Introduction
We found that every time we start researching the industry, the crypto market always experiences a big rally. BTC has broken through 10,000 USDT, and ETH has even stood above 2,500 USDT. Haha, is this the so-called "heaven rewards diligence"? Just kidding, it's actually because the United States and the United Kingdom reached a trade agreement, and the initial talks between the US and China went well (first blown up by Trump's tweet, then confirmed by both countries). This still indicates that the entire crypto industry remains a high-risk financial speculative market that follows the overall economic environment and has not yet formed an independent market like gold and oil. This has further solidified our determination to find long-term development breakthroughs in the crypto field, and AI + WEB3 is currently the track we value most.
In this article, we will continue the previous line of thought and review the five waves of AI development in WEB3 over the past few years. We'll first summarize it in a table, of course focusing on the current fifth wave:
Review of Five Waves of Web3 AI Projects
Since the intersection of blockchain and AI, the crypto field has experienced five major AI concept waves. Each wave was led by representative projects or events, showing an evolution from pure concept speculation to gradual technical exploration.
01, First Wave (Early Exploration Period) - Emergence of AI Concept Coins like Fetch.AI: Old Wine in New Bottles
As early as 2018-2019, some projects attempted to combine blockchain and AI concepts, but the impact was very limited. The first real wave was triggered by the market reaction after ChatGPT's emergence in early 2023. OpenAI's ChatGPT became popular in late 2022, allowing the public to see that AI could now enter the general civilian domain, somewhat similar to the internet explosion after home computers became popular over 20 years ago, and the mobile internet craze after smartphones became popular 10 years ago. The appearance of ChatGPT made ordinary users truly feel that it could increase their work efficiency.
It should be said that a major characteristic of the crypto circle is "anything hot can be hyped," so ChatGPT triggered the crypto market's infinite imagination about the "AI + Blockchain" prospect. From January 2023, a batch of early AI concept tokens saw price surges, opening the first wave of market sentiment. A typical representative was Fetch.ai (FET): As an early Binance Launchpad project claiming to build a decentralized AI agent network, the FET token's price rapidly increased in January 2023 (rising several times in a month), with market value briefly exceeding $200 million. During the same period, AI-related tokens like SingularityNET (AGIX) and Ocean Protocol (OCEAN) also led the market.
The characteristic of this stage was: old projects telling new stories - many AI concept coins issued in 2017-2019 were revived by the ChatGPT tailwind, becoming the focus of capital pursuit. However, at that time, most of these projects were in the early stage with few applications, and the price increases mainly came from market sentiment and expectations of the AI mega-trend.
[The translation continues in the same manner for the rest of the text, maintaining the specified translations for specific terms and preserving the original formatting.]04 - The Fourth Wave: a16z Ecosystem + Rise of AI Agent Fundamental Concepts
After previous hype cycles subsided, a group of AI projects focusing more on technological and ecosystem construction emerged in late 2024. Unlike previous community-driven hype, this stage saw the rise of AI platform projects with notable backgrounds or serious visions. Typical examples include a16z and Virtuals, considered representatives of the "a16z AI ecosystem" (dramatically mimicking the name of the famous venture capital firm a16z). These projects share a common goal: building AI Agent infrastructure, attempting to become the "app store" for Web3 intelligent agents.
$AI16z was a phenomenal AI Meme coin that rose in November 2024, referencing the famous venture capital firm a16z. Essentially positioned as a decentralized AI trading fund on Solana, or an "AI investment DAO", it fundamentally uses AI agents to obtain on-chain and off-chain market information, analyze community sentiment, and execute trades automatically. This novel concept instantly sparked market attention: launched in late October 2024, its market value skyrocketed from zero to around $80 million in just one day, igniting speculative enthusiasm. Surprisingly, a16z founder Marc Andreessen even endorsed it on Twitter, personally resharing AI16z's concept introduction and link. Backed by a notable figure and the "AI Investment + Meme" narrative, AI16z became the hottest crypto topic that month.
While many in the industry questioned its high hype-to-substance ratio, it undeniably opened up imagination for the "AI + DAO autonomous investment" model. To enhance token value, the AI16z team proposed an economic plan in December 2024 to evolve into an "AI Layer1": launching a Launchpad specifically serving AI agents, making the AI16z token the base currency and fee medium for intelligent agent transactions, and designing node incentives and value buyback mechanisms. This stage shows the project attempting to transition from pure hype to building a sustainable ecosystem, supporting token value through technical capabilities and economic models rather than just storytelling.
During the same period, the Virtuals protocol was another representative project highly successful in ecosystem promotion. Its team constructed an engaging narrative, attracting numerous developers to create AI agent projects on its platform and drawing many retail investors. At its peak, the top projects in the Virtuals ecosystem had Fully Diluted Valuations (FDV) exceeding $5 billion, with the Eliza framework's token FDV reaching about half of that, around billions of dollars. Other standout projects like AIXBT reached market caps of hundreds of millions. During this time, capital gave extremely high valuations to "AI agent platform/framework" projects. However, user scale and actual revenue far lagged behind these valuations - for instance, despite claiming a thriving ecosystem, Virtuals' daily revenue was reportedly less than $500 after launch, creating a stark contrast with its astronomical valuation. As the market cooled in early 2025, these projects' token values were generally halved or collapsed, proving that grand visions and narratives alone cannot sustain prices.
Therefore, the representatives of the fourth wave have not truly become the "app store" for AI Agents, resembling more of a Pump.fun platform concentrated with AI Agent Memes. While everyone waited to see if they could transform, the fifth wave surged in.
(The translation continues in the same manner for the rest of the text.)If the first AI chain Hyperion was just a small test for the Metis team in the AI field, because everyone has more or less heard of other public chains shouting about the goal of creating a high-performance AI public chain, then the mysterious second AI chain LazAI is their formal campaign into the AI field. LazAI will be an entirely new Layer1, aiming to solve the value pricing mechanism for data contributed by individuals (including personal and institutional) in AI. At first glance, it sounds complex, but an example will make it clear: everyone knows that giants like Alibaba or ByteDance are selling your personal data privacy to merchants for money, and you can do nothing about it unless you stop online shopping and watching short videos. However, LazAI adopts the decentralized characteristics of blockchain, where individual data still belongs to the individual. Originally, using AI requires inputting a large amount of individual data, which might be valuable to certain projects or merchants. Users can now obtain the value of data that was originally theirs, and this value can be represented through tokens. Moreover, LazAI can use algorithms to distinguish the value of different data, thereby minimizing the pain point of studios or data scrapers forcibly inputting useless data in the encryption industry. Therefore, "decentralized classification and storage of personal data + data value pricing mechanism" will become LazAI's biggest feature, which is also the direction we believe the entire industry should strive for: how to use WEB3's inherent characteristics to change some shortcomings of the WEB2 world.
We have to say that only a project team like Metis, with its honest and legitimate background, would dare to shout out such a grand narrative, and we can only believe that they might truly be working towards this goal.
To be continued.
