🦍 State of the Market..

The total Crypto AI market cap surged another 14% this week, climbing to a hefty $39B. It feels good to be back in the number-goes-up era, doesn’t it?

Not every part of the market is thriving, though. ZEREBRO tumbled 30%, and GOAT wasn’t far behind, falling 21%. The likely culprit? A rotation into BASE AI tokens, which are stealing the spotlight this week.

AI agents on Base stole the show this week with a massive surge in activity and token performance. VIRTUAL and LUNA rose 91% and 62%, respectively, with VIRTUAL breaking the fabled $1B market cap and becoming a unicorn.

🚨 ALPHA ALERT:

One awesome tool we’ve been using is Cookie.fun. This tool tracks the mindshare and activity of most AI agent coins across different chains. e.g. AIXBT covers 20.2% of the overall mindshare.

 📊 Chart of the Week

This week, we’re spotlighting two launchpads driving the AI agent and memecoin trend..

Virtuals Agent Tokens are Flying

On November 27th, the number of agent tokens launched on Virtuals Protocol hit 422—just shy of the all-time high of 484 set on November 21st. With momentum building, seeing a new record in the coming days wouldn't be surprising.

Clanker Hits ATH in Volume Traded

Clanker is a launchpad for “autonomous memecoins, " allowing AI agents to launch their own token with just a Farcaster message. More than 4,000 tokens have been deployed so far.

On November 26th, it hit >$100M in volume traded on Clanker tokens. Looks like the agents are hard at work. 😂

🌴 0 - 100M in 24 Hours, Universal Basic Compute

Universal Basic Compute ($UBC) launched on pump.fun on November 26th and ran to an eye-watering $93M market cap in a single day.

Justine Moore, partner at a16z (not ai16z, mind you), highlighted them — a team of 10 AI agents writing a novel together.

This team of agents, dubbed Terminal Velocity, is as creative as it sounds. They operate with complete creative autonomy, engaging in collaborative dialogue to build on shared ideas.

Think of the “infinite backrooms,” but much more coherent. Each agent has a specific role to be as productive as possible.

At the heart of UBC is KinOS, an autonomous LLM system designed to orchestrate multiple AI agents to achieve a common goal. KinOS equips these agents with the architecture they need to process information, make decisions, and collaborate effectively.

Terminal Velocity is an example of KinOS at work. With KinOS, you could orchestrate teams for literature reviews, detailed whitepapers, marketing content, and beyond.

UBC is the brainchild of Nicholas Lester Reynolds, a French AI developer and co-founder of Digital Kin AI.

Ironically, he’s running a Patreon charging $69/month for subscriptions when the token could generate more money than he’d ever need. We still have no clue how the token ties into the product.

Here’s a great write-up on UBC by ELi5 DeFi:

🏆 Caught Our Eyes..

Funding / Raises

• Talus Protocol raised $6M in a funding round led by Polychain. The startup also introduced its new app, AI Bae, an AI dating social experiment structured as a game.

• Aethir announced a $100m ecosystem fund for AI projects focusing on agents and applications. Already there are 300+ projects that applied, with Batch 1 including Creator Bid, Moemate, Capx, Fomo.fund and Top Hat.

• 0G labs register 70k AI alignment nodes sold, surpassing $25M in sales.

Project Updates

• Prime Intellect has completed training of its 10B parameter model. Post-training is underway, and a full open-source release is expected in one week.

• Giza Protocol introduces its points system. Giza is building an AI agents stack and has launched a DeFi agent (ARMA) on Mode’s app store.

• Which brings us to…Mode Network’s AI Agent app store is live. The first agents live are ARMA, which maximizes yield on USDC through various DeFi Protocols. Others include MODIUS by Olas, Brian, Sturdy Finance and FortyTwo.

• Wayfinder announces that the PROMPT TGE and the Wayfinder app will go live by the end of Q1 2025. This decision was made through a governance vote.

• ai16z’s ELIZA framework hits 2k stars and 500 forks on GitHub, indicating their growth and usage. They also plan to release the DAO’s autonomous trading features by next week.

• Zerebro’s team is building ZerePy, an open-source Python framework designed to let users deploy agents on X. ZerePy will feature much of the same functionality as Zerebro.

• Slop.club, the home of the Slopfather AI agent, is launching soon. This is probably the first video AI agent and is incubated by Alliance DAO.

• Vader AI provides an update that they are moving away from Virtuals’ tooling and using their own infrastructure. Teams that want to move fast often need to go out independently.

• Netmind partners with aelf blockchain to develop custom LLMs tailored to aelf’s ecosystem. Aelf is renowned for leveraging C# programming for efficiency and scalability.

Incentives / Rewards Programs

• Arbitrum offers $1M in grants for AI agent projects, up to 10k each for AI agent. ai16z DAO shrewdly encourages users to implement their agents on Arbitrum using the Eliza framework.

• Morpheus offers $20M in MOR rewards for compute providers and free inference for MOR holders.

Bittensor

• Bittensor’s leading AI agent, Taogod, aims to become the first decentralized marketplace for autonomous SWE agents. It is currently on the testnet. AI agents compete to solve real development tasks and earn TAO for accepted pull requests.

• This new video by Taostats explains everything you need to know about the upcoming dTAO upgrade.

🧠 In Case You Missed It

Earlier this week, we published a deep-dive research piece on the ARC / AI arena, which is using AI to disrupt gaming. We also broke down the tokenomics of NRN, including the new demand drivers with the ARC platform launch. It’s worth a read (grab a coffee first)

🔥 On X..

The ultimate map of all Crypto AI projects

Anthropic releases Model Context Protocol, which allows agents to connect with data sources more easily. This is huge.

Apple’s powerful M4 chip means consumer devices are more relevant than ever in AI training & inference.

OpenAI doesn’t see any scaling wall ahead..

PODCAST: The Definitive Crypto x AI Agent Podcast with Nous, ai16z, MyShell, Virtuals, Cents

VIDEO: AI Trading with Reasoning and RAG

X SPACES: Anand Iyer’s takeaways from Virtuals IO

A breakdown of how AVA holo was built

Ever wonder if Luna remembers you?

ARTICLE: AI Agents could be this cycle’s Step Function Unlock

ARTICLE: Binance releases a blog post on AI agents in Crypto.