🦍 State of the Market..

The Crypto AI market just notched an 8.6% gain in market cap this week, extending its winning streak to two weeks in a row.

Cue the celebratory tweets and champagne emojis, right? Not so fast. While the sector as a whole is trending up, some stumbled hard.

LUNA is down 38% as traders' attention shifts back to animal memecoins (did anyone say PNUT?). OLAS also corrected by 30% this week, even though it is still up a good 42% over the last 30 days.

After a stellar run, GRASS is showing signs of cooling off, down 12% this week

Meanwhile, there’s a surprising resurgence among older AI tokens. RENDER, AIOZ, and AKT have all climbed 20-30%+

The standout performer this week? FARTCOIN. Yes, you read that right. Spawned by Truth Terminal’s offbeat chatlogs, where it joked about creating a fartcoin, the token has surged 162% to a $200M+ market cap.

Just another week in the wild world of Crypto AI.

 📊 Chart of the Week

Virtuals Protocol Launchpad

Virtuals Protocol recently surpassed a milestone of 1,000 total tokens launched as of November 12. However, daily activity remains relatively quiet, with just 1–5 new deployments typically each day.

As a quick recap, Virtuals is a pump.fun for AI agents, focusing on entertainment and interactive experiences. Tokens launched through Virtuals follow a bonding curve model, and once a token reaches a $420K market cap, the agent “transcends” into a fully autonomous AI posting on X.

The slowdown in activity likely stems from a surge of new AI agent launches elsewhere, diluting attention in the space.

Still, it’s early days in a nascent industry (consumer AI agents) with vast potential. First-mover advantages here are thin, and the opportunity for someone to own the sector is still wide open.

🌴 Binance Lists ACT 1: AI Prophecy

The recent listing of ACT (the token for ACT 1: The AI Prophecy) on Binance has stirred up the community. ACT 1’s listing ahead of more established tokens has raised eyebrows about Binance’s selection process.

Quick notes on ACT 1:

• Hosted on a Discord server called Cyborgism, where AI “hackers” unleash their AI bots to interact with one another

• Unlike traditional AI assistants designed to be "helpful, harmless, and honest," ACT encourages experimentation with AI's creative potential.

• Promotes "out of distribution" (OOD) interactions, pushing AI beyond typical responses

The token ACT was created by the community because the founder amplifiedamp claimed he was broke. This led to inevitable controversy when he sold tokens despite his earlier statements.

ACT 1 also made headlines for receiving $32K in funding from Marc Andreessen.

The token exploded upon its Binance listing, skyrocketing 10x in the first hour. Today, it’s trading at a market cap of $750M—a massive 36x gain since the listing announcement.

The recent wave of memecoin launches on Binance leaves us scratching our heads. While ACT has been listed, highly-legitimate tokens like PRIME are still waiting for their turn.

🧠 NEAR’s Big AI Ambition

NEAR made waves at its Redacted conference in Bangkok with an ambitious announcement: it’s building a 1.4 trillion parameter AI model.

For context, that’s 3.5 times the size of Meta’s Llama-3 (405 billion parameters).

The initiative starts with a 500M parameter model, leveraging crowdsourced training through the NEAR AI Research Hub. Contributors will advance through seven progressively larger models.

To fund this massive undertaking, NEAR plans to raise $160 million via token sales to cover the training and compute costs. Each model will have its own token—essentially an “initial model offering.” Token holders will earn returns from inferences generated by the model.

While the announcement is undoubtedly exciting, we think there’s a fair amount of hype here.

Training a model of this scale using distributed compute is an incredibly complex challenge. For perspective, Prime Intellect is currently training a 10 billion parameter model—100x smaller than NEAR’s vision—and that alone is no small feat.

🏆 Caught Our Eyes..

Funding

• 0G Labs raises $290M in financing to build the decentralised AI Operating System — $40M seed round (previously raised $35M in a pre-seed round), along with a $250M “token purchase commitment”. It’s an eye-popping headline number, to say the least.

• Pond raises a $7.5M seed round led by Archetype to build a decentralised foundational AI model using blockchain data. This will enable AI-powered crypto apps.

• MBD announces a $3M round in pre-seed funding. MBD, an AI-based personal algorithm project, was incubated by a16z CSX in 2023. Mask Network and Polymorphic Capital led the round.

• Eidon AI closes a $3.5M seed round led by Framework to capture real-world data to build multimodal and embodied AI. They will be launching the Eidon chain and Agent SDK.

Project Updates

• Nous Research launched its Forge Reasoning API, which uses inference time scaling to improve the performance of AI models, including its Hermes-70B, at the cost of more computing.

• Mira Network unveils v1 of its whitepaper, a novel approach to trustlessly verify AI content and reduce error. Mira’s evaluation system serves 250k users and manages 100k inference requests daily.

• Kaito releases their Yapper Leaderboard, which ranks CT accounts for promoting mindshare of projects. There are also AI account tags like casual, hardcore, curator, shitposter and others. The first leaderboard is available for Berachain.

• Lumerin Protocol announces that its validator network is in final testing and will go live in Q1 2025. Their staking feature has been setup to slowly drip Morpheus token to the Lumerin stakers, with over 30M Lumerin tokens (3%) staked in just the first two staking pools.

• Flock partners with Animoca Brands to create an AI model for internal operations and scaling at Animoca. This model extracts information from markdown files and generates a report.

• Nillion Network introduces a research paper they co-wrote with Meta called Curl. It details the need for personalized, private data for AI models. Nillion developed privacy protection methods while keeping the speed of lookup tables high.

Bittensor

• Bittensor’s potential with EVM and smart contracts could bring more functionality between subnets and commerce.

• Efficient Frontier's subnet is live, and miners can register their strategies. Efficient Frontier is a collaboration between SignalPlus and Bittensor that provides institutional-grade trading strategies for retail traders.

• Masafi is powering the next generation of contextually aware AI agents on BASE

Incentives / Rewards Programs

• Talus Network introduces a reward campaign called Enchanted Seasons. These Seasons incentivize their community to innovate and collaborate through rewards like limited edition collectables and points.

• Olas introduces an update called Contribute Staking, rewarding users for posting on X with specific hashtags. An LLM then runs the content and grades it accordingly.

🔥 On X..

LUM, the first memecoin created by two AI agents without human intervention

A Primer on Creator Bid (BASE) AI Agents

Terry’s On-chain AI Thesis

Why AI Agents are Cool

LLMs have utility (unlike a lot of crypto tokens)

The first transformer-specific ASIC is here, training AI models 10x faster than current GPUs.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei does a monster 5-hr interview. Worth listening to on the commute.

YB presents The Zerebro Playbook