AI Agents will surpass the 20-year DeFi bubble to become an epic narrative

Author: Haotian

1. Narrative

The big trend is beyond doubt. AI Agent is neither an "asset" nor an "application", but a large-scale blockchain ecosystem "narrative" new paradigm.

In other words, the advent of AI Agent is like the DeFi Summer in the blockchain in 2020. It will generate a huge new "bubble" narrative cycle of Build+Speculation around the issuance, custody, and trading of AI Agent's tokens; infrastructure construction, framework, standards, communication, stacking, SaaS packaging; Application development, operation, aggregation, iteration, landing, etc.

DeFi has driven the glory of the last bull market, and has stimulated much market vitality around the three carriages of stablecoins + lending + DeX derivatives. According to incomplete statistics, the total locked value of multi-chain DeFI is 134.6 billion, the number of stablecoins in circulation has exceeded 100 billion US dollars, the monthly trading volume of DEX has reached 372.3 billion US dollars, and the lending volume is nearly 20 billion US dollars, etc. The market size and ecological importance of the entire DeFi industry are all in these data that have grown amazingly and are still being refreshed, which does not include the various chains and applications generated by DeFi, such as MCAP\FDV and other broader data.

In my opinion, AI Agent will also create a new round of narrative miracles that may even surpass the DeFi narrative, 200B, 500B imagination space? Don’t always think about the new DeFi Summer 2.0, please keep up with the current AI Agent Summer narrative trend and don’t fall behind.

2. Chaos

Based on this logic, let’s look at the "chaos" in the current AI Agent market:

1) Community verbal battles and leading competition among AI MEMEs such as $GOAT, $FARTCOIN, and $ACT;

2) The competition among AI Agent framework standards such as $VIRTUAL and $AI16Z;

3) The competition among derivative infras such as the issuance and circulation of assets such as $VVAIFU and $GRIFFAIN;

4) The competition among single AI Agent applications such as $AIXBT, $AVA, and $BULLY, etc.

You will find that it is still too early. The various lending platforms, derivatives, machine gun pools, governance tokens, etc. that have appeared on DeFi at least have the basic execution framework and standards provided by chains such as Ethereum, while the AI ​​Agent ecosystem does not even have its own infra conditions. From the perspective of ecological plasticity, the industry narrative opportunities brought by AI Agent are much greater than DeFi.

In other words, these chaos are not chaotic. If you are optimistic about the development of AI Agent narratives and the direction of various sectors, assets with a certain market value and a corresponding user base are all high-quality assets before the huge AI Agent narrative breaks out. The categories of assets such as YFI, CRV, UNI, DYDX, etc. have reached FDV market value heights of tens of billions, so you don’t have to panic.

Of course, confidence does not mean you can mess around. Don't forget that there are pseudo-value assets like the second uncle in addition to the first uncle, and this type of asset will always quietly capture your wallet with a more attractive short-term but toxic long-term attitude.

Three, the initial stage

Because it is indeed still in the early stages of the narrative, some AI MEMEs that clearly know that there are conspiracy groups operating have no reason to persuade everyone not to participate.

After all, no one knows how much wealth effect an early track can generate, and some framework standards that seem to be more valuable and have been implemented may also face the possibility of being overtaken by competitors at any time.

Fourth, investment logic

In short, it is difficult to give a clear Alpha discovery logic. I only share my personal investment research logic for reference:

1. AI MEME, only considers "leading coins" such as $GOAT with narrative origins. There is no logic. If you have to say one, it is like the consensus coin such as Bitcoin was born before the smart contract technology delivery coin such as Ethereum was born.

Although the early MEME of a track is mainly speculative, its role in educating the market and cultivating user awareness cannot be ignored, just like the popularity of DOGE in cryptocurrency.

2. AI Agent infra is very important and is underestimated in the long run. For example, early frameworks such as $ELIZA, which have rich Github open source libraries and a particularly wide range of applications, although they are indeed very early and may be siphoned away by other stronger framework standards at any time, their absolute advantages in open source sharing and first-mover advantage are barriers. There is a high probability that a better framework than it will be on top of it, which may affect its growth height, but it will definitely not eliminate it.

If we regard ELIZA as the EVM of the AI ​​Agent era, there will inevitably be new frameworks such as EVM++ and EVM Compatible to complement it.

3. AI Agent asset issuance, custody, and trading are still at the MEME-based asset issuance narrative level. It is necessary to lock in the value of the platform and not be confused by the "junk assets" on the platform.

The logic is very simple. AI Agent is essentially a process of landing the value of an AI scenario based on the Crypto incentive mechanism. In the early days, infra, applications, protocol frameworks, etc. were not yet mature. How could there be so many AIXBT-level super applications? What does the convenience of issuing coins bring? Understand it? In the end, it is just a bubble trap that creates heat for asset issuance platforms such as VIRTUAL and VVAIFU.

Therefore, don’t chase AI Agent super applications too much, unless there is an absolute information gap, otherwise when you see the market value at that time, the cost performance will not be high, and locking in the innovative platform infra is different.

4. There is still a large blank in the construction of AI Agent infra. For example, early frameworks such as ELIZA only solve the problems of LLM large model and AI Agent dialogue mechanism, and are applied to application scenarios such as Twitter and Discord, but more of them are still the matching of web2 information. When there is a set of ELIZA++ version that can connect the ELIZA framework and web3 transaction scenarios based on the public chain paradigm, it is worth looking forward to.

For another example, although AI Agent asset issuance platforms such as Virtual and VVAIFU can issue assets quickly, they still lack a lot in the subsequent decentralized custody of assets and AMM-style intention-based transactions. When will the previously hotly discussed AI Agent+TEE private key management method mature? Can asset issuance platforms extend new gameplay in transactions, and have more interesting trading gameplay and incentive models?

Also, can there be some chains that build interactive standards for AI Agents, become Cosmos in the AI ​​Agent era, and provide standard interoperability capabilities? Or some chains that build permanent Memory modular storage for AI Agents, and build necessary DA capabilities for AI Agents? There are also some AI Agent visualization tools, execution engines, modular combination packaging services, and so on.

With these technologies and market-driven supporting infras, will you still be anxious about a bunch of incomprehensible MEMEs?

Written at the end

As for the various layer1s built on the smart contract paradigm in the past, high-performance chains, cross-chain infras, chain abstractions, DA combination chains, layer2s, Restaking, and other perfect infrastructures, where are they going? In addition to the original infra landing application PMF delivery implementation problem, a breakthrough point is the new concept of "taking advantage of AI Agent narratives".

Therefore, which chain can jump out to provide AI Agents with some communication protocols, DAs, application development, and other service capabilities is worth paying attention to. Of course, there are definitely chains that are purely taking advantage of the concept, but it is always better than chains that are complacent and rely on their old capital.

In any case, please stay tuned to the AI ​​Agent track to welcome the arrival of this epic bull market.