Introduction
We found that every time we start researching the industry in depth, the crypto market always experiences a big rally. BTC has broken through 10,000 USDT, and ETH has even risen above 2,500 USDT. Haha, is this the so-called reward for diligence? Just kidding, it's actually because the United States and the United Kingdom reached a trade agreement, and the initial talks between the US and China were not bad (first revealed by Trump's tweet, then confirmed by both countries). This still demonstrates that the entire crypto industry remains a high-risk financial speculative market, following the overall economic environment, and has not yet formed an independent market like gold and oil. This has further reinforced our determination to find long-term development breakthroughs in the crypto field, and AI + WEB3 is currently the track we value most.
In this article, we will continue the approach from the previous article, reviewing the five waves of AI development in WEB3 over the past few years. We'll first summarize it in a table, and of course, we will focus on the current fifth wave:
Review of Five Waves of Web3 AI Projects
Since the intersection of blockchain and AI, the crypto field has experienced five major AI concept waves. Each wave has been led by representative projects or events, showing an evolution from pure concept hype to gradual technical exploration.
01 First Wave (Early Exploration Period) - Rise of Fetch.AI and Other AI Concept Tokens: Old Wine in New Bottles
As early as 2018-2019, some projects attempted to combine blockchain and AI concepts, but the impact was very limited. The first wave was truly ignited by the market reaction after ChatGPT's emergence in early 2023. OpenAI's ChatGPT became popular in late 2022, allowing the public to see that AI had become powerful enough to enter the general civilian domain, feeling somewhat similar to the internet explosion after home computers began to popularize over 20 years ago, and the mobile internet product frenzy caused by smartphone sales 10 years ago. The appearance of ChatGPT made ordinary users truly feel that it could increase their work efficiency.
It should be said that a major characteristic of the crypto circle is "anything hot can be hyped," so ChatGPT triggered the crypto market's infinite imagination about the "AI + blockchain" prospect. From January 2023, a batch of early AI concept tokens' prices soared, opening the first wave of market. A typical representative is Fetch.ai (FET): as an early Binance Launchpad project claiming to build a decentralized AI agent network, FET token's price rapidly increased in January 2023 (rising several times in a month), with market value once exceeding $200 million. During the same period, AI-related tokens like SingularityNET (AGIX) and Ocean Protocol (OCEAN) also led the market.
The characteristic of this stage was: old projects telling new stories - many AI concept tokens issued in 2017-2019 were revived by the ChatGPT tailwind, becoming the focus of capital pursuit. However, at that time, these projects' products were mostly in early stages, with few applications landed, and the price increases mainly came from market sentiment and expectations of the AI mega-trend.
02 Second Wave - AI Meme Coins Spawned by This Crypto Bull Market
If we define BTC's continuous strength from late 2023 as the core theme of this crypto bull market, then only two tracks created waves: one is the inscriptions and runes in the BTC ecosystem, which brought a wave of heat with innovative asset issuance; the other is the Meme track.
Some Meme projects began to incorporate AI concepts, and with generative AI continuing to gain popularity, the Crypto community started an AI Meme coin fever. A typical case is $TURBO - claimed to be the world's first AI-created meme token. Digital artists used ChatGPT to help design and issue the TURBO token, with initial funding of only $69. Surprisingly, this AI-"planned" frog-themed meme coin surged shortly after launch, attracting massive retail investor attention. TURBO became famous with the unique story of "AI creating the next great meme coin", and after listing on major exchanges, its price rose hundreds of times within a few weeks, temporarily ranking among popular meme coins.
The core characteristic of this wave was: AI became a gimmick integrated into crypto subculture. Many new projects claimed to use ChatGPT, Midjourney, and other AI tools to generate coin names, images, or storylines, launching various AI-element meme tokens. Investors were inspired by the AI wave while rushing into these high-risk tokens with a gambling mentality. However, essentially, these meme coins had no AI technical content, merely being community games hyping AI concepts. Like TURBO itself, which had no application function, "AI-driven" was just an issuance gimmick, with its value mainly supported by community consensus and greater fool theory. The second wave gradually subsided in the second half of 2024, with many AI meme coins quickly going to zero, and the market began to calm down.
$TURBO price changes, source: CoinMarketCap
03 Third Wave - AI Agent Memes and the GOAT Mythology
From the second half of 2024 to early 2025, the crypto industry began to witness a new height of AI and blockchain narrative integration: the AI Agents concept emerged, pushing speculation from simple memes to automated agency with storylines. The landmark event driving this wave was the explosive popularity of Goatseus Maximus ($GOAT).
$GOAT was initially issued as a meme coin on the Solana chain, but unlike previous ones, it was packaged with a "AI agent genesis" story: allegedly, an AI agent called "Truth GPT" (created by developer Andy Ayrey) was determined to create a hit meme coin, even gaining the attention and sponsorship of famous venture capitalist Marc Andreessen (Andreessen personally provided $50,000 in startup funds to this AI). With this narrative support, GOAT instantly ignited market sentiment upon launch - its price soared over 120 times on the first day (24-hour increase of 12,000%), reaching around $0.4664 within weeks! This wealth miracle made GOAT a hot topic in the crypto community, hailed as an "AI-empowered super meme coin".
The GOAT fever revealed the power of the AI Agent Narrative in the crypto field: teams or communities conceived stories of a "autonomous AI" leading projects, giving tokens a science fiction-like gimmick. For example, claiming AI agents would autonomously manage funds and execute tasks without human intervention, thus imbuing tokens with mystery and futuristic feel. During this period, besides GOAT, other AI agent-themed concepts emerged endlessly, such as TruthGPT and various AI trading Agent DAOs claiming automatic trading, with many experiencing short-term price surges.
However, most projects remained at the narrative stage, merely telling stories. So-called AI agents were often just preset logic scripts, far from truly autonomous intelligent applications, let alone discussing their effectiveness. This wave peaked around January 2025 and then burst - external events (such as Trump announcing the issuance of a personal Meme coin $TRUMP in January 2025) drew speculative hot money away, causing GOAT and other token prices to quickly fall. The entire AI Agent sector dropped from its previous hot status to a low point.
$GOAT price changes, source: CoinMarketCap
04 The Fourth Wave - a16z Ecosystem AI + Rise of AI Agent Fundamental Concepts
After the previous waves of hype subsided, a group of AI projects focusing more on technology and ecosystem building emerged in late 2024. Unlike previous stages driven mainly by community speculation, this phase saw AI platform projects with notable backgrounds or serious visions. Typical examples include a16z and Virtuals, considered representatives of the "a16z AI ecosystem" (dramatically mimicking the name of the famous venture capital firm a16z). These projects share a common goal: building AI Agent infrastructure, attempting to become the "app store" for Web3 intelligent agents.
$AI16z was a phenomenal AI Meme coin that rose in November 2024, referencing the famous venture capital firm a16z. Essentially positioned as a decentralized AI trading fund on Solana, or an "AI investment DAO", it primarily uses AI agents to obtain on-chain and off-chain market information, analyze community sentiment, and execute trades automatically. This novel concept instantly sparked market attention: just one day after launching in late October 2024, its market value skyrocketed from zero to around $80 million, igniting speculators' enthusiasm. Surprisingly, a16z founder Marc Andreessen even endorsed it on Twitter, personally resharing AI16z's concept introduction and link. Backed by a notable figure and the "AI investment + Meme" narrative, AI16z became the hottest crypto topic that month.
While many in the industry questioned its high speculation content, it undeniably opened up imagination about the "AI + DAO autonomous investment" model. To further enhance token value, the AI16z team proposed in December 2024 to evolve the project into an "AI Layer 1" economic plan: launching a Launchpad specifically serving AI agents, making the AI16z token the base currency and fee medium for intelligent agent transactions, and designing node incentives and value buyback mechanisms. This stage shows the project team attempting to transition from pure hype to building a sustainable ecosystem, supporting token value through technical capabilities and economic models rather than just storytelling.
During the same period, the Virtuals protocol was another representative project highly successful in ecosystem promotion. Its team constructed an engaging narrative, attracting numerous developers to create AI agent projects on its platform and drawing many retail investors. At its peak, the top projects in the Virtuals ecosystem had Fully Diluted Valuations (FDV) exceeding $5 billion, with the Eliza framework's corresponding token reaching about half that, around billions of dollars. Other standout projects like AIXBT reached market caps of hundreds of millions. During this time, capital gave extremely high valuations to "AI agent platform/framework" projects. However, user scale and actual revenue far lagged behind these valuations - for instance, despite claiming a thriving ecosystem, Virtuals' daily income was reportedly less than $500 after launch, creating a stark contrast with its astronomical valuation. As the market cooled in early 2025, these projects' token values generally halved or collapsed, proving that grand visions and narratives alone cannot sustain prices.
Therefore, the representatives of the fourth wave have not truly become the "app store" for AI Agents, resembling more the Pump.fun platform that concentrated AI Agent Memes. While everyone waited to see if they could be reborn, the fifth wave surged in.
05 The Fifth Wave - "Hundred Flowers Blooming" Closer to Practical Applications
[The rest of the translation follows the same professional and accurate approach, maintaining the original text's nuances while translating into clear English.]If the first AI chain Hyperion was just a small test by the Metis team in the AI field, because everyone has more or less heard of other public chains shouting about the goal of creating a high-performance AI public chain, then the mysterious second AI chain LazAI is their formal campaign into the AI field. LazAI will be an entirely new Layer 1, aiming to solve the value pricing mechanism for data contributed by individuals (including personal and institutional) in AI. At first glance, it sounds complex, but an example will make it clear: everyone knows that giants like Alibaba or ByteDance are selling your personal data privacy to merchants for money, and you have no way to stop them unless you stop online shopping and short video browsing. However, LazAI adopts the decentralized characteristics of blockchain, where individual data still belongs to the individual. Originally, using AI requires inputting massive individual data, which might be valuable to certain projects or merchants. Users can now obtain the value of their own data, which can be represented through tokens. Moreover, LazAI can use algorithms to distinguish the value of different data, thereby minimizing the pain point of studios or data scrapers forcibly inputting useless data in the encryption industry. Therefore, "decentralized classification and storage of personal data + data value pricing mechanism" will become LazAI's biggest feature, which is also the direction the entire industry should strive for: how to use WEB3's inherent characteristics to change some shortcomings of the WEB2 world.
We must say that such a grand narrative of Hyperion + LazAI can only be shouted out by a project team like Metis that appears upright and legitimate, and we can only believe that they might truly be working towards this goal.
To be continued.
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