AI Agent is experiencing a new economic cycle.

The overall market value of the AI Agent sector has surpassed 16.6 billion dollars, with a growth rate of up to 53.79% over the past 7 days. From Virtual to AI16Z, and then to platforms like Arc, the AI Agent ecosystem is expanding at an unprecedented speed.

The AI Agent project driven by Meme culture has significantly lowered the participation threshold for ordinary users through humorous expression, highly interactive community culture, and user-friendly communication strategies, successfully attracting a large number of non-professional users to join. This represents another cultural rebellion against "VC coins", as well as a continuation of the Meme narrative. Combining AI Agents not only lowers the participation threshold and expands the potential market scale but also injects more inclusivity and sustainability into the AI × Crypto narrative.

The total market capitalization of the top 5 AI Agent projects exceeds 7 billion dollars, accounting for nearly 45%. Among them, a certain ecosystem and another ecosystem have market capitalizations of 4.65 billion dollars and 2.37 billion dollars respectively, becoming benchmark cases in the entire cryptocurrency field.

The current prosperity of the "AI Agent" track is still mainly dominated by AI Memecoins or issuance platforms, and it remains in the early stage of the "equity" economic narrative limited to fair asset issuance, needing further deepening of its reach. Unlike DeFi, which requires users to actively learn complex financial tools, AI Agents can directly provide users with personalized and intelligent services, lowering the participation threshold.

The actual use of AI Agents is far from limited to issuing tokens. In the task-driven process of AgentGPT, AI Agents have demonstrated their potential in areas such as on-chain trading strategies. Users only need to know what results they want, without having to worry about the intermediate processes and steps.

The true value of AI Agents lies in becoming the interactive application layer of Web3, where users do not need to understand complex systems and can complete all on-chain operations simply by conversing with the AI Agent. This is expected to become the underlying infrastructure of Web3, deeply integrated with blockchain, smart contracts, and more, giving rise to new application forms and business models.

AI Agents are no longer just a hype but have truly integrated into industrial logic through value capture mechanisms, such as AI-driven KOLs, yield generation tools, trading and Alpha strategy optimization, as well as the construction of underlying infrastructure. AI technology is gradually shifting from entertaining narratives to tools that solve practical problems.

Infrastructure, as the core of Beta, represents a nearly transparent value capture opportunity, with a very clear narrative transmission path. It shifts from elitist finance serving a few to inclusive finance serving the majority; from the unsustainability of short-term speculation to the sustainability of long-term growth.

One important challenge faced by AI agents is how to efficiently mine and utilize high-quality data. Twitter data, Discord data, web scraping data, etc. may hide billions of signals, containing many use cases that can be derived and realized.

A certain platform has built a data service subnet and AI Agent arena on a certain network that is worth paying attention to. The AI Agent arena makes the data network no longer abstract, but enables AI Agents in real-time, allowing them to evolve continuously, iterating on a powerful reward mechanism that lets AI Agents compete in the arena.

From a broader perspective, focusing on the "adaptability" issues of AI agents on the chain to address the efficiency, stability, and intelligence needs of on-chain operations not only holds the promise of building the infrastructure for an on-chain AI ecosystem but may also drive a comprehensive upgrade of the developer ecosystem and user experience.

The improvement of infrastructure and the maturity of technology have allowed AI Agents to transition from the uncertain Alpha stage to the profitable and scalable Beta stage. The current enthusiasm for AI Agent infrastructure is just the beginning; the market's demand for on-chain intelligent infrastructure is rapidly expanding, and more projects with clear positioning, complementary functions, and valuations that have not been fully explored may gradually be discovered by the market.

AI Agent is not the destination, but the starting point: In the future crypto market, AI Agent will not only be a component of the ecosystem but also an important driving force to advance the entire ecosystem. The infrastructure is the foundation of the ecosystem, and behind any major trend, its support is indispensable. The market's recognition of this value is just a matter of time.