Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Asher (@Asher_ 0210)_

Moltbook Changes the Starting Point of AI Agent Discussion

The concept of AI Agent is not unfamiliar in the world of Web3.

At the beginning of 2025, it was one of the hottest narratives, only to be quickly disproven by the market in a short time. In the first wave of AI Agents, many leading projects, such as ai16z and swarms, were actively updating their project codes and iterating their products. However, the reality is that these efforts did not yield truly sustainable products or business models.

What the market was buying at that time was less about utility and more about a collective FOMO towards the "AI Agent narrative." Once the excitement faded, token prices quickly fell, and the entire sector's market value collapsed.

During that wave, I was not a bystander.

In the first wave of AI Agents, I did make money (related content: 88 times heavy investment diamond hand's confession: why I chose ai16z). But after that market ended, as the overall market value of the sector continued to plummet, I also gave back a lot of profits. It was precisely because I experienced this wave firsthand that I almost stopped paying attention to this direction for a long time— in my view, AI Agents are a trend, but Web3 is not the most reasonable landing point for them.

Until recently, an experiment called Moltbook, seemingly unrelated to crypto, brought the AI Agent track back into my view. What really made me stop and look was not its product form, but the way it was quickly captured and priced by market sentiment.

Moltbook is a social network that only allows AI Agents to speak. Humans cannot post, comment, or vote; they can only observe. From a product perspective, it cannot be called "useful"; but from a market perspective, it created a highly impactful scenario: a large number of AI Agents continuously interact, debate, and collaborate in a public space without intervention, even spontaneously forming culture and narratives (related content: From Moltbook to MOLT: How the imagination of AI autonomy was caught by the crypto market?).

More importantly, the setting of "human silence, AI freedom" was quickly priced emotionally by the crypto market. Even against the backdrop of a sluggish on-chain market, the Meme coin MOLT, derived from Moltbook, still achieved tens of times increase in a single day within a very short time, with its market value once soaring to 120 million dollars.

This was not because Moltbook itself solved any Web3 problems, but because the market began to buy into "the AI Agent itself" after a long time.

The truly important aspect of Moltbook is not its product design, but that it did a very simple thing: it placed AI Agents in a long-term, unmonitored public space. The result is that these Agents are no longer just tools being called upon, but a continuously interacting, self-evolving community.

This also naturally changed the questions being asked. The focus of discussion is no longer whether AI Agents can help people work, but whether Web3 can still participate when Agents exist in this way, and whether this means a new market trend is brewing.

In my view, whether to fully review the successes and failures of the first wave of AI Agents is no longer that important. What is truly worth discussing is whether phenomena like Moltbook signify a change in the way AI Agents exist, and whether this could open a new window for participation in Web3.

How Should the AI Agent Track Be Repriced After Moltbook?

If the core of pricing in the first wave of AI Agents was about "how big the narrative is," then after Moltbook, the market began to show a distinctly different tendency.

In the Moltbook experiment, almost no one truly cared about its product functionality. It does not enhance efficiency, does not directly create revenue, and certainly does not have a clear business model. Yet, even so, the market quickly generated a large number of related concept Meme coins around it, pricing them with extremely aggressive sentiment. This indicates that the market's focus has shifted from "what AI Agents can do" to "how Agents exist."

This shift directly changed the pricing logic of AI Agents. In the first wave of the market, Agents were more like narrative carriers packaged as "high-end tools." Whether they were actually used or produced results did not have a lasting impact on their valuation. But in the context of Moltbook, Agents were placed in a long-term, unmonitored public space, and their value no longer came from a single display of capability, but from continuous existence, ongoing interaction, and collective behavior itself.

This means that the market began to reprice three types of characteristics: the ability to exist continuously, the potential to form collective behavior, and the potential to continuously generate new behaviors and narratives.

From this perspective, the surge of the Meme coin MOLT is not paying for Moltbook's product capabilities, but betting on this form of existence. The market is not pricing how many tasks the Agent has completed, but whether it is worth being observed long-term, compared repeatedly, and continuously projected with sentiment.

In this sense, Moltbook did not answer "how AI Agents can land," but forced the market to confront a more fundamental question: if Agents themselves become objects of pricing, can Web3 still provide new forms of support for this way of existing?

There May Not Be a Big Market Trend in the AI Agent Track in the Short Term, but It’s Worth Reassessing

The Web3 application forms that have emerged around Moltbook are still in a very early stage. Whether it is Agent social, Agent economy, or the more abstract "existence form pricing," there is still a considerable distance from a clear product path and verifiable business model.

At the same time, the current crypto market is not friendly. The overall market sentiment is low, on-chain capital activity is limited, and most new concepts find it difficult to gain sustained attention and funding. In such a market, any expectations that attempt to directly replicate the first wave of AI Agent surges are unrealistic. But precisely because it is difficult to break out of the market in the short term, this phase is more suitable for reassessing the direction itself.

Based on this judgment, my main focus this year remains on tracks like prediction markets and Prep DEX that have already demonstrated real demand. However, beyond that, AI Agents have also begun to re-enter my thinking scope.

Moltbook did not provide a mature product answer, but the way it showcased Agent existence indeed opened up new imaginative space for Web3. I tend to believe that this inspiration will drive more new concepts and projects around AI Agents to emerge in the context of Web3.

This article mainly records my cognitive shift regarding the AI Agent track. In the next article, I will more specifically review the concept projects and tokens related to AI Agents currently in the Web3 ecosystem for everyone's reference, so stay tuned.

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