Competition in the AI + Crypto track

In the AI + Crypto ecosystem on the BAS chain, in addition to the Virtual platform, there is another platform that has recently been gaining more attention from participants, and that is

This platform has actually been around for a long time, probably around October last year, when I was following Virtual, I also saw this platform.

However, at that time, the performance of this platform was quite ordinary, and I couldn't see anything particularly special about it. Its operations were also inferior to Virtual, and it had not publicly expressed ideas and visions like the Virtual team did during interviews.

So soon my attention was no longer on it.

In April this year, when Virtual launched the Genesis Launches platform, the Virtual ecosystem became lively again. At that time, I looked at other AI platforms that had once been popular (such as Solana and zkSync), and they still hadn't shown any significant improvement, and the performance of this platform was also mediocre.

Until recently, it seems that more and more people on Twitter have started discussing it.

Creator.bid is deployed on multiple EVM chains, but the AI Agents it supports are mostly BASE, which is why BASE is its main battleground.

In addition to creator.bid, there is another ecosystem that is very active on a small scale, which is clanker.world. It is also an ecosystem on BASE.

Among these three ecosystems, Clanker mainly relies on Farcaster, resembling more of a toy or experiment in a geeky niche rather than a commercial application.

Creator.bid and Virtual are clearly more application-oriented and aimed at the general public.

Creator.bid has a significant difference from Virtual: many of the AI Agents on it are related to Bittensor and are specific AI Agent applications on the Bittensor subnet.

There are some articles online comparing the pros and cons of creator.bid and Virtual, emphasizing the transparency of the points system and the flexibility of the penalty mechanism in creator.bid.

But I think that even so, its role can only be short-term. In the long run, whether it's creator.bid or Virtual, the key to their future success lies in nurturing AI Agents that can create value. Ideally, it would be to cultivate an ecosystem of AI Agents that can generate value.

In this regard, creator.bid seems to rely more on the operation of Bittensor, while Virtual mainly relies on its own efforts, especially promoting its self-developed ACP.

Regardless of how the development of these platforms/ecosystems ultimately turns out, one thing is precious: they are able to rise again from the collapse of the entire ecosystem at the beginning of the year and attract participants once more.

Their resurgence has not only driven the development of their respective projects but has also propelled the growth of the entire BASE ecosystem in AI + Crypto.

This reminds me of Solana, which was the first to rise in the AI + Crypto track, the first AI meme coin, the first AI framework... all of which were born on the Solana platform.

However, after the collapse of the AI + Crypto ecosystem at the beginning of the year, there have been hardly any projects in the Solana ecosystem that have shown significant improvement, and even the Twitter account of the first AI framework project has been suspended for various reasons.

Currently, the only remaining fruitful applications of the AI + Crypto ecosystem in the entire crypto ecosystem are in the Ethereum ecosystem, more precisely in BAS.

In the face of this situation, as a participant, should one be pessimistic or optimistic?

The reason for my pessimism is that it differs from the previous round of DeFi and NFT development. In the last round, there were popular projects on multiple blockchains, such as Ethereum, BSC, and Solana, while now there are only popular projects on the BASE chain.

If all these platforms/ecosystems on BASE fail, it means that all promising disruptive innovative applications in this round of the crypto ecosystem will perish.

The optimism comes from the fact that there are several distinctive platforms competing and performing together on an on-chain (BASE), which is greatly beneficial for the development of their respective ecosystems.

Generally speaking, projects that can come back to life and rise from the trough have stronger vitality and are more likely to succeed. In the AI + Crypto space, currently only a few platforms have demonstrated this vitality and possibility.

Therefore, based on the current development trend, if the AI + Crypto track can succeed, the final winner is likely to be the ecosystem of the BASE chain.