A Review of the Five Waves of Web3 AI Projects

Since the intersection of blockchain and AI, the crypto field has experienced five major waves of AI conceptual trends. Each wave has been led by representative projects or events, demonstrating an evolution from pure conceptual speculation to gradual technological exploration.

The First Wave (Early Exploration Period) - The Rise of AI Concept Coins: New Wine in Old Bottles

Between 2018 and 2019, some projects began to attempt to combine blockchain and AI concepts, but the impact was limited. After the emergence of ChatGPT in early 2023, the market generated unlimited imagination about the prospects of "AI + blockchain", triggering the first wave of market activity. The representative project Fetch.ai (FET) claims to build a decentralized AI agent network, with its price rapidly increasing in January 2023, surpassing a market capitalization of 200 million USD. AI-related coins such as SingularityNET(AGIX) and Ocean Protocol(OCEAN) also led the market.

This phase is characterized by old projects repackaging their stories. Many AI concept coins issued from 2017 to 2019 have been revived by the tailwind of ChatGPT, becoming the focus of capital chasing. However, at that time, many of these projects' products were still in the early stages, with few real-world applications, and their price increases were primarily driven by market sentiment and expectations of the AI trend.

Second Wave - "Crypto Bull Market" Gives Rise to AI Meme Coins

The strengthening of Bitcoin starting at the end of 2023 is seen as a new round of "crypto bull market." During this period, two tracks have gained momentum: one is the inscriptions and runes of the BTC ecosystem, and the other is the Meme track. Some Meme projects have begun to incorporate AI concepts, leading to a wave of AI Meme coins.

A typical case is $TURBO, touted as the world's first meme token created by AI. Digital artists used ChatGPT to help design and issue the TURBO token, with initial funding of only $69. This AI "curated" frog-themed meme coin skyrocketed shortly after its launch, attracting the attention of a large number of retail investors. TURBO gained popularity with the story of "AI creating the next great meme coin," and within weeks of being listed on multiple exchanges, its price surged hundreds of times, briefly placing its market value among the popular meme coins.

The core feature of this wave is that AI has become a buzzword integrated into the crypto subculture. A large number of new projects claim to combine AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney to generate coin names, images, or storylines, launching various AI-themed meme tokens. However, in essence, these meme coins lack any real AI technology and are merely community games that hype the concept of AI. The second wave of enthusiasm gradually faded in the second half of 2024, with many AI meme coins quickly plummeting to zero, and the market began to cool down.

Wave Three - AI Agent Memes and the GOAT Myth

In the second half of 2024 to early 2025, the crypto industry witnessed a new height of the fusion of AI and blockchain narratives: the emergence of AI Agents(AI smart agents) concept, pushing speculation from simple memes to narrative-driven automated agents. A landmark event driving this wave of enthusiasm was the meteoric rise of Goatseus Maximus ($GOAT).

$GOAT was originally issued as a meme coin on the Solana chain, but it is wrapped in the story of "AI Agent Genesis": reportedly, an AI agent named "Truth GPT" aims to create a blockbuster meme coin and has even caught the attention and sponsorship of well-known venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. With such a storyline backing it, GOAT ignited market sentiment instantly after its launch, with its price soaring over 120 times on the first day and reaching a high of about $0.4664 within a few weeks.

The GOAT craze reveals the power of the AI Agent Narrative in the crypto space: teams or communities have conceived stories of "autonomous AI" dominating projects, giving tokens a sci-fi-like hype. During this period, in addition to GOAT, various concepts related to AI agents have emerged, such as TruthGPT and various AI trading Agent DAOs claiming to automatically trade tokens, many of which have also seen short-term price surges.

However, most projects remain in the narrative stage, and so-called AI agents are often just scripts of preset logic, far from truly autonomous intelligent applications. This wave peaked around January 2025 and then collapsed, with the prices of currencies like GOAT rapidly falling. The entire AI Agent sector has dropped from the hot trend it was a few months ago to a low point.

The Fourth Wave - The Rise of a16z's AI Ecosystem + Basic Concepts of AI Agents

By the end of 2024, a new wave of AI projects will emerge that focus more on technology and ecological construction. Unlike the previous phase which was mainly driven by community hype, this stage has seen the appearance of AI platform projects with well-known backgrounds or serious visions. Typical examples include ai16z and Virtuals, which are regarded as representatives of the "a16z AI ecosystem." The commonality among these projects is to build AI Agent infrastructure, attempting to become the "app store" for AI agents in the Web3 field.

$AI16z is a phenomenal AI meme coin that emerged in November 2024, positioned as a decentralized AI trading fund based on Solana, known as "AI Investment DAO". Its core function utilizes AI agents to obtain market information both on-chain and off-chain, analyze community sentiment, and execute trades automatically. This novel concept instantly sparked market interest after its launch: within just one day at the end of October 2024, its market capitalization skyrocketed from zero to approximately $80 million. Surprisingly, a16z founder Marc Andreessen even endorsed it on Twitter.

To further enhance the value of the token, the ai16z team proposed an economic plan to evolve the project into "AI Layer1" in December 2024: launching a Launchpad specifically designed to serve AI agents, making the ai16z token the base currency for agent transactions and a medium for transaction fees, as well as designing node incentives and value buyback mechanisms, among others. At this stage, it can be seen that the project party is attempting to shift from speculation to building a sustainable ecosystem, supporting the token's value through technological strength and economic models.

At the same time, the Virtuals protocol has been very successful in ecological promotion. Its team has constructed an engaging narrative that attracts many developers to create AI agent projects on its platform, as well as a large number of retail investors participating in investment. At its peak, the Fully Diluted Valuation(FDV) of top projects within the Virtuals ecosystem once broke through 5 billion USD, and the FDV of the Eliza framework corresponding token also reached about half of that. Other standout projects( like AIXBT) had a peak market value of several hundred million USD.

However, the user base and actual revenue at that time had not kept pace with the valuation. By early 2025, the overall market had cooled down, and the value of these projects' tokens had generally halved or even collapsed, indicating that grand visions and narratives alone cannot support prices. As of now, the representatives of the fourth wave have not genuinely become the "app store" for AI Agents, but are more like platforms that concentrate on AI Agent Memes.

Fifth Wave - "Hundred Flowers in Bloom" Closer to Practical Applications

In early Q2 2025, the WEB3 AI sector is experiencing a resurgence, with a clear trend of "moving from virtual to real": there are focuses on platforms and tools for the next generation of AI Agents; new AI ecosystems specifically designed for the operation of AI projects; initiatives utilizing the decentralized nature of user data for value storage; and even combinations of WEB3 AI with other high-tech fields such as robotics. Below are some examples of the fifth wave:

Zerebro

As an AI agent project in the Solana ecosystem, Zerebro aims to provide a decentralized content generation and agent deployment platform, attempting to build a "Consumer-Level AI Agent Launchpad." Its team announced at the end of 2024 the development of an agent issuance platform called "Zentients," envisioning the use of the ZEREBRO token as a medium for the creation costs and value feedback of AI Agents. The scenario depicted by Zerebro is: anyone can generate their own AI agent on the platform with one click and issue corresponding sub-tokens for the agent; the ZEREBRO token serves as a universal payment and governance tool for all agent services, facilitating value accumulation.

Stimulated by this, the price of the ZEREBRO token continued to rise in early 2025. In April 2025, ZEREBRO surged 400% in just two days, attracting significant market attention. At the same time, other related projects also experienced explosions: for example, the $AIOS token, known as the "Agent Operating System," rebounded 10 times, and the Crypto AI sector, which had been dormant for months, became active again. Investors' imagination is shifting from a single AI Agent to underlying support platforms: the market is beginning to chase projects that provide standard interfaces, communication protocols, and deployment environments for AI agents.

However, Zerebro recently reignited the market in a bizarre way: co-founder Jeffy Yu posted a "suicide" video online, and an obituary platform also published a related obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle, leading to a new meme LLJEFFY token skyrocketing to over $100 million, only to plummet back to nearly zero. Some KOLs found that on-chain data showed that after Yu's reported death, the associated wallets still had active funds, indicating that this could be a new exit scam. If the "fake death event" is true, Zerebro may just be a more elaborately packaged meme project.

Metis's AI chain Hyperion + LazAI

Metis is a well-established ETH Layer 2 project, notable for the fact that the mother and aunt of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin are founding partners. Metis recently announced that its "AI chain Hyperion" testnet will officially launch on May 14, attracting market attention.

Hyperion aims to address the challenges that existing L1 and L2 face in meeting the large-scale computational demands of WEB3 AI projects. It reshapes a new chain suitable for running WEB3 AI projects or high-performance computing game projects, solving the issues faced by development teams through the Metis SDK and Alith AI Agent framework. Hyperion still uses $Metis as the sole token, indicating that the Metis team may indeed want to make a real impact in the AI sector.

More forward-looking is the second AI chain LazAI planned by Metis. This will be an entirely new Layer 1, aimed at addressing the value pricing mechanism for contributions of data by individuals ( and institutions ) in AI. LazAI utilizes the decentralized characteristics of blockchain, allowing individuals to retain ownership of their own data and using algorithms to distinguish the varying values of different data. This "decentralized classification storage of personal data + data value pricing mechanism" may become LazAI's biggest feature, representing a direction in which WEB3 technology addresses the shortcomings of the WEB2 world.

The grand narrative of Hyperion and LazAI showcases the Metis team's ambitions in the AI field, and the background also boosts market confidence in these plans.