🦍 State of the Market..

The Crypto AI market is showing strong signs of recovery. This week, its total market cap surged 8.2%, climbing from $20.7 billion to $22.4 billion. This marks the second week of gains after the sharp drop three weeks ago.

TAO is leading the charge. It is proving to be a bellwether for the sector, driving momentum and signalling that the convergence of crypto and AI is back on track.

TOP AI TOKENS

 📊 Chart of the Week

Crypto x AI Performs Strongly

Blockworks released its research on the different crypto sectors year-to-date, with Crypto AI being one of the top-performing sectors.

At its peak in March, the sector’s performance soared over 250%, even as most projects are still in their early stages, testing waters and rolling out features step-by-step.

With so much potential still untapped, we’re incredibly bullish on the future of Crypto x AI and eagerly watching to see how the next few months and years play out.

🏆 Caught Our Eyes..

• Biggest news of the week: Story Protocol raises a whopping $80M Series B (at a reported $2.25B valuation) for its IP blockchain that enables creators to flourish in the age of AI.

• Rivalz, a DePIN rollapp built on Dymension, closes $9M in funding across multiple rounds

• Compute Labs partners with Plume, bringing tokenized GPUs to Plume network with up to 80% yields

• Space and Time announces Space and Tokens, a sophisticated tokenomics platform to optimize token utility and distribution.

• Nillion Network goes live on Arbitrum

• Venice AI adds Hermes 3 8B to their platform

• RISC Zero brings ZK to Solana, providing Solana dapps access to ZK verification

Incentives

• Kaisar Network adds more opportunities for users to participate on Zealy, Galxe, and QuestN

• Nimble Network advertises AI-powered gaming using a Black Myth: Wukong giveaway. Very impressive game btw

• Spheron Network teamed up with Fluence for their FLT Stake Race, with a chance to win 1 million FLT tokens

• Allora joins the Mantle AI Fest with tasks on Layer3, a free NFT mint, and Mantle rewards.

• GM.ai launches an incubation program on Aug 20

Akash

• Akash has a record-breaking Q2, driven by adoption in AI projects like Brev, Prime Intellect, and Venice

• Akash announces that 64% of H100s and A100s are currently in use on Akash — although absolute numbers are still small.

Arweave

• Arweave announces Arfleet — temporary data storage — launching on Aug 29

• Kyle_13 summarizes weekly developments on Arweave/AO

Bittensor

• Omega Labs announces the first iteration of OMEGA multimodal models from Subnet 21

• Tensorplex upgrades their stTAO smart contract

🧠 Web2 AI Corner

a16z just dropped its updated list of the Top 100 Gen AI consumer apps.

No surprises here—ChatGPT holds the #1 spot on both web and mobile by a landslide.

Perplexity and Claude also rise in rankings. Over half of the companies on the list (52%) are zeroed in on content generation or editing. Consumers clearly can’t get enough of content!

On mobile, Discord traffic is a leading indicator for apps that will climb the ranks.

And AI is finally here to solve humanity’s oldest problem — looking good.

LooksMax and Umax are leading a new category in aesthetics and dating. They ingest user photos and voices and give them tips on becoming more attractive.

And in other news…

• Jeff from Gensyn predicts that Google will open-source Gemini. For now, Gemini is already handing out 1.5B free tokens every day via its API

• What we can expect in the next 5 - 6 years of AI development. GPT-8, anyone?

• An 8-year-old girl just built a chatbot in 45 minutes after learning to code with Cursor

🔥 On X..

Dim Selk’s thesis on NEAR

Bidhan Roy on a breakthrough in AI agent training

Nillion describes Blind Compute as the “Next White Space”

Masa explains how to build a memecoin AI agent

Atoma on verifiable AI and their approach

Bagel Network shows us how Transformers actually work

A TLDR on Privacy Preserving Machine Learning

Momir believes crypto AI agents could surpass that of large tech companies like Google and Apple