On April 17, the Solana ecosystem AI Meme coin DARK briefly surged past a $32 million market cap, hitting an all-time high. Over the past week, its market cap has grown by 150%. In the weak Crypto AI cycle, how has this AI project been able to sustain its upward trend? And what is the team behind it, MtnDao?

What is Dark

DARK is an AI that provides an MCP to external platforms under the TEE protocol. Everyone in CryptoAI is certainly familiar with TEE, which has appeared multiple times in CryptoAI projects since last year when developer Ropirito created the stone "tee_hee_he." It is an experimental trusted execution environment designed to ensure that AI behavior is not influenced by humans. The term MCP may have been heard more frequently recently. You can think of it as a USB-C interface for large models, allowing various devices to connect through the same interface without being unable to use the same connector due to device changes. Since Anthropic open-sourced MCP on November 25, 2024, it has rapidly swept through the AI industry, becoming popular in CryptoAI since February 2025.

Combining these two well-known concepts, the DARK project has pushed its market cap to $30 million on the margins of the CryptoAI market. Two main factors contributed to this: "Founder's decision-making and efficiency" and "Founder's team's future expectations."

Founder's Decision-Making and Efficiency

Friend's transformation after setting a fitness plan, Edgar Pavlovsky's one-year change

Founder Who Loves Quidditch

Founder Edgar Pavlovsky is fluent in English and Russian, a graduate of the University of Utah, a long-standing institution in Salt Lake City, and the core base of the "We work" workspace that MtnDao collaborated with Solana in February is also located in downtown Salt Lake City. Looking at his social media, you can tell that ten years ago, what he loved was definitely not blockchain but a sport called Quidditch, which almost filled all his spaces from 2014 to 2017. This is a sport derived from Quidditch in "Harry Potter."

He had spent several years with the Utah Crimson Quidditch community team, which had crowdfunded on indiegogo to participate in the Quidditch World Cup. Unfortunately, they only managed to raise $1450.

The player on the far right in the picture is Edgar Pavlovsky

Edgar Pavlovsky's Blockchain Journey

After graduating from college, he had worked at Uber and founded several startups. Upon entering the blockchain industry, he not only created the Paladin client to prevent MEV attacks but also co-founded the Solana ecosystem margin protocol Marginfi. In April 2024, he left the team due to a clash in values, which was widely believed to be related to the earlier SolBlaze accusation of Marginfi manipulating BLZE emission distribution, causing quite a stir at the time.

Further Reading: "Founder Driven Out, TVL Plunges 20%, What Happened to Marginfi?"

His vision for DARK was not merely to sell a concept after integrating technologies but to have a complete product theory. After the launch of $DARK, he shared on social media X, "I am focused on building DARK's first product. As DARK aims to achieve its long-term infrastructure goals, iterating productization is the best way to achieve it—building in public, adding revenue + distribution, testing new technology in production."

To achieve these goals, his proposed product direction was to attract mobile users with a consumer PWA (Progressive Web App) application experience to replace traditional apps. Leveraging viral usage by daily users to expand influence, ideally showcasing the decentralized MCP led by DARK in a broader application of POC (Proof of Concept).

Weekly Product Delivery

These words may sound abstract and cliché, possibly spoken by countless Crypto founders, which also resulted in DARK's price hovering between 2M and 4M from April 7 to April 11. During this time, he proposed a product concept for a game AI, expressing his love for the blockchain game Dark Forest and paying tribute to its creator. The DARK version of Dark Forest was encapsulated and run on a private VPS, accessible only to its AI players, who would be containerized and play the game through the Dark Forest MCP launched by DARK.

Players cannot directly play Dark Forest with the AI because it is a world exclusive to them, similar to the AI's Hunger Games. Players can participate in several ways, such as betting on the outcome of AI wars in the DARK Market and winning rewards, directly sponsoring artificial intelligence to provide them with energy or funding enhancements to defeat competitors, or even designing AI strategies that, while not directly adopted, will influence the AI's in-game strategy.

Note: Dark Forest is a decentralized large-scale multiplayer online "MMO" space conquest strategy game inspired by the Dark Forest theory from Liu Cixin's sci-fi novel series "The Three-Body Problem." Initially initiated by MIT graduate Brian Gu as an undergraduate project, it was later taken over by the 0xPARC Foundation. Until now, the game remains one of the most representative blockchain games.

On April 11, he announced that the game was completed, and the next day, the AI Agent would begin simulating wars. He presented a very promising vision, aiming to expand his influence and reach "everyone can start their own game environment" by creating a VPS game world and consumer viewing application as entertainment activities. This, combined with MCP and the agent infrastructure composed of AI containerization, is designed to expand his impact and reach. Lastly, by trading AI warriors and enhancing items through the DARK Market, the game's value is consolidated.

DARK version of Dark Forest game screenshot

By this point, DARK's token price had risen to a peak market cap of 9 million USD, showcasing not only the vision but also the terrifying delivery efficiency of the first product within a few days. On April 16, the product was officially launched, and within 24 hours of the launch, it surged another 100%, rising from a market cap of 14 million USD to 32 million USD.

Meanwhile, Edgar's female friend H「hnxyn_」, also a member of MtnDao, revealed the truth behind it, pointing out that Edgar is almost always working. She mentioned, "Today he was working at my tattoo shop, working in a taxi on the way to the bar for a friend's band performance, working at the bar where our friends were playing, and now we are at our second bar tonight."

Edgar Pavlovsky Working at the Bar

The DAO Behind the Scenes

The "Peak" Behind DARK — MtnDAO

Following the DARK launch on April 9, MtnDAO, an organization founded by Edgar Pavlovsky and Barrett, concluded its fundraising for MtnCapital on MetaDAO. MtnDao has been deeply involved in building Solana's developer community since the early days. Mtn Capital aimed to establish a new investment management model, using futarchy or "market prediction" to guide governance decisions. The $MTN could be likened to futures managed by a futures-managed fund. In just 7 days, 1931 contributors raised $5.75 million for the project.

The organization's investments will be determined by traders, and the approval of proposals will depend on the trading actions of those speculating on the MTN token price. Decision-making will be based on the trend of the MTN token. In simple terms, if traders believe a proposal, such as "investing $100,000 in BTC," is beneficial for Mtn Capital, they will buy and drive up the MTN price, ultimately resulting in the proposal's approval. Conversely, if they think the trade is unfavorable to Mtn Capital, they will push down the MTN price, leading to the proposal's failure.

Is Dark an Initial Confirmation of the Futarchy DAO Concept?

This concept was not first introduced by MtnDao; it was originally proposed by Robin Hanson, an economics professor at George Mason University, in a 2007 paper. The premise is that speculative markets may make better decisions than purely democratic nations. Hanson believed that participants in speculative markets, such as stock and betting markets, are incentivized to conduct necessary research to understand the best outcomes for their interests, and they make buying and selling decisions based on this research.

Proph3t Appears at Solana Event Wearing His Own Image Mask

Meanwhile, the founder of the fundraising platform MetaDAO, Proph3t, is a strong advocate of this concept, believing that "the goal of a DAO is to make better decisions, and market experience surpasses that of experts." Within MetaDAO, project proposals from entities such as Jito DAO, Sancutm, Ore, and Drift will all follow a futures trading model in MetaDAO's proposal repository.

MtnDAO has a long-standing relationship with MetaDAO. Apart from the mysterious Proph3t often "appearing" at MtnDAO's co-working space, founder Edgar Pavlovsky has already invested $2.2 million in MetaDAO in 2024, making MtnDAO the first project on the fundraising platform.

Founder Barrett stated, "Mtn Capital will focus on Solana native projects, as Solana is the home of MtnCapital and the place with the highest expected returns." Mtn Capital's investments in startups are separate from MtnDAO's portfolio, but the brands operate in parallel. The fund's investment strategy is highly flexible, able to deploy funds across various investment opportunities ranging from early-stage private investments to highly liquid public tokens.

Solana Labs CEO Toly at MtnDAO's Salt Lake City Hacker House

This flexibility allows mtnCapital to adapt to evolving market conditions, regardless of development stage or liquidity status, while leveraging the futarchy governance mechanism to benefit from the collective wisdom of the mtndao community. Founder Barrett said, "I think its performance will outperform venture capital funds." He also mentioned that traditional investment firms tend to be more biased towards long positions at the start, hence the choice to engage in open fundraising at the market bottom.

Mtn Capital Treasury

The launch of Mtn Capital coincided closely with DARK, and the token's deployment on pumpfun on November 24, 2024, five months ahead of schedule, was certainly not a spur-of-the-moment decision. This inevitably led the community to speculate on the relationship between the two. On the one hand, there are questions about whether the $5.85 million in idle treasury funds will be used for DARK's development. On the other hand, there is anticipation regarding the MtnDAO and the founder's connections in the Solana ecosystem.

These two reasons have propelled DARK's token price to surge continuously. DARK's two ATHs also coincided with increases in MTN's token price. With DARK's price breakthroughs on April 11th and April 17th, each doubling the fundraising market cap of the IDO to nearly $10 million (initial IDO market cap around $5.5 million), MTN's price has seen a significant increase. This indirectly validates the perspectives of Mtn DAO and MetaDAO, suggesting that perhaps the true essence of DAO tokens lies in the continuous anticipation of potential value output—a "futures" concept. DARK may represent the shadow of this mountain.

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