a16z Ventures Takes the Lead in the AI Memetic Currency Craze
How is the cryptocurrency market performing recently?
In the recent development of the cryptocurrency market, $BTC experienced a short-term decline to $65,500 on October 26th, followed by a rebound to around $67,000 and continues to fluctuate. $SOL, after reaching a new high in the sol/eth exchange rate, has maintained its strength and is fluctuating around $170-175 USD.
Introduction – AI Guru Marc Andreessen’s New Masterpiece $DEGENAI, $AI16Z
Do you remember the $GOAT meme coin that went online and gained popularity on Binance within two weeks? One of the creators, Marc Andreessen (the one who sent $50,000 worth of BTC to AI), who is also a well-known co-founder of the venture capital firm a16z, has recently created another masterpiece:
The related tokens $degenai and $ai16z saw astonishing price surges on Sunday. The data at the time of writing is as follows:
$AI16Z: Surged more than 20 times in 12 hours, with a market value approaching $100 million, currently at $68 million, and a trading volume of $31 million.
$DEGENAI: Surged more than 10 times in 12 hours, with a market value of $19 million and a daily trading volume of $27 million.
Source: dexscreener
Further reading: The Birth of the First AI Millionaire: The Meme Coin $GOAT Achieved a 16,000% Increase in Just One Week, All Thanks to Two AI Agents?
Now let us understand the story behind it.
a16z’s Focus on the AI Track in this Bull Market Cycle, Starting with the $GOAT Meme Coin
We all know that the rise of AI is closely related to the promotion of a16z. a16z is an investment fund founded in 2009, co-founded by Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Chris Dixon (co-founding partner). In 2013, they launched a special fund called a16z Crypto for the cryptocurrency industry, and its influence remains significant to this day. During this bull market cycle, they have invested in many AI projects in the field, including PIN AI, Gensyn, and even announced plans in March this year to raise $6.9 billion to invest in a series of AI projects, including two funds dedicated to AI.
The Craze of the $GOAT Meme Coin
Marc Andreessen discovered the obsession with goat memes at Truth Terminal and sent them $50,000 worth of Bitcoin to help them escape. However, this did not stop Truth Terminal from continuously tweeting about the gospel of goats, which eventually led to the emergence of the $GOAT meme coin. Within a week, the market value of $GOAT reached a peak of $300 million.
The madness of $GOAT is not only reflected in its price, but also in its increased discussion in the market. According to AI engine Kaito’s tweet, $GOAT has the highest mindshare (8.53%) among memes and is the sixth highest currency in the overall market.
The market’s high discussion naturally caught the attention of leading exchanges. Binance, a leading cryptocurrency exchange, announced on October 25th that it will list the $GOAT token contract. This news further pushed up the price of GOAT to a high of $0.94, equivalent to a market value of $900 million, which is close to the token market values of large DeFi projects such as $LIDO (Lido Finance), $MKR (MakerDAO), and $ENA (Ethena).
How Did the $DEGENAI and $AI16Z Meme Coins Come About?
The Emergence of AI Version Marc
A Twitter account named Marc “AI”ndreessen created the ai16z fund through daos.fun. This fund will automatically invest the raised funds of 420.69 SOL into various meme coins through AI-powered chat conversations. It has the same personality as the original Marc Andreessen, and anyone can participate. Early investors who participate will also benefit from the future growth of the fund.
The $ai16z token is the tokenized asset of this fund. Investors holding $ai16z can recommend tokens to this AI Marc for reference in making purchases. Each user will have a trust value, which will vary depending on the amount of $ai16z tokens held.
The entire process is executed automatically, and the code has been open-sourced: https://github.com/ai16z/eliza/
Fund link: https://daos.fun/HeLp6NuQkmYB4pYWo2zYs22mESHXPQYzXbB8n4V98jwC
Currently, trading can only be done on the daos.fun website, but the founder is creating a way for the DAO to vote to move liquidity to a DEX that supports the token2022 standard and is supported by the jup aggregator.
The Real Marc Makes a Call on $ai16z
Since the real founder of a16z, Marc, retweeted the image below, a significant chemical reaction has occurred, and the price of $ai16z has surged more than 20 times in 12 hours, with a peak market value of nearly $100 million.
After the surge in the price of $ai16z, the developers who created the $ai16z token also created the $degenai token. The ai16z fund itself also holds a large amount of $degenai tokens. The $degenai token represents another AI agent, and its specific operation is simple chat and investment advice.
The management fee of the ai16z fund is 8% of AUM (Assets Under Management), 80% of which will be used to repurchase $degenai tokens, and 20% will be used to repurchase fund tokens $ai16z. In other words, the two tokens are linked.
This platform was also incubated by Pumpdotfun, a meme coin launchpad that has generated over $100 million in profits, and Moonshot, a meme coin trading platform. It can be said that AllianceDAO has dominated the Solana meme market, and now it has joined forces with investment institutions like a16z. The influence is enormous.
At the time of writing, the ai16z fund has not yet made any investments. Please note the risk of token retracement.
This AI frenzy was ignited by AI agents. What is an AI Agent?
An AI Agent refers to an AI application designed to address specific topics. It is a powerful technology that enables users to autonomously understand tasks, plan steps to complete tasks, execute all steps, handle errors and exceptions, and deliver results. Recently, popular AI agents include terminal of truths and Luna, the virtual live stream host on the Virtual platform.
The largest AI model repository, Huggingface, offers over 10,000 fine-tuned open-source LLMs to choose from. Each has different scales (larger models are more powerful but have higher operating costs), unique functionalities (such as uncensored, good at mathematics or reasoning, support for larger context lengths), domain expertise (such as medicine, programming languages), and styles (such as speaking like a teacher or pirate, responding with code).
Currently, although powerful LLMs can act as the brains of AI Agents, AI Agents still need to connect to external data sources, access domain-specific knowledge bases, store and parse content, and external execution tools in order to operate smoothly.
Source: (Translation provided by a professional translator authorized to repost from Daily Coin Research)
