Virtuals lead the way, CreatorBid stealthily advances, who will dominate the AI agent track?

It has been about 7 months since the AI Agent craze began.

**Written by: @**Defi0xJeff

Compiled by: zhouzhou, BlockBeats

Editor’s Note: The article evaluates the performance of several crypto AI projects in terms of ecological construction, product iteration, community distribution, and token value. It concludes that Virtuals is the strongest in maintaining speed and popularity, while CreatorBid, although slow in execution, has a clear vision and focuses on the Bittensor intelligent agent ecosystem, with promising long-term potential. The overall AI agent track is still in its early stages, and future focus may shift towards infrastructure and real consumption scenarios.

The following is the original content (for ease of reading and understanding, the original content has been compiled):

It has been about 7 months since the AI Agent craze began. This wave was initially started by the emergence of @truth_terminal ➙ @pmarca invested in it ➙ someone issued tokens for it ➙ it started promoting the tokens ➙ @virtuals_io launched an agent tokenization platform ➙ AIDOL and conversational agent phases emerged ➙ alpha agent phase, @aixbt_agent rose ➙ framework phase, @elizaOS (formerly ai16z) initiated the open AI developer movement ➙ small-scale AI x gaming attempts (but no one survived) ➙ DeFAI phase (the vision remains strong, but execution is lacking).

This roughly summarizes the main stages of the AI Agent track.

Among the teams evolved from these stages, there are a few reliable AI agent teams that remain active, continuously launching new products and features (although they primarily rely on revenue from transaction fees accumulated in the early stages to sustain themselves).

Most importantly, there are still some ecosystems that remain strong, providing support to developers and helping product ideas start from scratch, driving AI products and tokens from concept to successful launch.

Role of Ecosystem Leaders

These ecosystem leaders provide extremely valuable support:

• With a powerful distribution network, it can bring attention to your tokens and projects;
• Integration of products/services with the core of the ecosystem (that is, aimed at potential users);
• Provide guidance and incubation services from 0 to 1 and then to 10;
• Support your ideas through investment and funding.

In the Web3 AI field, ecosystem leaders remain the core pillar. Because the community is a core component of the crypto world—the community is key to whether tokens can form network effects (unlike traditional SaaS models that rely on subscription fees, Web3 projects depend on tokens to incentivize participation, accelerate growth, and user adoption).

In the past 7 months, we have seen several ecosystem leaders rise and fall. But those projects that are still active stand out in the following aspects:

• Positioned as an AI Agent application store, developers/users can access services from both Web2 and Web3 to enhance or automate their workflows - @arcdotfun
• Build an economy for autonomous agents to trade with each other (and with humans) — @virtuals_io
• Leading the largest Web3 open AI movement — @elizaOS
• Combine Bittensor's subnet intelligence with AI Agent workflows to attract more people to join the @opentensor (Bittensor) ecosystem - @creatorbid

This article will objectively analyze what each ecosystem is doing well, who is leading, who is lagging behind, and so on.

We will analyze from the following aspects:

• Products and Distribution
• AI / Intelligence Level
• Development Speed
• Token Value Capture Situation

Without further ado, let's first look at the first aspect:

Products and Distribution

In Web3, tokens themselves are often seen as a product. However, in this article, we define "product" as goods or services that can meet actual user needs.

In the Web3 AI field, most products revolve around "financialization", which means they are tools and smart services that help people make money—such as Alpha terminals, dialogue agents that can express sentiment towards a certain project, agents that can trade or make predictions, with the goal of outperforming the market, and so on.

The success of a product largely depends on "distribution". Generally speaking, this field is 90% distribution + 10% technical architecture. Very few people in the industry care about what model your AI Agent uses; they are more concerned about whether its output is stable and whether the insights and alpha it shares are truly useful.

Virtuals

@virtuals_io has the most diverse range of products within its ecosystem - including alpha signals, terminals, on-chain / off-chain data, agent workflows for auditing and security analysis, bots, investment DAOs, trading agents, prediction agents, sports analytics, music, DeFi, and more.

Virtuals can be said to be the strongest in storytelling and narrative shaping, and they are also the best at listening to community feedback and iterating quickly (can be called the "survivors").

However, although they offer a wide variety of services, there are actually only a few teams that provide products that truly offer real value to users (rather than just entertainment).

Virtuals is the first pioneering player to launch an AI Agent startup platform, allowing anyone to publish conversational agents and bind a token. This mechanism is a double-edged sword - in the early stages, Virtuals can collect fees and gain value from these launches, but because anyone can publish, it has attracted a large number of short-term speculators and value harvesters who may repeatedly issue tokens and even run away immediately after going live.

(However, Virtuals is developing ACP, and we hope to see some flagship proxy products and services soon.)

Arc

Players like @arcdotfun have taken a completely different path.

They did not choose to build a "launch pad" and encourage as many projects as possible to go live, but instead focused on creating the AI Agent market "Ryzome" by collaborating with a few high-quality projects to integrate these projects' products and services into their MCP infrastructure.

In addition, they will launch a no-code / node-based Agent building tool called "Ryzome Canvas," allowing users to access universal MCP server resources, as well as services and use cases provided by Arc partners, to custom-create agent workflows (similar to Rayon Labs' Squad tool).

Users can sell these workflows or tokenize them and launch them through Arc's Forge (its launch platform).

(In short, Arc follows the route of "refining the product first, then discussing distribution." And Ryzome will soon open for testing.)

Eliza

Among all frameworks, the most flexible and versatile is none other than @elizaOS.

Eliza supports various integrations, such as secure execution through TEE, conducting transactions, analyzing real-time on-chain data, executing smart contracts, and managing wallets.

The framework supports multi-agent systems, allowing developers to create a group of agents with different personalities, goals, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to collaboratively complete tasks (such as trading, social media automation, and business process automation).

For this reason, the number of users of Eliza continues to grow, currently with about 16,000 stars and 5,100 forks on GitHub.

However, although Eliza's framework is widely used, it initially lacked distribution channels. Unlike Virtuals, Eliza failed to capitalize on the hype and traffic bonuses during the early stages of AI Agent's rise (the end of last year).

This situation changed a few weeks ago - Eliza launched @autodotfun, a launch platform priced in SOL (the next phase will introduce the $ai16z liquidity pool), and promised to use part of the transaction fees to buy back $ai16z tokens.

But so far, autodotfun has not shown any significant differences among similar launch platforms, and there have not been any truly interesting or unique projects launched, which is a bit disappointing.

(Eliza's biggest advantage and disadvantage actually lie with @shawmakesmagic: without Shaw's countless high-intensity investments, this framework would not exist; however, he also often "crashes" and makes some questionable decisions, leading to market FUD, which has happened multiple times.)

AI / Intelligent Capability

As mentioned earlier, most of the time, the market is more focused on "products" and "distribution" rather than the underlying architecture or the AI models themselves.

But if you have a powerful and continuously evolving intelligent system, it is still possible to create more user-centered products.

For example: a model specifically trained on on-chain data will be stronger in analyzing on-chain information compared to a general model; a model trained on sports match data, crowd intelligence, and real-time data will also have an advantage in predicting match results.

Bittensor is still the largest ecosystem with the most diverse smart models, and the only one truly dedicated to integrating Bittensor subnet intelligence with AI Agent / Agentic workflows is @CreatorBid.

This team has performed poorly in distribution (slow onboarding of new agents, and a slower iteration pace), but has clear goals in the direction of "strongly supporting Bittensor". (They have not officially announced it yet, but may launch a subnet called SN98 Creator to further incentivize the building of agentic workflows based on Creatorbid and to go live.)

Development Speed / User Growth / Project Launch Rhythm

In Web3, if you are creating a long-term product, you must consider how to keep the community engaged continuously in the short to medium term.

If you cannot "entertain" the community, the token price will often decline over time, as no one is willing to be stuck for the long term. In contrast, the market prefers projects that can continuously generate topics and publicly build.

Virtuals is the strongest player in this field, openly developing, quickly fixing issues, actively listening to community feedback, and regularly launching new features or narratives to maintain users' ongoing interest, while also building their ACP. Additionally, they often have Genesis Launches for new users to participate in.

Eliza ranks second in distribution capability, thanks to its developer network and partnerships with multiple L1/L2s. Eliza is also the preferred framework for deploying agents on other chains (non-Solana). autodotfun also provides a smoother onboarding path for projects.

Arc's Ryzome and Ryzome Canvas are making progress. Once released, they may drive a resurgence in ecosystem enthusiasm and potentially activate the launch of more Forge projects.

In terms of Creatorbid, the top agents have recently launched new features (although the valuation range has not changed much). CB may be preparing to launch an agent driven by the Bittensor subnet and launch its own subnet. The overall pace is slow, and we hope it can speed up in the future.

Token Value Capture

$VIRTUAL is currently the token with the strongest value capture. It is the main currency for LPs constructed within the Virtuals ecosystem, and agents entering Virtuals also need to use it. The recent Genesis Launch introduced Virgen points, which will flow into $VIRTUAL and other ecosystem tokens, further enhancing the holding value of $VIRTUAL.

$ai16z might be the second strongest. autodotfun has a daily trading volume of 2 to 3 million dollars (still far below Virtuals and other platforms), with part of the fees used to repurchase $ai16z. However, Eliza needs to launch quality projects as soon as possible, especially those with a market cap of over 10 million dollars, otherwise the attention will still be focused on Virtuals.

The value capture of $arc comes from LP transaction fees and the revenue streams generated by developers on Ryzome in the future. However, this path is still in the early stages and requires time to materialize.

The token mechanism of $BID is the most unique because its circulation is lower than that of similar projects, and it can encourage platform activity through token releases. However, at present, these releases have not been well utilized, and the trading volume remains low (between $100,000 and $500,000 per day).

Summary

Each of the above items has its own advantages, but in the short to medium term, "distribution capability" + "the ability to attract speculative funds" (i.e., trading volume) is the most critical moat.

The key to the system's operation is whether it can continuously generate excitement and attract players to keep placing bets in your "casino." In this regard, Virtuals is currently the best-performing project.

Whether they can maintain their popularity over the long term and transform it into real product capabilities is worth observing in the future.

Although @CreatorBid's execution still needs improvement, I personally have high hopes for them because their vision aligns with mine—to bring high-quality AI to the masses and truly commercialize agentic workflows.

Imagine this: an ever-evolving trading signal system that consistently outperforms the market, which is then transformed into a fully automated trading Agent — this is the vision of the SN8 Proprietary Trading Network.

We are still in the early stages of the market, and it is unclear who will ultimately prevail. More complex use cases are being handled by large teams outside of the ecosystem, such as:

• @vana——Focus on data ownership
• @NousResearch - Reinforcement Learning
• @TheoriqAI——Liquidity Providing System
• @gizatechxyz - Focus on finance / stablecoin-related agency

In the future, how the leaders of the AI Agent ecosystem position themselves will determine whether they can seize the growth opportunities of the next cycle. We may also see more DeAI infrastructure being established, a deeper degree of decentralization in agency systems, and entrepreneurial opportunities at various levels of the technology stack.

Ultimately, the speculative enthusiasm may shift from individual agent tokens to the core infrastructure built for open AI systems. Perhaps we will see genuinely consumer-facing AI products that generate real revenue, rather than short-term speculative bubbles solely supported by "degens trading back and forth."