Author: 0xJeff

Compiled by: Tim, PANews

Since the publication of the first article on mainstream AI trends in May, the market has undergone many changes:

• Market sentiment and the number of fairly launched AI agent tokens have both declined
• Narrative shifts
• New and old ecosystem participants have alternated
• The value proposition of the Web3 AI ecosystem has become clearer
• Institutions and whales face more AI investment opportunities
• A shift towards real products and applications, rather than hype
• Others

In this article, we will review and summarize the dynamics of the past few months, analyze current trends, outline market leaders, assess industry development directions, and discuss how to best position for future trends.

Let’s get started.

Since the beginning of this year, life in the on-chain trenches has been tough.

First: We have too many tokens, which dilute liquidity and attention.

Second: There is too much nonsense on crypto Twitter and AI junk content, distracting people from quality content.

Third: Pumping is not as strong as before and will continue to decline.

Fourth: Game version iterations are very fast; if you are not constantly paying attention or have the right information channels, it is hard to keep up.

Looking back at the first and second quarters, popular projects like the Trump family Meme coins, celebrity coins, ICM, creator coins, and Pump ICOs attracted the vast majority of active liquidity in the market, leaving very little funding for the AI sector.

AI Agent Ecosystem: From Concept Hype to Product Implementation

Because of this, good opportunities have become extremely scarce. The number one AI Agent project, Virtuals, which has the most developers, has become a highly anticipated ecosystem. The Genesis launch project performed quite well, occasionally featuring projects with 5-20x returns.

However, this situation only lasted for 1-2 months because, after all, the focus of this ecosystem is on hyping new projects. When there is a lack of exciting new projects, attention and hype will fade, and "points" will become worthless.

This shift in sentiment has prompted investors and speculators to become more selective, focusing on product substance rather than market hype.

Two major AI Agent trends are emerging:

1. Investors are shifting their attention from Virtuals Genesis launch projects to selectively investing in quality Virtuals agent teams.

Some teams previously launched their tokens but faced significant selling pressure; now they are about to launch new important products or features.

There are also new teams launching more refined products on Virtuals. They are not building a minimum viable product in two to three months but are launching products immediately after issuing tokens.

These include (but are not limited to) the following teams:

• ArAIstotle: AI fact-checking platform
• PredictBase: Decentralized prediction market
• Mamo: Personal finance assistant (developed by the Moonwell team)
• Billy Bets: Sports prediction agent, engine, aggregation platform
• Backroom: AI-driven SocialFi application

The next trend is likely to continue, where quality projects will remain scarce, but if you closely monitor the dynamics of promising AI Agent teams on Virtuals, the probability of capturing the next 10-50x return project will significantly increase.

2. Investors are shifting their attention from Virtuals to other more promising AI agent ecosystems.

CreatorBid, with its high-quality token listing strategy, has successfully gained mind share and investor favor by launching AI products with clear utility and practical use cases through the Bittensor subnet.

Additionally, the team focuses on supporting existing teams through products, partnerships, and marketing, successfully positioning CreatorBid among the forefront of the AI agent ecosystem.

Players have referred to the Launch platform launched by Holoworld as a lottery-style launch platform (HoloDraw), where users can participate in a lottery by purchasing tickets (each ticket represents 0.5 SOL in purchasing power on the bonding curve). 35% of the token supply will be reserved for the HoloDraw lottery, and if users do not win, they can participate in a consolation prize pool for a second lottery (accounting for 5% of the supply). HOLO successfully launched on Upbit exchange with a fully diluted valuation of $1.5 billion, sparking enthusiastic community support.

Other projects like OpenServ are focusing on incubating teams, aiming to launch products first, attract users, and generate revenue before issuing tokens; meanwhile, OpenServ continues to develop its decentralized n8n product for consumers.

Next: Top agent projects on Coinbase will continue to seek product-market fit in the prediction track, while Coinbase remains committed to enhancing the value accumulation of BID (which is currently their pain point).

Other ecosystems continue to adopt a product-first strategy; their tokens may be impacted, but once they launch flagship use cases, products, or teams, token valuations are bound to rise.

Key ecosystems to watch: CreatorBid, OpenServ, Holoworld, Arc, Loomlay, ElizaOS

In addition to AI agents, capital is concentrated in a few narratives and verticals:

Decentralized AI: From Primitive Intelligence to Intelligent Productization

DeAI remains the favored sector for whales and institutional investors.

Decentralized computing remains the highest revenue-generating subfield. Aethir has achieved eight-figure annual revenue, and Chutes processes 50-100 billion tokens daily through its open routing platform.

Privacy-preserving AI technology based on federated learning is accelerating its implementation. Flock has partnered with Web2 companies and government agencies to build privacy-preserving vertical AI solutions while achieving product-market fit and token-market fit. Recent collaborations include the United Nations Development Programme, the Hong Kong government's official AI service provider, and CIMG.

Darwinian AI ecosystems are rapidly developing. Bittensor has expanded to 128 subnets, and Sentient has launched the world's largest collaborative intelligence network, GRID, while building a Darwinian AI ecosystem with the "artifact" subnet architecture.

Projects like FractionAI are applying Darwinian AI to the gaming sector, allowing users to deploy AI agents for competitive matches across various scenarios, including Polymarket predictions, agent battles, tic-tac-toe, and soccer.

Predictive AI is nearing industrialization. Multiple Bittensor subnets have proven that large-scale decentralized intelligence creation can significantly enhance model performance: the SN18 Zeus network, SN44 scoring network, and SN50 synthesis network have all surpassed benchmark tests and state-of-the-art models. Among them, SN44 monetizes signals through the Sire sports betting strategy (top sports hedge funds deploy $300 million using its strategy).

One of the latest fields in DeAI is data, primarily including data labeling, human feedback reinforcement learning (RLHF) data services, and evaluation (yes, this is the first and second area with the highest funding and adoption value in Web2).

Data labeling and human feedback reinforcement learning (RLHF) is a labor-intensive task. Web3 allows participants from any region to engage in labeling, annotating, rating, and providing feedback through token incentives, thereby reducing related costs.

Key players in this field include: SapienAI, FractionAI, PerleAI, PublicAI, SN52 Dojo, Synesis One.

DeFi x AI (DeFAI): From Proof of Concept to Fully Autonomous Financial Agents

The development journey of DeFAI: from the abstract layers and failed implementations of GPT-like interactive interfaces in the first quarter, to the second quarter achieving proof of concept for personalized agents assisting users in managing funds, to the third quarter fully launching a fully autonomous financial agent system and building a highly scalable and verifiable infrastructure.

Rapid technological advancements, represented by players like Giza, are leading the entire track. Giza has achieved nearly $2 billion in agent trading volume and manages $20 million in agent assets around the clock.

The newly launched Swarm Finance + Pulse (Pendle agent) marks the beginning of a new era where agents optimize idle funds for users.

Almanak follows closely, utilizing a highly scalable and verifiable infrastructure, building a system architecture with agent pools and smart contracts (asynchronous tokenized vaults) that allows AI not to directly manage user funds.

This completely protects investors from illusions and AI hackers, exploits, creating an environment where institutions and whales can safely deposit large amounts of funds. Almanak's quantitative creation platform also allows anyone to launch quantitative strategies in minutes without spending weeks.

Progress of DeFAI use cases:

Key players to watch: Giza, Almanak, Cod3x, Theoriq

How will it develop next?

Predictive AI is one of the fields with the best asymmetric betting opportunities. The total addressable market (TAM) for prediction markets far exceeds the Web3 scope, as users from various industries log into Polymarket and Kalshi platforms to make predictions on topics of interest.

AI and tools built on prediction markets will be able to capture tremendous value from the growth in this field. In particular, consumer applications with user funnels and alternative prediction markets, agents will stand out. Liquidity remains the biggest obstacle; however, the emergence of AI market makers and treasury products is likely to help improve liquidity conditions across markets.

Data will be a focus in the fourth quarter of this year. As "useful" data becomes increasingly scarce, Web3 data service providers will face stronger demand from Web2 and Web3 AI labs. Data is the biggest moat and bottleneck.

AI agents and the AI agent ecosystem will continue to attract the attention of on-chain players and the crypto Twitter community due to their simplicity and fair launch characteristics. High-return opportunities will become scarcer, but quality projects that can stand out may still achieve 10-50x growth (liquidity for such projects will still be quite thin, so please proceed with caution).

DeFAI will evolve to a stage where top players will become key drivers of massive TVL and trading volume for top DeFi protocols (AAVE, Pendle, Fluid, Uniswap, Aerodrome, etc.). Covering more DeFi application scenarios, achieving more complex strategies, providing better execution capabilities, and building safer risk barriers and infrastructure.

Conclusion

The brutality of the battlefield will continue, many tokens will perish, attention will be diverted, and some will leave.

However, amidst this chaos, the foundation for the next wave of Web3 AI is being laid right now.

The leaders of the next wave will be those who:

• Solve real problems
• Attract highly sticky users
• Build products that withstand narrative shifts

Ironically, the biggest winners will initially appear unremarkable (boring infrastructure, privacy, data), until one day they suddenly no longer seem plain.

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