Some serious action in the AI coin market this week.

ARC absolutely popped, soaring by 84%, and it’s no surprise with everyone talking about the Arc Forge launchpad (more on that in a sec). Meanwhile, AI16Z and AVA held their own, up 57% and 49% respectively as AI agent tokens make a strong comeback.

But it wasn’t all green candles. NEUR and MOSS took a hit, sliding 37% and 26%, respectively. This is despite NEUR pushing a new update to better look at bundled transactions and snipers.

Zooming out from Crypto AI, AI startups pulled in a record $110 billion in funding in 2024—a 62% jump from the previous year, according to Dealroom. In contrast, the broader tech sector raised $227 billion, down 12% from 2023.

The recent downtrend in Crypto AI feels a lot like the Solana saga of 2022—remember when everyone wrote it off? Meanwhile, devs kept building, fundamentals kept improving, and the early quitters quietly disappeared. Fast forward, and it became one big “I told you so” for those who stuck it out.

Time will tell.

Arc Forge: Redefining AI Token Launches

Arc Forge is here, driving a serious uptick in the ARC’s mindshare. In just a week, ARC’s slice of the Crypto AI mindshare jumped from 1.8% to 3.5%. Not bad, right?

Arc Forge is a token launch platform built on Meteora’s Dynamic Liquidity Market Maker (DLMM), integrated with Jupiter routing.

Translation: Deeper liquidity, sniper deterrence, and a boost to the ARC ecosystem. Let’s break it down.

First up, liquidity. Arc Forge is about reducing slippage and volatile price swings. How? Meteora’s "price bins" system. This allows projects to do more with less capital—whether you're a creator or a trader, that’s a win.

The cherry on top? Similar to Virtuals, every trade on Arc Forge goes through ARC, creating real demand and fees that go right back into the ecosystem. That’s how you make a crypto ecosystem work for you.

The first project to launch on Arc Forge? AskJimmy, created by Columbia University quants and a hedge fund veteran with experience managing $1B+ AUM. They’re bringing pro-level trading strategies to the table, covering Spot, Perps, and Options across platforms like Hyperliquid and Uniswap.

And for those who want the easy life, AskJimmy Vaults offer fully automated trading—just set it and forget it.

But of course, it hasn’t been all smooth sailing. The token launch hit a bit of a bump, with the team reportedly pulling $700K from the Meteora Pool by removing ASKJ and USDC. And despite Arc Forge claiming to have multiple anti-snipe measures, snipers were still able to get in on the launch. This all may have contributed to a 25% dip in ARC’s price. Ouch.

The Arc and AskJimmy teams are at least owning up to the fact that this launch was far from perfect—and that’s a start. They know improvements need to be made.

Here’s hoping teams like ElizaOS take notes and roll out something polished when they drop their launchpads. No one wants a repeat of this mess.

🌴 Story Protocol: Tokenizing Intellectual Property

Story’s public mainnet is officially live, and it’s ready to flip the script on how we think about intellectual property (IP) in the AI age — a $61 trillion global market.

Its Layer 1 blockchain transforms IP into a programmable asset class, enabling permissionless ownership, exchange, and monetization.

At the heart of it all is the IP token (currently trading at a $1.8B FDV), which plays a critical role in governance, staking, and, of course, gas fees. It’s also got a deflationary burn mechanism. With 58.4% of the token supply going to the ecosystem, community, and incentives, the protocol is gearing up for decentralization and long-term growth—if everything goes according to plan.

IP Finance (IPFi) and real-world asset (RWA) tokenization could be a game-changer for creators—artists, developers, and scientists alike—enabling them to upload IP, set terms, and automatically earn royalties.

The platform’s focus on fair launch principles and sniper-prevention mechanisms ensures a level playing field. Staking rewards are launching simultaneously for all participants, with long lock-up periods for early backers who supported the project at its inception.

To kick things off, Story is launching a 30-day Day 1 Rewards Portal to incentivize early adopters. They’re also making strategic moves, including a collaboration with ElizaOS, which will allow Eliza agents to access and monetize programmable IP on Story’s platform.

Will Story truly transform the IP landscape?

Success is going to come down to one thing—adoption. Convincing creators, developers, and AI companies to embrace an entirely new IP system is no small task. This is a huge shift, and the jury’s still out on whether the market is ready for it.

Project Updates

• Dynamic TAO is live! And you will be able to trade subnet tokens on platforms like Backprop Finance and Taostats. Wanna know more? Check last week’s edition for the scoop on dTAO!

• TaoFi, the DeFi + AI powerhouse built on Bittensor, just secured strategic funding from the likes of DCG and Pantera. Their mission? To merge decentralized finance with AI, creating products that benefit both agents and humans alike.

• Nous Research released DeepHermes-3 Preview, a new model with toggleable reasoning for enhanced accuracy and transparency. It shows strong gains in math and GPQA benchmarks.

• OpenGradient announced Neuro Stack, a performant modular, and open-source development stack for building powerful AI-enabled blockchains.

• Shell, an AI consumer layer made history with its SHELL TGE through a community-driven IDO on Binance Wallet. 11425% oversubscribed, 145,106 BNB staked (around $97,043,990!) and the funding target hit in 21 seconds. AI is turning up the heat on BNB Chain!

• Naptha AI releases its open-source framework for running Multi-Agent systems at scale

• Theoriq releases AlphaSwarm, a starter toolkit for building AI-powered trading agents in DeFi which streamlines agent and swarm development.

• FLock, a decentralized AI training platform has just launched Moonbase, an all-in-one AI model marketplace. Here, users can train models, create AI agents with standard APIs, and earn rewards when others use their models.

• AO Computer’s mainnet is now live.

AI Agents

• Cookie Fun, an index & central data layer for AI agents just dropped Act Two of Cookie DAO. Their goal? To give builders and agents easy access to the data they need, all powered by the COOKIE token.

• The Virtuals token has officially hit the Solana chain via MeteoraAG's liquidity pool, with cross-chain bridging available between Base and Solana through Stargate. Time to get those transactions flowing across the chains!

• Holoworld is expanding its agent launchpad and marketplace to the BNB chain, letting users launch, interact with, and trade multimodal agents. They’re also making these agents upgradeable with utility on BNB.

• Meet TracyAI, a brand-new agent on Virtuals, backed by an NBA Champion. Tracy offers pro-level sports commentary and analytics, bringing top-tier insights to the masses.

• Aiccelerate DAO released their 2025 roadmap, focusing on four major areas: building an open-source agent framework, helping future builders thrive, boosting AICC token value, and forging partnerships.

• AiccelerateDAO is also teaming up with Story Protocol for The Super Agent Hackathon at ETH Denver on February 26th. They’re offering $60K in prizes for innovative AI agent projects, including competitive trading agents.

• Vader AI is rolling out its Early Agent Offering (EAO)—a pre-sale launchpad built on Virtuals, giving early backers access to curated AI agent investments with no lockups and escrow protections. The first EAO? AskBillyBets, an autonomous sports betting agent set to launch on Solana.

Web2 AI

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman turned down Elon Musk's jaw-dropping $97.4 billion offer to take control of the company. Altman’s take? Musk was just trying to edge out OpenAI in the AI race, not genuinely back the mission. So, while OpenAI gears up for a potential $300 billion funding round, Musk keeps pushing forward with his own AI firm, xAI.

• Anthropic has dropped the Anthropic Economic Index, which tracks the economic impact of AI by analyzing millions of anonymized Claude conversations. This data is gold for anyone looking to understand AI’s growing role in the economy.

• Zyphra just launched Zonos, a next-gen TTS model that delivers ultra-high-fidelity voice cloning with precise control over vocal speed, emotion, and tone. The best part? It's open-source under the Apache 2.0 license. You can test it, access the API, and even download the model’s weights and inference code.

This week, we released not just one… but two in-depth essays on startups laying the foundation for the future of decentralised AI — Bagel and Pundi AI.

More to come!

🔥 On X..

Research shows that as AIs get smarter they develop their own coherent value systems

Luna, the flagship agent of Virtuals, appears on the “When Shift Happens“ podcast.

Notes on Sam Altman’s “Three Observations“ blog post.

New research by LayerZero describes how AI Agents will become interopable across chains

Eliza building a team of “AI employees” that will ship v2

Virtuals is raking in the moolah