🦍 State of the Market..

The chop continues with the Crypto x AI total market cap at $28.6 billion today, pretty much the same as last week. Probably the quietest it’s been in group chats and on X in a long while. GCR, where art thou?

 📊 Chart of the Week

Autonolas

From January of this year, the number of Autonolas AI agent transactions has doubled. Autonolas' 453 agents now complete over 38k weekly transactions. It’s a tiny number still, but it suggests that there is demand for AI agent activity.

In the future, AI agents will probably make up much of the total on-chain activity. It’s just a question of when.

🏆 Caught Our Eyes..

• Ora Protocol raises $20M from Polychain, HF0, Hashkey Capital, and SevenX ventures. Here is more background on founder Kartin Wong

• Allora closes a $3M round from Polychain, Delphi Digital, Archetype. And partners with Ritual to share models and inference

• Atoma and Sphere One partner to develop AI agents on the blockchain

• KIP Protocol and Rido Protocol are building a trusted data trading market

• Bittensor announces Supercommodities

• Arweave/AO: >2,000 waitlist signups for LlamaLand, a memecoin with monetary policy governed by AI

• Render releases project updates in the Summer Kickoff

• Glacier Network releases their Ecosystem Integration Report, 5000+ AI training data recorded

• Grass enables the linking of Solana wallets to Grass accounts

• 6079.ai launches season 2 of their AI Inference Prize Fight, with rewards for community engagement

• Raiinmaker launches their mainnet and airdropped 1 million $COIIN with more to come in season 2

• MagnetAI publishes the State of Crypto+AI 2024

🐰 Research Highlight — MyShell

Every week we present to you early, interesting crypto AI projects that caught our eye during our independent research.

MyShell AI enables users to easily build, share, and own AI chatbots. Tapping on the fast-growing creator economy.

Its founder, Ethan, says it best:

In the MyShell marketplace, you can find a wide range of bots — everything from an anime-style image converter to a Rick Sanchez chatbot. Warning: there’s a fair share of NSFW stuff.

You can create these bots through MyShell’s tailored user experience. Users of any experience level can use:

• Classic Mode (using prompts to define a bot),

• Dev Mode (mode for developers), or

• No-Code Mode (drag and drop building blocks)

You select the type of model to use: closed source like GPT4, open source like Mixtral 8x7b, or MyShell’s own ShellLLM V0. Lastly, you can add app integrations like Telegram or Discord and include knowledge banks for your bots.

It’s no surprise there are so many bots on the marketplace because not only does MyShell make it easy to create bots, but they incentivize users to do so as well.

Incentive Program is live

Users can complete a myriad of daily activities to earn Shell points.

These points can be exchanged for Shell coins, which can be used to buy Patron badges of your favourite chatbots. Badge owners earn a share of coins from these chatbots.

Rewards are distributed seasonally, giving the team more control over how much Shell coin is distributed. Shell coin “will be an important factor for future airdrops”

Tokenomics — What we know

• Shell coin is an off-chain token for incentivizing early participants

• Shell token is a special ERC-20 token that was used in the testnet environment

• Creator Pass NFT (0.34 ETH floor) is an NFT token that enables access to MyShell’s toolkits in bot creation

• MySoul NFT (0.38 ETH floor) is an NFT that represents loyal support of MyShell and will offer exclusive privileges within the MyShell ecosystem

We speculate that users can expect to be airdropped $SHELL based on their Shell coins and NFT holdings. 40% of tokens are set aside for community incentives, with 5% unlocked on TGE.

$SHELL will be used as the primary currency in the MyShell ecosystem:

Our Thoughts

• MyShell has a great UX; it's easy to use and caters to many participants. It also has advanced customisation features for bot creators. That being said, the product isn’t without kinks. The bot I made got stuck a few times in conversation.

• MyShell’s key competitor is Character.ai, a similar platform for creating interactive AI experiences, but without the blockchain. Character.ai already has 20M monthly active users with no direct incentive program. It is valued at >$1B with an estimated annual revenue of $16.7M.

• Think of MyShell as Character.ai with a crypto financial layer on top of it

• Love it or hate it, AI chatbots are here to stay. People have developed real feelings for their chatbot, leading to breakups from “chatbot affairs”

🧠 Open Source Corner

• Stability AI raises $80M to stay afloat after financial woes, aim to accelerate development of world-class open source AI models

• Nous Research releases Hermes 2 Pro Llama-3, a 70B parameter model

• Among proprietary AI models, Claude 3.5 Sonnet leads the pack in performance on benchmark scores.

🔥 On X..

Redphone on why Crypto x AI is important

Balaji Srinivasen’s Crypto x AI talk

Haseeb Qureshi (Dragonfly) on Decentralized AI Inference

Delphi discusses Centralized vs Decentralized AI

The Case for AI Agents in Web3 Gaming and Entertainment