This article was first published on October 28 and was reissued after data and content updates.

This morning, Vitalik and Jesse both bought into the Base ecosystem meme coin ANON, once again propelling Base into an AI token frenzy. This utility token, featuring ZK technology, once again made the community realize that Base might be experiencing a DeFi-like narrative reminiscent of the beginning of the year.

Half a year ago, most Crypto AI projects in the market were mostly concepts related to traditional AI technologies such as AI+DeFi and computing power leasing. But now, Crypto AI projects have taken on a different style. From the AI Bot token GOAT, which reached a market cap of 800 million USD without Binance's involvement, to last weekend when AI16Z initiated an AI investment DAO model, AI seemed to have opened up a new frontier for the crypto sphere, breaking away from its previous narratives.

However, the simple narrative of "AI issuing meme" seems unable to support the vast imagination space that investors need. Therefore, from the AI meme craze to the current AI Agent hype, the narrative and main battlefield of AI + Crypto are rapidly evolving, leaving behind anyone who doesn't understand the AI meme trend.

From AI Meme to AI Agent: The Rapid Evolution of AI + Crypto Narrative

In March of this year, Virtual Protocol was launched with the goal of creating an AI factory born for games and the metaverse, making games more intelligent, enhancing the sense of experience and interaction. In this transition from the AI meme to the AI Agent narrative, Virtual Protocol has undoubtedly been the biggest beneficiary, with its native token VIRTUAL skyrocketing over 4 times in about a week, nearly reaching a market cap of 5 billion USD.

In mid-October of this year, Virtual Protocol's token issuance platform IAO was officially launched, allowing users to easily deploy AI Agents and launch AI Agent tokens that are 100% fairly distributed, as well as allowing users to collectively own the income generated by the AI Agents. Subsequently, VIRTUAL began its journey to new highs.

An AI Agent refers to an artificial intelligence with tools and reasoning capabilities. In the cryptocurrency field, these Agents can access tweets, and even have a crypto wallet to perform on-chain transactions. For example, if you are planning a trip, a traditional large-scale language model can provide you with destination information or travel advice, whereas an AI Agent can understand your needs, search for flights and hotels proactively based on your sentence, and execute booking operations.

For Virtual, its protocol is similar to a decentralized AI factory, providing support for many different AI Agents, creating an on-chain virtual experience. The AI Agent launched by Virtual represents a project with the ability of "on-chain self-awareness" called Luna, which can self-reflect, display its thought process on-chain, and operate completely autonomously without relying on human supervision.

However, AI Agents were not a newly emerging trend after Virtual. Projects like Myshell, FLock.io, among others, have previously introduced the functionality of custom AI Agents. Currently, the total market value of the AI Agent trend has reached $46.5 billion, accounting for 14% of the total market value of AI-related projects ($326 billion).

ArkStream Capital once released a research report on AI Agents, mentioning that for the leading AI Agent products in Web3, building a complete ecosystem and providing diverse functionalities may be more critical than the quality and performance of a single product. In other words, the success of a project depends not only on what it offers but also on how it integrates resources, promotes collaboration, and creates network effects within the ecosystem.

Related Reading: "Can AI Agents Become the Lifesaver of Web3+AI?"

AI in Late Autumn, AI at Base

Aptitude for promoting abstract concepts has always been a characteristic of the Crypto industry, and for Base, it has taken this industry culture to the extreme. For example, in this wave of AI fervor, within the Base ecosystem, it has been summarized as AI Autumn, much like the past Onchain Summer and Builder Spring.

When you are still immersed in the adrenaline-inducing PVP battles on Solana, have you suddenly realized why Base quickly rose to prominence in the second wave of the AI craze this year?

Exploring Hong Miao's "AI Chain"

The previously mentioned Virtual Protocol is indeed an AI project deployed on Base. The team once explained why they chose to deploy on Base, stating that it supports accelerating the realization of a decentralized open AI agent network, achieving common equity through the neutrality of blockchain, and providing a developer-friendly environment.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has publicly stated that AI should not be regulated, just as the golden age of software and the internet benefited from unrestricted development. AI should also follow a decentralized and open-source path, allowing technology to unleash its potential freely.

Therefore, Coinbase as a whole company, including its incubated project Base, upholds this ideology.

The Multi-Party Computation (MPC) wallet introduced by the Coinbase Developer Platform (CDP) can be integrated with an AI Agent to enable autonomous payments. Brian Armstrong encourages developers to integrate this wallet into their AI models to achieve payment capability, helping AI access resources and services.

Enabling payment functionality for AI Agents is not a spontaneous decision by Coinbase but a long-considered plan. As early as May of this year, Brian Armstrong stated that "self-hosted crypto wallets will support AI Agents." Brian has also publicly provided an independent crypto wallet for an AI chatbot named Truth Terminal.

Related Reading: "Coinbase Ventures into AI Payment Territory: What Other Projects are Providing Wallets for Agents?"

In September, Coinbase Senior Software Engineer yuga.eth mentioned that Coinbase is building an SDK that will empower Bots and AI Agents with functions such as sending USDC for free, cryptocurrency transactions, betting on prediction markets, staking ETH/SOL, fiat-to-crypto conversion, deploying/creating NFTs, cross-L2 bridging, and more.

Just this past weekend, Coinbase developer Lincoln Murr released a demo video of a new tool called "Based Agent," which allows users to create an AI agent with a crypto wallet feature in just 3 minutes. This agent can perform on-chain transactions, token swaps, staking, and other tasks. The tool is based on the Coinbase SDK, OpenAI, and the Replit platform, and users only need Coinbase developer project API keys and OpenAI keys to use it. However, at present, Based Agent has not yet seen any real-world use cases.

Liquidity Ready to Explode

However, in the crypto world, whether an ecosystem or narrative can take off still ultimately depends on the flow of money.

According to Artemis data, over the past three months, the chain with the most funds inflow was Solana, reaching $1.6 billion, but in the last month, Base had the largest inflow, reaching $253 million. In other words, the fund growth in the past month surpassed Solana, becoming the first.

Moreover, as can also be seen from the following chart, the overflow funds from Ethereum and Solana mainly flowed into Base.

On September 12, Coinbase officially announced the launch of its wrapped Bitcoin token, Coinbase Wrapped BTC (cbBTC), running on the Ethereum network, with 1:1 Bitcoin backing. With the introduction of cbBTC by Coinbase, Base's on-chain assets, such as AERO, WELL, VIRTUAL, etc., truly felt the injection of liquidity.

Prior to this, Coinbase Wallet and USDC infrastructure also secured liquidity on Base. On October 26, Base processed $18.1 billion in stablecoin trading volume (99.9% of which was USDC), accounting for over 30% of the stablecoin trading volume that day.

What to Focus On?

Crypto researcher Howe once stated that the future development of the AI Agent track should focus on the following four points: First, projects that purely rely on Agent narratives will struggle to stand out and must attract market attention through differentiated competition; second, AI Agents will gradually transition from singularity to interconnectedness as AgentFi, and sharing data and services will enhance user experience; next, tool projects supporting Agent development with a "sell water" logic will have more market opportunities, similar to stable profit infrastructure; finally, the main source of revenue for Agent products comes from the B side, while the C side is more for reputation accumulation, although C side user referrals also help with product market dissemination.

Now that from Coinbase to Base, the stage has been set for this AI grand play, all that's left is to find projects like Virtual to participate in this AI Autumn. Furthermore, the second wave of AI token frenzy revolution fully took place in the Base SocialFi backyard on Farcaster. At the time of this article's first release, readers were recommended to pay attention to task publishing platforms like Bountycaster, AI Agent Aether, and other platforms, and the following section will introduce projects in this wave of Base AI tokens to keep an eye on.

CLANKER

Clanker is an AI Agent developed by dish and proxystudio.eth, with its native token being CLANKER. Currently, Clanker has evolved into a decentralized token generation platform based on AI technology. Users only need to mention Clanker on the Farcaster platform and input the desired token name they wish to create. The CLANKER system will then automatically generate the token and provide the corresponding Clanker.world link for users to view and manage. The community has even compared it to Pump Fun, creating a Dune dashboard for data analysis.

Clanker's success is not only evident at a technical level but also in its redefinition of community participation and asset creation models, injecting vitality into decentralized social and economic systems. As of now, CLANKER has supported the creation of nearly 2000 tokens, among which LUM and ANON have quickly grown to become star projects on Base. This morning, CLANKER's market cap briefly surpassed 15M, reaching 12.7M at the time of writing with a 24-hour increase of 52%.

LUM

LUM is a meme coin autonomously created by the two AI Agents previously mentioned, Aether and Clanker.

On November 8th, during a user interaction, a user named nathansvan presented Aether with a thought-provoking challenge: could they come up with a good token name and symbol, conceptualize an image, and deploy it through Clanker? Aether accepted this challenge, creating the token "Luminous," with the code LUM, symbolizing collective intelligence between humans and AI. They partnered with Clanker to deploy LUM online entirely without human intervention.

The significance of this event lies in the fact that it was the first time in history that two AI agents autonomously generated a unit of economic value. This asset was neither conceived by humans nor manufactured by machines under human instruction but was born through autonomous cooperation of artificial intelligence. This event blurred the boundaries between human and machine creativity, challenged our traditional understanding of creation and value, and prompted us to rethink the fundamentals of economy and innovation.

Related Read: "How did two AI Agents autonomously create the 70 million market cap LUM?"

ANON

ANON is a token with anonymous posting functionality that combines ZK technology, launched by Clanker and born in the Farcaster client application Supercast ecosystem. The Superanon feature introduced by Supercast allows users to make anonymous posts. Users can publish anonymous posts on Farcaster or use advanced features by holding a certain amount of ANON tokens. For example, holding 30,000 ANON unlocks basic posting functionality, while more advanced features such as promoting a post to platform X or content deletion require 1 million ANON.

This morning, Ethereum's Vitalik and Base protocol lead Jesse each purchased 30,000 ANON tokens to experience the Superanon anonymous posting feature. As a result, the ANON market cap quickly surged, surpassing 60M at one point. At the time of writing, the ANON market cap remains at 54M with a 312% 24-hour price increase.

Related Reading: "Vitalik, Jesse Make Consecutive Purchases - What's Behind ANON in the Base Ecosystem?"

33BITS

33BITS is also an anonymous posting application core to zk technology, but only users with Farcaster ID (FID) less than or equal to 20001 can use it. Its native token 33BITS is also deployed by Clanker, currently valued at 2.24M with a 686% 24-hour price increase.

The name 33BITS originates from the "33 Bits of Entropy" theory proposed by Princeton University professor Arvind Narayanan. The theory suggests that only 33 bits of information are needed to de-anonymize the identities of 6.6 billion people worldwide, highlighting the importance of privacy protection. The usage flow of 33BITS heavily relies on zero-knowledge proof technology. Users log in through Warpcast, and the system generates a zk proof within the user's browser, which is then validated by the backend to publish the anonymous post to the @33BITS account. The entire process does not expose the user's real identity, ensuring the privacy of the FID.

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