A Review of the Five Waves of Web3 AI Projects

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

01 First Wave (Early Exploration Period): The Initial Rise of AI Concept Coins

From 2018 to 2019, there were projects attempting to combine blockchain and AI concepts, but the impact was limited. The real ignition of the first wave of enthusiasm was the market reaction after the launch of ChatGPT in early 2023. OpenAI's ChatGPT gained popularity at the end of 2022, allowing the public to witness the power of AI that has already entered the general civilian sector.

Since January 2023, a batch of early AI concept tokens has seen a surge in prices, triggering the first wave of the market. A typical representative is Fetch.ai (FET): claiming to build a decentralized AI agent network, the price of FET tokens rose rapidly in January 2023, with a market capitalization once exceeding $200 million. During the same period, AI-related coins such as SingularityNET (AGIX) and Ocean Protocol (OCEAN) also led the market.

The characteristics of this stage are: old projects telling new stories. Many AI concept coins issued between 2017 and 2019 have been revived by the tailwind of ChatGPT, becoming the focus of capital chasing. However, at that time, the products of these projects were mostly in their early stages, with few applications implemented, and the price increase mainly came from market sentiment and the anticipation of the AI mega trend.

02 The Second Wave: The Rise of AI Meme Coins

In this round of the "crypto bull market," two tracks have emerged: one is the inscriptions and runes categorized under the BTC ecosystem; the other is the Meme track.

Some Meme projects have started to incorporate AI concepts, leading to a surge of AI Meme coins in the Crypto community. A typical case is $TURBO, claimed to be 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 frog-themed meme coin, "orchestrated" by artificial intelligence, skyrocketed shortly after its launch, attracting a large number of retail investors. TURBO gained popularity with its unique story of "AI creating the next great meme coin," and after being listed on several major exchanges, its price surged hundreds of times within just a few weeks, 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 meme tokens with AI elements. Investors are inspired by the AI wave on one hand, while on the other hand, they enter these high-risk tokens with a gambling mentality. However, in essence, these meme coins lack any AI technology content and are merely community games that hype the AI concept. The second wave of enthusiasm gradually declined in the second half of 2024, with many AI meme coins quickly going to zero, and the market began to cool down.

03 The Third Wave: AI Agent Memes and the GOAT Myth

From the second half of 2024 to early 2025, the crypto industry began to witness a new height in the fusion of AI and blockchain narratives: the rise of AI Agents, which elevates hype from simple memes to automated agents with storylines. A landmark event driving this wave of enthusiasm was the explosive popularity of Goatseus Maximus ($GOAT).

$GOAT was initially issued as a meme coin on the Solana chain, but unlike previous ones, it is backed by a story of "AI Agent Genesis": An AI agent named "Truth GPT" allegedly aimed to create a hit meme coin, even catching the attention and sponsorship of renowned venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. With such a storyline, GOAT ignited market sentiment upon its launch, with its price skyrocketing over 120 times on the first day, reaching around $0.4664 within weeks! This wealth myth made GOAT a hot topic in the crypto community at that time, hailed as the "AI-powered super meme coin".

The GOAT craze reveals the power of the AI Agent Narrative in the crypto space: teams or communities conceive a story of a "self-sufficient AI" leading a project, giving the token a sci-fi-like hype. During this period, besides GOAT, various concepts of AI agents have also emerged, such as TruthGPT and various AI trading Agent DAOs claiming automatic trading, with many prices also skyrocketing in the short term.

However, most projects remain at the narrative stage. The so-called AI agents are often just scripted logic, far from truly autonomous intelligent applications, not to mention discussing whether the application’s effects are good or bad. This wave of enthusiasm peaked around January 2025 and then collapsed, with the entire AI Agent sector dropping from the hot trend it was a few months ago into a valley.

04 The Fourth Wave: The Rise of AI Ecology and Basic Concepts of AI Agents

After the hype of previous waves subsided, a batch of AI projects that focus more on technology and ecological construction emerged at the end of 2024. Unlike the previous phase primarily driven by community speculation, this stage saw the emergence 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 common feature of these projects is: to build AI Agent infrastructure, attempting to become the "app store" for AI agents in the Web3 field.

$AI16z is a phenomenon-level AI Meme coin that is set to rise in November 2024. The project is essentially positioned as a decentralized AI smart trading fund based on Solana, namely "AI Investment DAO," which core utilizes AI agents to gather on-chain and off-chain market information, analyze community sentiment, and automatically execute trades. This novel concept instantly ignited market attention after its launch: by the end of October 2024, its market value skyrocketed from zero to approximately $80 million in just one day, igniting the enthusiasm of speculators. With endorsements from notable figures and the backing of the "AI Investment + Meme" narrative, AI16z became the hottest crypto topic of the month.

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: specifically, to launch a Launchpad dedicated to serving AI agents, making the ai16z token the base currency for agent transactions and a medium for transaction fees, while also designing node incentives and a value buyback mechanism, among others. At this stage, it can be observed 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, rather than just relying on storytelling.

During the same period, the Virtuals protocol was very successful in ecological promotion as another representative project. Its team built an engaging narrative that attracted many developers to create AI agent projects on its platform, as well as a large number of retail investors participating. At its peak, the Fully Diluted Valuation (FDV) of the top projects within the Virtuals ecosystem once exceeded $5 billion, and the FDV of the tokens corresponding to the Eliza framework also reached about half of that, totaling in the billions. Other notable projects reached peak market values of several hundred million dollars. During this time, capital gave extremely high valuations to "AI agent platform/framework" type projects. However, the user base and actual revenue at that time were far from keeping pace with the valuations. As the overall market cooled in early 2025, the token values of these projects generally halved or even collapsed, indicating that grand visions and narratives alone cannot sustain prices.

Therefore, the representatives of the fourth wave have not yet truly become the "app store" for AI Agents, but rather more like platforms that concentrate AI Agent Memes. While everyone is waiting to see if it can break out and be reborn, the fifth wave has surged in.

05 Fifth Wave: "Hundred Flowers Blooming" Closer to Practical Applications

After a brief downturn, the WEB3 AI sector is warming up again in early Q2 2025. This time, the trend has become noticeably "real" rather than "virtual": there are focuses on new generation AI Agent real platforms and tools; new AI ecosystems specifically suitable for AI project operations; utilization of user data with decentralized characteristics for value storage; and even the combination of WEB3 AI with other high-tech sectors such as robotics. All of these present a "blooming flowers" pattern. Here are some examples from the fifth wave:

Zerebro

As an AI agent project within the Solana ecosystem, Zerebro focuses on providing a decentralized content generation and agent deployment platform, aiming to build a "consumer-grade AI Agent Launchpad." The team announced the development of an agent issuance platform called "Zentients" by the end of 2024, envisioning the use of the ZEREBRO token as a medium for the costs and value return of creating AI Agents. The scenario depicted by Zerebro is: anyone can generate their own AI agent on the platform with a single 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. This model is seen as a real application store for AI Agents, with promising prospects.

Stimulated by this, the price of the ZEREBRO token continued to rise at the beginning of 2025. Especially after undergoing previous adjustments, in April 2025, ZEREBRO surged 400% within two days, attracting significant market attention. During the same period, other related projects also experienced explosions: for example, the $AIOS token, touted as the "Agent Operating System", rebounded tenfold, and the Crypto AI sector, which had been silent for months, became active again. Investors' imaginations are 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, hoping they will serve as a bridge connecting Web2 AI technology with Web3 value capture. Although Zerebro has planned rich functionalities, the actual product has not yet fully landed during the frenzy phase, and many application scenarios remain in testing or Demo.

Metis's AI chain Hyperion + LazAI

Metis is a well-established ETH Layer 2 project. The reason Metis intersects with AI is that it officially announced on May 7 that its "AI chain Hyperion" testnet would officially launch on May 14.

The emergence of the first AI chain, Hyperion, is to address the issues that all L1 and L2 currently face: WEB3 AI projects require a larger scale of computing power to meet the frequent read and write operations and compute states, while also striving to maintain decentralization, which was not supported by previous EVM environments. The new Hyperion solution released by the Metis team can be simply understood as: reconstructing a new chain that is most suitable for WEB3 AI projects or gaming projects (both of which require high-performance computing) to operate, solving the problems that development teams may encounter through the Metis SDK and Alith AI Agent framework. Hyperion still uses $Metis as the only token, which makes us believe that the Metis team genuinely wants to do something substantial in the AI sector, rather than just shouting lofty slogans.

The second AI chain LazAI will be a brand new Layer 1, aimed at solving the value pricing mechanism of data contributions by individuals (including both personal and institutional). LazAI utilizes the decentralized nature of blockchain, ensuring that individual data still belongs to the individual. Users can obtain the value of their own data, which can be represented through tokens and other means. Moreover, LazAI can rely on algorithms to distinguish the varying values of different data, thereby minimizing the pain points in the cryptocurrency industry caused by studios or data farmers flooding the market with useless data. Therefore, "decentralized classification storage of personal data + data value pricing mechanism" will become LazAI's biggest feature, which is also the direction the entire industry should strive for: how to leverage the inherent characteristics of WEB3 to address some shortcomings of the WEB2 world.