A Review of the Five Waves of Web3 AI Projects

Since the intersection of blockchain and AI, the cryptocurrency field has experienced five major waves of AI concept trends. Each wave has led by representative projects or events, demonstrating an evolution from pure conceptual speculation to gradual technological exploration.

First Wave (Early Exploration Phase) - The Rise of AI Concept Coins: Old Wine in New Bottles

As early as 2018-2019, there were projects attempting to combine blockchain and AI concepts, but their impact was very limited. The real surge began with the market reaction after the launch of ChatGPT in early 2023. OpenAI's ChatGPT became popular at the end of 2022, allowing the public to witness the power of AI entering the common civilian domain, which feels somewhat similar to the explosion of the internet after personal computers became widespread over 20 years ago, and the frenzy for mobile internet products due to the hot sales of smartphones a decade ago. The emergence of ChatGPT has made ordinary users truly feel that this can increase their work efficiency.

One major characteristic of the crypto space is that "whatever is trending can be speculated on," so ChatGPT has sparked infinite imagination in the Crypto market regarding the prospects of "AI + Blockchain." Starting from January 2023, a batch of early AI concept tokens saw their prices soar, marking the beginning of the first wave of market activity. A typical representative is Fetch.ai (FET): as an early project on a certain trading platform, it claims to build a decentralized AI agent network. The price of FET tokens skyrocketed in January 2023 (with several times increase within a month), and its market capitalization once surpassed 200 million dollars. During the same period, AI-related coins such as SingularityNET (AGIX) and Ocean Protocol (OCEAN) also led the market.

The characteristics of this stage are: old projects telling new stories - many AI concept coins issued between 2017 and 2019 have been revived by the tailwind of ChatGPT, becoming the focus of capital pursuit. However, at that time, the products of these projects were mostly in the early stages, with few applications landing, and the price increases mainly came from market sentiment and the yearning for the big trend of AI.

Second Wave - This Round of "Crypto Bull Market" Breeds AI Meme Coins

If we define the continuous strength of BTC starting from the end of 2023 as the core theme of this "crypto bull market", then only two tracks have created waves during this period: one is the inscriptions and runes classified under the BTC ecosystem, which brought a wave of heat through innovative asset issuance; the other is the Meme track.

Some Meme projects have started to incorporate AI concepts, and with the rise of generative AI, a wave of AI Meme coins has begun to emerge in the Crypto community. A typical case is $TURBO—reportedly the world's first meme token created by AI. Digital artists used ChatGPT to help design and issue the TURBO token, with initial funding of only $69. Unexpectedly, this frog-themed meme coin "orchestrated" by artificial intelligence surged shortly after its launch, attracting a lot of retail attention. TURBO became popular due to its unique story of "AI creating the next great meme coin," and after listing on multiple trading platforms, its price skyrocketed hundreds of times in just a few weeks, briefly placing its market value among the popular meme coins.

The core feature of this wave is that AI has become a gimmick integrated into the crypto subculture. A large number of new projects claim to combine AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney to generate coin names, images, or storylines, launching various meme tokens with AI elements. On one hand, investors are inspired by the AI wave; on the other hand, they enter these high-risk tokens with a gambling mentality. However, in essence, these meme coins do not contain any AI technology; they are merely community games that hype the AI concept. For example, TURBO itself does not have any application functionality, and "AI-driven" is just a marketing gimmick, with its value primarily supported by community consensus and a speculative mentality. The second wave of enthusiasm gradually declined in the second half of 2024, with many AI meme coins rapidly going to zero as the market began to cool off.

Wave Three - AI Agent Meme and the GOAT Myth

From the second half of 2024 to the beginning of 2025, the crypto industry began to witness a new height in the fusion of AI and blockchain narratives: the concept of AI Agents emerged, shifting the hype from simple memes to automated agents with storylines. The iconic event driving this wave of enthusiasm was the rise of Goatseus Maximus ($GOAT).

$GOAT was originally issued as a meme coin on the Solana chain, but unlike previous ones, it is backed by a story of "AI Agent Genesis": an AI agent named "Truth GPT" (created by developer Andy Ayrey) aims to create a blockbuster meme coin, and even attracted the attention and sponsorship of renowned venture capitalist Marc Andreessen (who personally provided $50,000 in seed funding to the AI). With such a storyline, GOAT instantly ignited market sentiment after its launch—its price skyrocketed over 120 times on the first day (with a 24-hour increase of 12,000%), reaching a high of about $0.4664 within a few weeks! This myth of sudden wealth made GOAT a hot topic in the crypto community at the time, hailed as the "AI-powered super meme coin."

The GOAT craze reveals the power of the AI Agent Narrative in the crypto space: teams or communities conceive a story of a "self-governing AI" leading a project, giving the token a sci-fi-like gimmick. For example, claims that AI agents manage funds and execute tasks autonomously, without human intervention, endow the token with a sense of mystery and futurism. During this period, besides GOAT, other concepts related to AI agents have emerged, such as TruthGPT and various AI trading Agent DAOs claiming to automatically trade coins, with many prices soaring in a short time.

However, most projects remain in the narrative stage, meaning they can only tell stories. The so-called AI agents are often just pre-set logic scripts, far from true autonomous intelligent applications, let alone discussing whether the application effects are good or bad. This wave of enthusiasm peaked around January 2025 and then collapsed—external events (such as Trump announcing the issuance of his personal Meme coin $TRUMP in January 2025, which drew market funds) caused speculative hot money to withdraw, leading to a rapid decline in the prices of coins like GOAT. The entire AI Agent sector has fallen from a few months ago's peak to a trough.

The Fourth Wave - The Rise of a16z's AI Ecosystem + AI Agent Basic Concepts

After the previous waves of speculation receded, a batch of AI projects that focus more on technology and ecosystem building emerged at the end of 2024. Unlike the previous phase mainly driven by community speculation, this stage saw the emergence of AI platform projects with well-known backgrounds or serious visions. Typical examples include: ai16z and Virtuals, which are seen as representatives of the "a16z AI ecosystem" (the name dramatically mimics the well-known venture capital firm a16z). The commonality among these projects is: to build the AI Agent infrastructure, attempting to become the "app store" for AI agents in the Web3 space.

$AI16z is a phenomenal AI Meme coin that emerged in November 2024, with a name that alludes to the well-known venture capital firm a16z. The project essentially positions itself as a decentralized AI investment fund based on Solana, namely "AI Investment DAO," which primarily utilizes AI agents to gather on-chain and off-chain market information, analyze community sentiment, and automatically execute trades. This novel concept instantly ignited market attention after its launch: by the end of October 2024, its market value skyrocketed from zero to approximately $80 million within just one day of going live, igniting the enthusiasm of speculators. Surprisingly, a16z founder Marc Andreessen even endorsed it on social media, personally sharing the concept introduction and link for AI16z. With the backing of well-known figures and the narrative of "AI investment + Meme," AI16z became the hottest crypto topic of the month.

There are many doubts in the industry about its speculative elements being higher than its actual implementation, but it is undeniable that it has opened up people's imagination for the "AI + DAO autonomous investment" model. To further enhance the value of the token, the ai16z team proposed an economic plan to evolve the project into "AI Layer1" in December 2024: to launch a Launchpad specifically serving AI agents, making the ai16z token the base currency and fee medium for agent transactions, and designing node incentives and value buyback mechanisms, etc. At this stage, we can see the project party trying to shift from speculation to building a sustainable ecosystem, supporting token value through technical strength and economic models, rather than just relying on storytelling.

During the same period, the Virtuals protocol was very successful in ecological promotion as another representative project. Its team built an engaging narrative that attracted many developers to create AI agent projects on its platform, as well as a large number of retail investors. At its peak, the Fully Diluted Valuation (FDV) of the top projects within the Virtuals ecosystem once broke the $5 billion mark, with the FDV of the Eliza framework token reaching about half of that, which is in the tens of billions range. Other standout projects (such as AIXBT) reached a peak market value of several hundred million dollars. During this time, capital gave extremely high valuations to "AI agent platform/framework" type projects. However, the user base and actual revenue at that time had not kept pace with the valuations— for example, although Virtuals claimed ecological prosperity, statistics showed that its daily actual income was once less than $500 after its launch, creating a stark contrast with its high valuation. As the overall market cooled in early 2025, the token values of these projects generally halved or even plummeted, indicating that having only grand visions and narratives is still not enough to support prices.

Therefore, the representatives of the fourth wave have not yet truly become the "app store" for AI Agents. Instead, they are more like the Pump.fun platform, which concentrates AI Agent memes. While everyone is waiting to see if it can break out and be reborn, the fifth wave has surged in.

Fifth Wave - "A Hundred Flowers Awaiting Bloom" Closer to Practical Applications

After a brief downturn, the WEB3 AI sector is experiencing a resurgence in early Q2 2025. The hotspots this time have become quite clearly "practical": there are focuses on new generation AI Agent real platforms and tools; new AI ecosystems specifically suitable for the operation of AI projects; utilization of the decentralized characteristics of user data for value storage; and even combinations of WEB3 AI with other high-tech tracks like robotics. All these present a "blooming flowers" scenario, and we look forward to the day when these practical projects can truly achieve a "hundred flowers blooming". Below we list some examples from the fifth wave for reference.

Zerebro

As an AI agent project within the Solana ecosystem, Zerebro focuses on providing a platform for decentralized content generation and agent deployment, aiming to build a "Consumer-grade AI Agent Launchpad." Its team announced at the end of 2024 the development of a platform for agent issuance called "Zentients," envisioning the use of the ZEREBRO token as a medium for the costs and value feedback associated with creating AI Agents. The scenario depicted by Zerebro is that anyone can generate their own AI agent (such as an email assistant, programming assistant, trading bot, etc.) on the platform at the click of a button and issue corresponding sub-tokens for the agent; the ZEREBRO token serves as a universal payment and governance tool for all agent services, enabling value accumulation. This model is seen as a real application store for AI Agents, with promising prospects.

Stimulated by this, the price of the ZEREBRO token continued to rise at the beginning of 2025. Especially after a period of adjustment, in April 2025, ZEREBRO surged by 400% within two days, attracting significant attention from the market. During the same period, other related projects also experienced explosions: for example, the $AIOS token, claiming to be the "Agent Operating System," rebounded tenfold, and the Crypto AI sector, which had been quiet for months, became active again. Investors' imaginations are shifting from a singular focus on AI Agents to underlying supporting platforms: the market is beginning to chase projects that provide standard interfaces, communication protocols, and deployment environments for AI agents, hoping they will become the bridge connecting Web2 AI technology with Web3 value capture. Although Zerebro has planned rich functionalities, the actual products have not yet fully landed during the fervor stage, and many application scenarios remain in testing or demo.

In just the past week, Zerebro once again ignited the market, but in a rather absurd way that makes one both laugh and cry: Zerebro's co-founder Jeffy Yu posted a "suicide" video online, then an obituary platform also released a related obituary, which was published in the San Francisco Chronicle. This subsequently ignited a new meme LLJEFFY token, which soared to over 100 million U, only to immediately drop.