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A month ago, Solana’s onchain demand metrics spiked to record highs after a viral AI meme coin set the trading world ablaze with new interest in AI crypto integrations. The joke at the time was that a strange AI chatbot had overshadowed the launch of Donald Trump’s World Liberty Financial crypto tokens.
That state of affairs would not last long, however, as Trump’s victory in the presidential election sent the crypto markets soaring and overshadowed the resurgent interest in AI crypto. Still, the AI projects highlighted and spotlighted at October’s rally have continued apace, even if their star now shines a little less brightly.
There’s still the goat-themed token that started it all, whose chatbot occasionally posts about tokens on However, that hasn’t stopped the coin from soaring to over $1.1 billion in market cap, leaving the AI bot’s public wallet with almost half a billion worth of crypto.
Truth_terminal created a wave of interest around AI agents that communicate with humans to perform some kind of blockchain action.
Virtuals Protocol is one such project at the base layer-2. “Pump dot fun for AI agents” allows users to purchase tokens tied to autonomous AI agents in the hope that the AI bots will attract more investment as they do more interesting things. The most popular Virtuals agent has reached a market cap of $115 million, up 106% in the past 24 hours, as much of the Ethereum community gathers for Devcon in Thailand.
But memecoins are the center of the late AI hype, and Solana is the center of memecoins. A new project in this area is ai16z, a group with an AI bot that invests in memecoins based on the recommendations of its members. The project emerged from daos.fun, a new crowdfunding mechanism for DAOs on Solana, founded at Alliance DAO. Ai16z’s AI version of Marc Andreessen also attracted a lot of attention on social media from the real version of the a16z boss, who is apparently becoming a key part of launching a crypto AI project.
There are also crypto AI outfits with bigger ambitions. This week I spoke with Ryan Trattner from the DAIN protocol, a network for onchain AI apps and bots. Trattner, who was previously a contractor at the nonprofit Solana University, thinks the future will consist of many AI agents doing different things, so he’s helping build DAIN to accommodate them all. He showed me how an AI agent on the network could order a Chick-Fil-A sandwich and how another could trade bitcoin based on Polymarket’s presidential election odds.
Trattner said DAIN could let him “order food in the same [interface] where I trade my memecoins.” That doesn’t seem like the most requested use of AI to me, but then again, with Bitcoin shooting above $90,000, everything seems to be on the table at this point.
So while the headlines and X-feeds have cooled on AI crypto integrations for now, those AI crypto startups don’t seem to be losing any steam.