Original Author: 0xJeff
Original Compilation: Luffy, Foresight News
The crypto market has experienced repeated pullbacks, and liquidity is becoming increasingly thin. Recently launched AI agent projects that have successfully achieved a peak market capitalization (MC) of around $10 million are considered "successful" in that they have achieved product-market fit (PMF), providing value to real users and generating (or about to generate) revenue.
This situation stands in stark contrast to 3 to 4 months ago, when AI agent projects that achieved product-market fit had market capitalizations exceeding $100 million, especially those positioning themselves as "agent + framework/startup platform tokens." For example, $AVA, as a 3D agent, also derives value from its own launch platform and supported projects through its audiovisual layer.
Old Model: Positioning Agents as Frameworks
The past model involved launching an agent project to showcase its capabilities, attracting developers who wanted to build their own agents, and requiring these developers to hold/burn/use their own tokens to gain access to the framework. What was the problem? The crypto Twitter community placed an excessively high premium on framework tokens, and these "framework agents" were largely similar, lacking differentiation. In most cases, they didn't even have a real product, merely boasting on Twitter to drive up token prices.
The first generation of AI agent products primarily consisted of conversational agents. This is unique to the crypto space, as we place more emphasis on community building compared to other fields, similar to a founder-led marketing model (founders gain attention through promotion). Having agents promote on Twitter to increase project visibility seemed like a good idea at first. When this model emerged in November 2024, it was indeed effective. But now, there are 420,690 agents promoting incessantly worldwide, with most content being simple, repetitive, and frankly, quite annoying.
New Model: Positioning Agents as a Business
The old model has been ruthlessly eliminated by the market. If you are still looking to build an AI agent project, here are the thoughts you should have:
Launching an agent project means you will be operating a startup while managing up to three products: the core product, the token, and the agent.
1. Core Product (Actual Business)
Your core product should solve real problems and should not merely be a conversational agent; to become a true product, it needs to provide value to users.
Examples:
A predictive model that can improve betting odds, helping users achieve more wins in sports betting (e.g., @AskBillyBets).
A crypto asset prediction model that optimizes trading, minimizes impermanent loss, and maximizes returns for liquidity providers (LPs) (e.g., @Cod3xOrg, @gizatechxyz, @Almanak__).
An AI agent research search engine that aggregates insights from top-quality information sources like Cookie, Kaito, Nansen, Messari, Aixbt, CoinGecko (CG), Dexscreener, and Bubblemaps to assist in investment decisions (no team has successfully achieved this yet; we need a product similar to Perplexity for AI agents).
Building the core product should be the top priority for every team before launching a token. You need to ensure that there is real market demand for the product and that users are willing to pay for it. Otherwise, you will fall into the "death spiral" of the crypto space, which can be worse than what traditional startups face:
High operational costs.
The cost of acquiring customers through token incentives.
Token price plummets → reputation damaged → no one cares about your project.
If your token price drops significantly, it becomes a curse. In this space, most people won't care about your project, regardless of how it progresses or how strong your core product is.
Do not rely on token incentives; instead, focus on attracting customers through the product and envision a profitable model that balances growth and revenue.
@KaitoAI's model is a great case study:
They developed an enterprise-level product: a crypto search engine focused on social/emotional/narrative aspects, charging users, projects, and ecosystems, providing real value.
They launched the Mindshare Dashboard, a standard tool for tracking narratives and trends.
They further introduced the Yapper leaderboard, allowing key opinion leaders (KOLs) to share spontaneously everywhere, serving as a status symbol.
They also incentivized users to interact on Twitter with real rewards through NFT whitelists and $KAITO token airdrops.
While Kaito's model is difficult to replicate, the experience tells us: first find product-market fit, achieve revenue, and excite people about the project before launching a token. Once you gain attention (hype) and revenue, launching a token can elevate the project to new heights.
Moreover, communication is crucial. Many projects have excellent products but fail in communication. If no one knows what you are doing, no one will care about your project.
2. Token (Coordination Tool)
We have shifted from the "VC token" model to a "fair issuance" model that advocates for high circulation and low fully diluted valuation (FDV) tokens. However, fair issuance is not truly fair; every token issuance strategy has its pros and cons.
If you launch the token for your agent project with a high circulation and low fully diluted valuation structure, you will be unable to raise funds from venture capital (VC) and angel investors (due to the lower valuation). However, you can use the token as a marketing tool to enhance project visibility.
Many teams will launch two types of tokens:
Agent token: used to enhance project visibility.
Ecosystem token: to raise funds from venture capitalists and angel investors at a higher valuation.
But this leads to inconsistent expectations. The community expects airdrops, and when the ecosystem token is launched, funds will flow from the agent token to the ecosystem token, causing the agent token price to plummet.
Managing the core product, agent token, and ecosystem token while ensuring that each part accumulates value is extremely complex and challenging.
Ideally, there should be a token that can accumulate all value from the core product. Historically, only projects that can generate revenue and funnel that revenue back to the token (through buybacks or profit sharing) can survive in the long term.
Tokens should complement the core product, not be a necessity.
3. Agent (Supplementary Product)
Here, "agent" refers to conversational agents built using frameworks like ElizaOS, G.A.M.E, ARC, Pippin, etc.
While these agents integrate on-chain and off-chain functionalities, they should complement the core product.
Agents should enhance the core product by changing the user funnel:
Instead of having users seek out and use your product, have the agent push the product to users.
This may mean: using agents on Twitter to directly showcase the product in text or video form.
Using agents as AI assistants to change the way users interact (similar to the abstract model of ChatGPT).
The agent itself serves as an interface, executing tasks in the background.
However, there are exceptions. Aixbt is an example, providing real-time social and emotional insights from Twitter, allowing users to access high-quality signals earlier than others. Aixbt has become the number one KOL in the crypto Twitter space by continuously providing quality information, showcasing the powerful capabilities of its terminal. In this case, the agent itself is the product.
However, this is extremely difficult to replicate. Most teams should first focus on strengthening their core product.
Cookie DAO is an excellent research case that prioritizes the product:
Starting with a free AI agent dashboard to acquire users.
Transitioning to a freemium model, locking COOKIE tokens to unlock premium features.
Monetizing by providing APIs for projects and agents.
Launching Agent Cookie to push insights directly to Twitter.
Conclusion
During the period from 2020 to 2021, you needed to have Solidity programming knowledge to launch a token. Now, platforms like Pump.fun make tokenization of anything incredibly easy.
This has changed the way people think; they no longer focus on building real products but instead launch tokens directly. It's like "garbage in, garbage out," with funds flowing from one garbage project to another.
We need to change this situation.
To build sustainable projects, we should operate agent projects as startups. Do not just think about attracting attention from the crypto Twitter community or raising funds from venture capitalists and angel investors; instead, create products with lasting value, not just for the next 6 months, but for the next 6 years.
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