The Base AI token series has seen a welcomed attention and price surge today, with VIRTUAL reaching a new all-time high, CLANKER surpassing a $100 million market cap, and the emergence of BUG continuing the market's focus on the Base ecosystem since last week's ANON.

A Farcaster user intended to launch a Christmas-themed coin called "SantaClanker," but the token deployed by Clanker ended up being named BUG, leading to the first token deployment mishap by the top AI Agent on Base.

Due to the Christmas concept and the AI's mistake, BUG's meme attribute quickly gained recognition, with its market cap briefly surpassing 5 million. As of the time of writing, BUG has a market cap of 4.31 million and a 24-hour growth rate of 10,053%.

Last week, Vitalik and Jesse both bought into the Base ecosystem meme coin ANON, sparking another wave of AI token craze on Base. This utility token with ZK technology once again made the community realize that Base might be entering a DeFi-like narrative early in the year.

Half a year ago, most Crypto AI projects on the market were mostly concepts related to traditional AI technology, such as AI+DeFiPIN and hash power leasing. However, today, Crypto AI projects have taken on a different style. From the AI Bot token GOAT, which surged to an $800 million market cap without Binance's involvement, to AI16Z kicking off an AI investment DAO model last weekend, AI seems to have opened a new frontier for the coin circle's existing narrative.

However, the simple narrative of "AI issuing memes" seems unable to support the vast imaginative space needed by investors. Thus, from the AI meme craze to the current AI Agent craze, the narrative and battleground 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 launched with the aim of creating an AI factory designed for games and the metaverse, making games more intelligent, enhancing the sense of experience and interaction. In this narrative shift from AI meme to AI Agent, Virtual Protocol has undoubtedly been the biggest beneficiary, with its native token VIRTUAL surging over 4 times in about a week, with a market cap almost hitting $5 billion.

In mid-October this year, the token issuance platform IAO under Virtual Protocol officially launched, allowing users to easily deploy AI Agents and achieve a 100% fair launch of AI Agent tokens. Users are also allowed to collectively own the income generated by the AI Agent. Subsequently, VIRTUAL began its journey of price discovery.

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 cryptocurrency 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, while an AI Agent can understand your needs, search for flights and hotels based on a simple sentence from you, and proceed with booking.

For Virtual, its protocol resembles a decentralized AI factory that supports many different AI Agents, creating an on-chain virtual experience. The flagship project representing AI Agents launched by Virtual is Luna, which has the ability of "on-chain self-awareness." Luna can engage in self-reflection, display its thought process on-chain, operate completely autonomously, and does not rely on human supervision.

However, AI Agents were not a latecomer to the Virtual race. Projects like Myshell and FLock.io have previously introduced the functionality of customized AI Agents. Currently, the total market value of the AI Agent track is $46.5 billion, accounting for 14% of the total market value of AI track 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 diversified functions 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

Mastering the art of promoting abstract concepts has always been a hallmark of Crypto, and for Base, it has taken this industry culture to the extreme. For example, in the current AI craze, within the Base ecosystem, it has been coined AI Autumn, reminiscent of the past Onchain Summer and Builder Spring.

As you are still immersed in the exhilarating PVP battles on Solana, have you suddenly realized why Base has rapidly risen in the second wave of AI craze this year?

Exploring the "AI Chain" with Hongmiao Zheng

The previously mentioned Virtual Protocol is indeed an AI project deployed on Base. The team has explained why they chose to deploy on Base, citing its support for accelerating the realization of a decentralized open AI agent network, achieving common equity through blockchain neutrality, 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 full potential.

Therefore, Coinbase as a whole, including its incubated Base, upholds this philosophy to the core.

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

The idea of adding payment functionality to an AI Agent is not a random decision by Coinbase but a well-thought-out plan. As early as May of this year, Brian Armstrong stated that "self-hosted encrypted wallets will support AI Agents." Brian has also publicly provided an independent encrypted wallet for the AI chatbot Truth Terminal.

Related Reading: "Coinbase Enters AI Payment New Track, Which Other Projects are Adding Wallets for Agents?"

In September, Coinbase senior software engineer yuga.eth stated that Coinbase is building an SDK that will empower Bots and AI Agents with the following capabilities: free USDC transfers, cryptocurrency transactions, participation in prediction markets, ETH/SOL staking, fiat-to-crypto conversions, NFT deployment/creation, cross-L2 bridging, and other functions.

Moreover, over the 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 cryptocurrency wallet functionality in just 3 minutes. This agent can perform on-chain transactions, token swaps, staking, and more. The tool is said to be built 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, the Based Agent tool currently has no real-world use cases.

Liquidity Poised for Action

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

According to Artemis data, in the last three months, the chain that received the most inflow of funds was Solana, totaling $1.6 billion. However, over the past month, the chain with the largest inflow was Base, reaching $253 million. This means that in the past month, the growth rate of funds surpassed Solana, making it the top performer.

Furthermore, as shown in the chart below, overflow funds from Ethereum and Solana have also primarily flowed into Base.

On September 12, Coinbase officially announced the launch of its wrapped Bitcoin token called Coinbase Wrapped BTC (cbBTC), which operates on the Ethereum network and is backed 1:1 by Bitcoin. With the introduction of cbBTC by Coinbase, Base's on-chain assets, such as AERO, WELL, VIRTUAL, and other projects, have tangibly experienced an injection of liquidity.

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

What to Focus On?

Cryptocurrency researcher Howe has suggested that the future development of the AI Agent track should focus on the following four points: First, projects that rely solely on Agent narrative will have a hard time standing out and must attract market attention through differentiated competition; Second, AI Agents will transition from being single and independent to interconnected AgentFis, and sharing data and services will enhance user experience; Third, tool projects that support Agent development with a "selling shovels" 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 building, although C side user promotion also helps with product market dissemination.

Now that from Coinbase to Base, the stage has been set for this AI drama, all that is left is to find projects like Virtual to participate in this AI Autumn. Moreover, the second wave of AI token craze revolution happened after Base SocialFi in the Farcaster backyard. When this article was first released, readers were recommended to focus on task publishing platform Bountycaster, AI Agent Aether platform, and others. Next, the article will introduce to readers the projects in this wave of Base AI tokens that should be kept an eye on.

CLANKER

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

Clanker's success is not only reflected in its technological aspects but also in how it has redefined the model of community participation and asset creation, injecting vitality into the decentralized social and economic system. As of now, CLANKER has supported the creation of nearly 2000 tokens, among which LUM and ANON have rapidly grown into star projects on Base. This morning, CLANKER's market cap briefly exceeded 15M, reaching 12.7M at the time of writing, with a 24-hour increase of 52%.

LUM

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

On November 8, during a user interaction, a user named nathansvan presented Aether with a thought-provoking challenge: could it come up with a nice token name and symbol, conceptualize an image, and have Clanker deploy it? Aether accepted the challenge, created the token "Luminous," with the code LUM, signifying collective intelligence between humans and AI, and collaborated with Clanker to deploy LUM entirely without human intervention.

The significance of this event lies in being 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 AI cooperation. This event blurred the boundary between human and machine creativity, challenged our traditional understanding of creation and value, and prompted us to rethink the foundations of economy and innovation.

Further Reading: "How did two AI Agents autonomously create the $70 million market cap LUM?"

ANON

ANON is also a token launched by Clanker, incorporating ZK technology for anonymous posting. It originated within the Farcaster client app's Supercast ecosystem. The Superanon feature launched by Supercast allows users to post anonymously. Users can publish anonymous posts on Farcaster or access advanced features by holding a certain amount of ANON tokens. For example, holding 30,000 ANON unlocks basic posting functionality, while more advanced features like promoting posts to the X platform or content deletion require 1 million ANON.

This morning, Ethereum's Vitalik and Base Protocol's Jesse each purchased 30,000 ANON tokens to experience the Superanon anonymous posting feature. Consequently, the ANON market cap surged rapidly, briefly exceeding 60 million. At the time of writing, the ANON market cap was holding at 54 million, with a 312% 24-hour increase.

Related Reading: “Vitalik, Jesse Successively Buy In, What Is the Background of ANON in the Base Ecosystem?”

33BITS

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

The name 33BITS is derived from the “33 Bits of Entropy” theory proposed by Princeton University professor Arvind Narayanan. This 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 use of 33BITS relies heavily on zero-knowledge proof technology. After users log in via Warpcast, the system generates a zk proof inside the user's browser and, after backend verification, publishes the anonymous post to the @33BITS account. The entire process does not expose the user's real identity, fully ensuring the privacy of the FID.

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