening.

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

For example, the collaboration between @getmasafi and Virtuals, Masa launched a 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 register it in the 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 (as shown in the figure below), the more chances you have to receive more $TAO emissions. Later, Masa will further refine the indicators for evaluating the quality of Agents. (At that time, 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, $TAOCAT, which is an Agent specifically designed to shill TAO, was born this way as mentioned above.

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

btw, $TAOCAT is made by the official team to attract market attention. If the official team expands its influence and pumps up $TAOCAT to create some wealth effects, it is the best solution to attract more people to participate.

At the end of the day, Virtuals has become an increasingly popular choice for infrastructure projects to issue Agent tokens, which is a huge positive flywheel. Crypto is an industry with a fat protocol and thin applications. The usual approach is to use small balls to carry big balls, that is, to attract market attention to its infrastructure through 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 (possibly because infrastructure can have higher valuations).

Infrastructure construction