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 conceptual trends. Each wave has been led by representative projects or events, demonstrating an evolution from pure conceptual hype to gradual technological exploration.

1. First Wave (Early Exploration Phase): The Rise of AI Concept Coins

As early as 2018-2019, there were projects attempting to combine blockchain and AI concepts, but the impact was very limited. The real explosion of the first wave of enthusiasm came from the market reaction after the launch of ChatGPT in early 2023. The emergence of ChatGPT made ordinary users truly feel that AI can enhance work efficiency.

Starting from January 2023, a batch of early AI concept tokens saw their prices surge, marking the first wave of the market. A typical representative is Fetch.ai (FET): claimed to build a decentralized AI agent network, the FET token rapidly increased in price in January 2023, with its market capitalization once surpassing 200 million dollars. During the same period, AI-related coins like 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 pursuit. However, at that time, the products of these projects were mostly in the early stages, with few applications implemented, and the rise was mainly driven by market sentiment and the anticipation of the large trend of AI.

2. Second Wave: The Rise of AI Meme Coins

With the continuous rise of generative AI, the crypto community has seen a surge in AI Meme coins. A typical example is $TURBO, which is 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 an initial funding of only 69 USD.

This AI "planned" frog-themed meme coin 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 landing on several mainstream exchanges, its price increased 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 gimmick integrated into the crypto subculture. A large number of new projects claim to incorporate AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney to generate coin names, images, or storylines, launching various meme tokens with AI elements. 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 is gradually fading in the second half of 2024, as many AI meme coins quickly go to zero and the market begins to calm down.

3. The Third Wave: AI Agent Meme and GOAT Myth

From the second half of 2024 to early 2025, the concept of AI Agents (AI entities ) will rise, shifting speculation from simple memes to storyline-driven automated agents. A hallmark event driving this wave of enthusiasm is the explosive popularity of Goatseus Maximus ($GOAT).

$GOAT was initially issued as a meme coin on the Solana chain, but unlike before, it is wrapped in a story of "AI Intelligent Being Genesis": reportedly, an AI agent named "Truth GPT" is determined to create a hit meme coin and even caught the attention and sponsorship of renowned venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. With such a storyline backing it, GOAT ignited market sentiment immediately after its launch, with the price skyrocketing over 120 times on the first day, reaching a high of about $0.4664 within a few weeks.

The GOAT craze reveals the power of the AI Agent Narrative (AI intelligent agent narrative ) in the crypto space: teams or communities conceive a story of a "self-governing AI" leading a project, giving the token a sci-fi-like hype. During this period, in addition to GOAT, other concepts related to AI agents have also emerged, such as TruthGPT, various AI trading Agent DAOs claiming to trade automatically, many of which have seen short-term price surges.

However, most projects remain in the narrative stage, meaning they can only tell stories. The so-called AI agents are often just scripts with preset logic, far from truly autonomous intelligent applications. This wave of enthusiasm peaked around January 2025 and then collapsed, with the prices of coins like GOAT quickly falling back. The entire AI Agent sector has plunged from being extremely popular a few months ago to a low point.

4. The Fourth Wave: The Rise of AI Ecosystem + AI Agent Basic Concepts

After the recent waves of hype recede, a group of AI projects that focus more on technology and ecological construction will emerge at the end of 2024. Unlike the previous phase, which was mainly driven by community speculation, this stage features AI platform projects with well-known backgrounds or serious visions. Notable examples include ai16z and Virtuals, which are seen as representatives of the "a16z AI ecosystem." The commonality among these projects is the creation of AI Agent infrastructure, aiming to become the "app store" for AI entities in the Web3 domain.

$AI16z is a phenomenal AI Meme coin that emerged in November 2024, with a name that alludes to the well-known venture capital firm a16z. The project is essentially positioned as a decentralized AI smart trading fund based on Solana, namely "AI Investment DAO," which primarily utilizes AI agents to obtain on-chain and off-chain market information, analyze community sentiment, and automatically execute trades. This novel concept instantly sparked market interest upon its launch: at the end of October 2024, its market capitalization skyrocketed from zero to approximately 80 million USD within just one day.

In order 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: that is, to launch a Launchpad specifically serving 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 the same time, the Virtuals protocol has been very successful in ecological promotion as another representative project. Its team has built a compelling narrative that attracts many developers to create AI agent projects on its platform, as well as a large number of retail investors to participate. At its peak, the Fully Diluted Valuation (FDV) of the top projects within the Virtuals ecosystem once surpassed 5 billion dollars, and the FDV of the corresponding token for the Eliza framework also reached about half of that, which is in the tens of billions of dollars.

However, the user base and actual revenue at that time had not kept pace with the valuation. With the overall market cooling down in early 2025, the token values of these projects generally halved or even crashed, indicating that having only grand visions and narratives is still insufficient to support prices.

5. The Fifth Wave: "A Hundred Flowers Blooming" Closer to Practical Applications

After a brief downturn, the WEB3 AI sector is experiencing a resurgence in early Q2 of 2025, and the current trends have clearly begun to "materialize": there are platforms and tools focused on the new generation of AI Agents; there are new AI ecosystems specifically designed for the operation of AI projects; there are decentralized features for utilizing user data for value storage; and there are even applications that combine WEB3 AI with other high-tech sectors like robotics. These all present a "blossoming" form, and below are some examples from the fifth wave:

Zerebro

As an AI intelligent body project in the Solana ecosystem, Zerebro focuses on providing a decentralized content generation and agent deployment platform, aiming to build a "consumer-grade AI Agent Launchpad." Its 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 feedback of creating AI Agents.

The scene depicted by Zerebro is: anyone can generate their own AI agent (such as an email assistant, programming assistant, trading bot, etc.) on the platform with one click, and issue corresponding sub-tokens for the agents; the ZEREBRO token serves as a universal payment and governance tool for all agent services, facilitating value accumulation. This model is seen as a true application store for AI Agents, with promising prospects.

Stimulated by this, the price of the ZEREBRO token continued to rise in early 2025. Especially after experiencing prior adjustments, ZEREBRO surged 400% in just two days in April 2025, attracting significant market attention. During the same period, other related projects also saw explosive growth: for example, the $AIOS token, known as the "Agent Operating System," rebounded 10 times, and the Crypto AI sector, which had been quiet for months, became active again.

However, just in the past week, Zerebro once again ignited the market, but in a bizarre way: Zerebro's co-founder Jeffy Yu posted a "suicide" video online, then an obituary platform also published a related obituary, which was featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, and then it triggered a new meme LLJEFFY token that surged to over 100 million dollars, only to instantly drop back to nearly zero. Some KOLs discovered that on-chain data showed that the associated wallet had still been active after Yu's reported death, leading them to conclude that this was a new exit scam.

Metis's AI chain Hyperion + LazAI

Metis is a well-established ETH Layer 2 project that officially announced on May 7th that its "AI Chain Hyperion" testnet will officially go live on May 14th. Metis will go all in on AI in the future and aims to create two AI chains.

The emergence of the first AI chain, Hyperion, is to solve the problems that all L1 and L2 will encounter: WEB3 AI projects require larger computing power to meet frequent read and write operations and state calculations, while also striving to maintain decentralization. The newly released Hyperion solution by the Metis team can be simply understood as: it has reshaped a new chain that is most suitable for WEB3 AI projects or gaming projects (both of which require high-performance computing) to operate, using the Metis SDK and Alith AI Agent framework to solve the issues that development teams may face. Hyperion also uses $Metis as the sole token.

The second AI chain LazAI will be a brand new Layer 1, aiming to solve the value pricing mechanism of data contributions from individuals (including both personal and institutional). LazAI utilizes the decentralized characteristics of blockchain, ensuring that individual data still belongs to the individual. Users can obtain the value of their own data, and this value can be manifested 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 crypto industry where studios or opportunists forcefully inject useless data.

"The decentralized classification storage of personal data + the pricing mechanism for data value" will become LazAI's greatest feature, and this is also the direction the entire industry should strive for: how to leverage the inherent characteristics of WEB3 to address some of the shortcomings of the WEB2 world.