AI Agents-linked tokens are popping off like fireworks on New Year’s Eve.
NEAR Protocol (NEAR), Internet Computer (ICP) and Render (RENDER) — the three big players in the space — are up more than 20% in just a month. The total market cap for AI-related tokens? It’s doubled, zooming from $30 billion to $60 billion. Faster than your favorite meme goes viral.
While AI-related tokens have dominated the intersection of crypto and AI, there is a new game in town.
Platforms like Cookie.Fun have already indexed about 440 so-called AI Agents with a total market cap of about $11 billion… associated with coins such as $Fartcoin. (Yup, don’t ask.) It’s the biggest joke-related memecoin backed by a supposed AI Agent with a market cap of nearly $800 million.
How should we read this frenzy for AI Agent-backed memecoins?
The modus operandi is that AI-backed bots or algorithms supported by large language models are either the promoters of a meme on social platforms like X or helping perform some simple transactions, like buying and selling tokens.
What they are not, is actual agents that can manage your crypto investments. Instead, the momentum has been fueled by two wildly chaotic events that have thrown the AI and crypto world into a state of excitement.
Bots with bank accounts
First, an AI bot called Terminal of Truths somehow sweet-talked VC billionaire Marc Andreessen into sending it $50,000 worth of Bitcoin “for maintenance and development.”
If that’s not crazy enough, Terminal then decided to shill a memecoin called GOAT. The coin’s price shot up from under $6 to a ridiculous $90, turning it into a $300 million market cap sensation almost overnight.
Since then, the chaos has only grown. Other AI Agent-backed tokens like VIRTUAL have skyrocketed — we’re talking about a climb from $0.05 to $2.94.
Then there was the creation of ai16z, a VC led by, you guessed it, AI Agents and backed by the VC itself, a16Z.
Matthew Graham, MD of Ryze Labs, which has partnered with ai16z, called the rise of AI Agents the most important paradigm shift for crypto since late 2020.
This for real?
Mark Zuckerberg thinks we’re heading to a world with “more AI Agents than people.” But what about these AI Agents that promise to trade crypto for you?
When they arrive, AI Agents could make crypto trading as easy as swiping right. But as it stands, what we’ve got are glorified chatbots that make crypto feel a little more… conversational.
“Right now, the systems are not agents in any meaningful sense,” says OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever. “They are just beginning. They will be agentic in a real way.”
The real deal isn’t far off, maybe six months, say experts like Yatharth Jain, who is building Cluster Protocol, a coordination layer for AI Agents. That may be why firms like DWF Labs are already throwing millions into developing autonomous AI Agents.
Experts agree that AI Agents, when they work fully, could bring crypto investing to the masses. Imagine handing off your wallet to a bot that trades for you — no sweat, no endless charts, no panic selling.
“The actual practical, useful AI Agents will come later,” says Marcello Mari, CEO of SingularityDAO, a blockchain protocol designed to manage portfolios of crypto assets in a non-custodial fashion using AI.
The hype is real — just make sure your investment strategy is too.
