A picture is worth a thousand words — just look at the mindshare AI is commanding compared to every other sectors this week. 🤯

If you’ve been waiting for an “alt season” sign, this is it! The Crypto AI market cap surged to $49B, up 11.1% from last week. While we usually highlight the top 5, look at how many tokens have doubled in value this week.

It’s not every week you see 10x gains, but NOVA, MOSS, and SWARMS have pulled it off, going from tiny caps to small caps in just seven days. For context, SWARMS and MOSS traded at a humble $1M–$2M market cap last week.

Most of these tokens generate no revenue; this screams froth in the markets. So be cautious—crypto moves fast, and things can drop as quickly as they rise, especially when liquidity dries up.

That said, not everyone came out on top. VANA and SNS saw drawdowns of 19% and 8%, respectively. Still, the fact that only a few tokens experienced a drop of 5% or more underscores the incredible momentum currently.

The AI agent sector has been soaking up the spotlight. Hype is a fickle friend. Over the next few weeks, we might see the market shift focus back to fundamental plays—tokens with real utility and revenue potential.

Enjoy the ride my friends—but don’t forget your parachute.

 📊 Chart of the Week

AI Agent Framework Recommendation Survey

Superoo7 surveyed over 70 AI agent builders, and while the sample size is small, the results are telling: 57.1% identified as beginners, underscoring how early we are in this space.

The trend continues, with 48.6% of builders favouring no-code tools and environments. This signals massive growth potential for no-code AI agent platforms, where the competition is just heating up.

On the blockchain front, EVM (mostly Base) still reigns supreme as the preferred stack, but Solana is quickly gaining momentum. The race for innovation is on, and it’s anyone’s game! 🚀

🌴 Solana AI Hackathon

The 1st ever Solana AI Hackathon concluded with a whopping 400+ submissions! Our very own Josh dove in and found some cool projects he wanted to shout out.

NEUR is an AI tool designed to be the intelligent copilot for Solana, offering data-driven insights on tokens and integrating with Solana protocols like Jupiter. Think of it as a ChatGPT for doing due diligence on new Solana tokens—much needed for us to stay sane, given how many new tokens launch daily. It costs 1 SOL to join the early access program. The project’s token trades at a ~$40M market cap.

JailBreakMe is akin to FAI (Freysa AI) on Base, rewarding users for rigorously testing and jailbreaking AI models. A portion of each prize pool is used for JAIL token buybacks from the market. Fun fact: the top user has earned $90K just by participating—maybe it’s time to quit our jobs! 😅 JAIL is currently trading at ~$9M market cap.

Akasha protocol lets users create AI agents for game, business, and community interactions. Highlights include an immersive shopping experience with personalized offers in 3D digital worlds powered by partnerships with Amazon Shopping and Solana Labs. It is part of the Bloomverse ecosystem, which creates mini-games for brands. AKA is trading at a ~$29M market cap

0xJeff also talked about several hackathon projects he liked:

🏆 Caught Our Eyes..

Year in Review / 2025 Roadmap

• ExoLabs’ 2024 wrapped. They launched a GitHub repo that hit #1 trending in the world with 18K stars. Amazing stuff.

• Phala Network shares its year in review: a TEE that combines software- and hardware-based trusted execution environments.

• Morpheus: Why Morpheus matters

• Top Hat: The hat stays on

• Peaq Network’s 2025 roadmap

Project Updates

• Nillion, a privacy-preserving protocol and humanity’s “first blind computer”, announces its mainnet launch in February 2025.

• Zerebro is building Zentients.xyz, a consumer-facing launchpad for agents. Users will be able to launch agents while funnelling value back to Zerebro.

• 0G Labs proposes a new NFT standard for AI Agents, ERC-7844, offering a secure method to transfer both ownership and private metadata. This could pave the way for a decentralized marketplace for trading AI agents, akin to OpenSea.

• FLock.IO, a private AI training platform. reveals its tokenomics and airdrop details ahead of the TGE, with 66.7% of tokens allocated to the community and ecosystem.

• Lush AI, a launchpad for good-looking and sexy influencers, launches the Lush Exchange alongside Kookie, a blonde girl influencer.

• Holoworld AI teases the launch of their AI agent launchpad. It aims to be the premiere AI agent launchpad with no-code functionality, multimodality, and many more features.

• Aethir unveils the Aethir Edge device, enabling users to share high-performance computing power and earn rewards, promoting a decentralized computing future.

Incentives / Rewards Programs

• Spheron Network’s payout for contributors increased to 255M FN Points, a 29% increase this week.

Bittensor

• A year in review for Bittensor: Dataverse unlocks the most powerful scraper in the world, Nextplace beats Zillow, and more.

• EVM integration is now live, allowing Bitttensor incentives to be connected directly into contract code.

• Bittensor’s first Layer 2, developed by Palaidn, is launching soon.

👀 In Case You Missed It

We’re just getting started. Here’s a quick glimpse of what you can expect from us at Chain of Thought in 2025:

🔥 On X..

The Fat Protocol Thesis Reborn

An overview of 10+ AI x Crypto frameworks

Decentralized compute as a resurgent L1 trade?

TEE + Web3: Do you know what you trust in?

ARTICLE: So, what’s the deal with TEE and AI agents?

EXO introduces private web search with local LLMs on your device

The winning AI agent platform will be the one with the most developer functionality.

Meta proves the utility of memory layers (built into the model, compared to RAG which relies on an external knowledge base)