AI Memes are very popular, but can’t keep up with the pace. Are DAO funds + Memes on the rise?
Written by: Karen, Foresight News
Last weekend, besides the BAN supported by Sotheby’s Vice President Michael Bouhanna, ai16z also attracted a lot of attention with its outstanding performance, with a market cap once approaching the $100 million mark, currently falling back to around $46 million.
Three days ago, someone spent only 20 SOL (about $3,500) to purchase 47.54 million ai16z tokens, which are now worth $2.3 million, yielding a return of up to 650 times.
So what exactly is ai16z? How does its launch platform daos.fun operate? What are its features and risks?
What is daos.fun? How does it operate?
daos.fun is a platform founded by @baoskee and supported by Alliance DAO. The main function of this platform is to help fund managers and creators raise funds so they can establish their own DAOs and invest in Memes on behalf of token holders.
Currently, daos.fun is still in an invitation-only phase, and only creators who receive an official or @baoskee invitation code can participate.
Once you become a creator on daos.fun, you need to set a fundraising target amount, fund expiration time, and management fees. Then, you will have a week to raise the required amount of SOL. The tokens of each DAO will be issued fairly to ensure that everyone can obtain tokens at the same price at the start. If fundraising fails, buyers have the right to redeem their SOL, but early redemption incurs a 10% loss.
When the fundraising reaches the preset hard cap, the creator will invest the raised SOL into their preferred Solana protocols or Memes, while the tokens will also be publicly traded through a virtual AMM market. Thus, the market value and price of the DAO tokens will fluctuate with the trading activities and performance of the fund, and of course, market attention plays a significant role.
In principle, the price upside potential of DAO tokens is unlimited, but the downside is limited to the fundraising market value. As long as the market value of the tokens exceeds the original fundraising amount, holders can sell DAO tokens at any time.
All DAOs have expiration times ranging from 3 months to 1 year. After the fund expires, the DAO wallet will be frozen, and SOL profits will be distributed proportionally to creators and investors. Token holders can choose to burn DAO tokens to redeem the underlying assets or sell them directly on the market (provided the market value is higher than the fundraising amount).
Ai16z: The top AI DAO by market cap on daos.fun
As mentioned above, the most successful DAO fund on the daos.fun platform is undoubtedly the ai16z fund founded by @pmairca (Marc Andreessen). ai16z started with an initial fundraising amount of 420.69 SOL, and with the support of a16z founder Marc Andreessen, who mentioned it twice on official Twitter, it achieved a top market cap, once nearing $100 million, and although it has since fallen back, it remains stable at around $45 million.
Top 10 DAOs by market cap on daos.fun
Marc Andreessen has pointed out, "We are in the midst of a revolutionary wave of change, where the deep integration of AI and blockchain technology will reshape the landscape of finance and innovation. In this transformation process, the pioneering AI DAO, AI16z, is playing a leading role, envisioning a future where AI agents are the core driving force of value creation and growth. In the early stages, ai16z will operate in a highly autonomous manner under the guidance of the collective wisdom of stakeholders. Its long-term goal is to achieve full on-chain operation, placing AI entities under the strict protection of trusted execution environments (TEE) to ensure unprecedented transparency, security, and integrity."
ai16z not only actively listens to community insights and suggestions but also strives to learn and grow from them. DAO holders have the opportunity to provide input on investment decisions in Discord, and the AI system will closely monitor the implementation effects of these suggestions. Individuals who consistently contribute reliable insights will earn the trust and confidence of the AI, while those whose suggestions perform poorly will see their influence gradually diminish. To maintain a balanced distribution of power, each member's input weight will be proportional to their shareholding in the DAO, effectively preventing malicious actors from posing potential threats to the system. In the future envisioned by ai16z, everyone who empowers the network and adds value will receive fair rewards.
The official page of ai16z also shows that ai16z will invest in seed-stage AI companies, covering areas such as robotics, bio + healthcare automation, consumer manipulation, crypto anarchy, enterprise obsolescence, fintech disruption, game theory development, infrastructure hijacking, and more. The technology battles of ai16z have been open-sourced on GitHub.
It is worth mentioning that kotopia is the DAO that has raised the most on daos.fun, collecting nearly 4,207 SOL (worth $740,000), with a current market cap of $810,000.
What are the features and risks of daos.fun?
So, what are the features and potential risks of daos.fun?
daos.fun lowers the threshold for operating Meme funds. If daos.fun later opens up creator registration, theoretically anyone can initiate a Meme DAO or Meme VC, and some KOLs and institutions may also be able to issue tokens through daos.fun. In the current context where AI Memes are extremely popular, but most retail investors find it difficult to keep pace, daos.fun undoubtedly opens up new possibilities for retail investors.
Transparency is also a major feature of daos.fun. First, the asset management status of each DAO is publicly displayed on the daos.fun page, and second, the profit-sharing mechanism is relatively transparent. Additionally, all DAO creators are linked to their Twitter accounts, which usually means they value their reputation. But who knows?
The profit points of daos.fun mainly lie in the performance of DAO tokens and fund investments. However, this profit model also comes with significant risks, especially concerning improper behaviors such as front-running by fund managers. More critically, the severe divergence between the fund's market value and its net asset value has become another major potential risk point.
Taking the largest token by market cap on daos.fun, ai16z, as an example, its market value to net asset value ratio is as high as 58. The second-largest token, SEQUOAI (market cap $455,000), has a ratio of 40, while the third-largest token, NORM, has a ratio of 29. The high ratios of these funds undoubtedly reveal the current market's strong atmosphere of speculation and hype, as well as investors' high expectations for the future performance of these funds. However, this also reminds us that while pursuing high returns, we must be vigilant about potential market fluctuations and risks.
As early as 2022, the concept and implementation of Ventures DAO had already emerged in the Web3 space, but it did not achieve significant progress at that time. With the rise of the Meme craze, whether Meme DAOs, AI DAOs, and others can create a wave remains to be seen, and Foresight News will continue to monitor this.
免责声明:本文章仅代表作者个人观点,不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享,不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议,与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权,请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com,本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。