Anyone who has been paying attention to the markets over the past year knows that crypto has been pretty much a graveyard.

We have been in a painful prolonged bear market, with many underfunded projects and exhausted investors throwing in the towel.

However, just when it felt like all hope had been lost, one corner of the crypto universe started to wake up.

Today we are talking about the intersection of crypto with AI, and some related projects that have been outperforming in recent weeks.

AI Improving Exponentially

Earlier this month, the CEO of Citadal gave a talk at Stanford and described a recent "step change" in AI capabilities. Work that used to take a team of Finance PhDs weeks or months can now be completed by AI agents in a matter of hours or days.

For better or worse, AI is taking over the world. This can be done in a centralized way by the likes of Palantir, Oracle, and OpenAI, or it can be done in a decentralized and permissionless way by using crypto as the base economic layer for AI agents.

Outperforming Projects

Over the past week, several AI-related tokens have be posting gains upwards of 100, 200, and 500%. Here are just a couple of examples:

Gitlawb is a code collaboration platform with no central authority. It pays both AI agents and humans in GITLAWB tokens to complete coding tasks. Its market cap increased from $2M to $35M in the span of just three weeks.

Miroshark (shown in the chart above) is a "universal swarm intelligence engine" that spawns and coordinates hundreds of diverse AI agents to simulate real-world social, narrative, and decision dynamics around any input scenario. Its token is up almost 500% this past week.

Other frameworks can spawn AI agents that take in market signals from multiple sources, communicate with each other, intelligently calculate probabilities, and trade on behalf of investors.

Agentic AI is a game changer for sure.

Why AI Agents Will Use Crypto

These swarms of thousands - if not millions - of AI agents are going to need to exchange value with one another somehow.

Imagine the amount of time it would take for each agent to get approval for a bank account and a credit card. It's unfeasible. Instead, AI agents are going to use a permissionless blockchain like Solana or Base (Ethereum Layer 2) to pay for resources like data and compute.

For now, most agents are paying each other with stablecoins like USDC. In the future however, when the dollar collapses under the weight of its own debt, these agents could end up paying each other with pure cryptocurrencies, using services like THORChain, Maya Protocol and LeoDEX to move tokens between blockchains.

The Race Is On

Which blockchains will get the most agentic AI adoption? Top contenders at the moment are Base and Solana.

Base has a leg up thanks to its integration with Coinbase, allowing customers to invest directly into the ecosystem. There are plenty of talented developers building out composable AI agent infrastructure on Base (launchpads, frameworks, etc).

Solana doesn't want to be left behind, and their blockchain is well suited for high-frequency micropayments. Many Solana-based agent launchpads seem to have died in the bear (stopped posting to X). Others, including clawpump, continue building.

Honorable mentions include the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (FET), a sovereign blockchain in the Cosmos ecosystem focused on AI agentic commerce. NEAR Protocol is also actively building infrastructure for AI agents to exchange value autonomously.

Until next time...

It appears that decentralized, permissionless AI may be what revives the flatlining crypto space. In any case, things just got interesting once again.

Of course, none of this is financial advice. Be sure to do your own research before investing in this high-risk, high-reward crypto sector.

If you learned something new from this article, be sure to check out my other posts on crypto and finance here on the Hive blockchain. You can also follow me on X or InLeo for more frequent updates.

Further Reading

- Which Currencies Will Fuel The AI-Powered Economy?
- AI Spotlight: REPPO Uses Decentralized Prediction Markets To Better Train AI Models