A Review of Five Waves of AI Development in WEB3

We found that every time we start to study the industry, there is always a big market in the crypto market. BTC has broken through 100,000 U, and ETH has even reached 2,500 U.

We found that whenever we started to study the industry, there was always a big market in the crypto market. BTC had broken through 100,000 U, and ETH had even reached 2,500 U. Haha, was it the so-called God rewards hard work? Just kidding, it was actually because the United States and the United Kingdom had reached a trade agreement, and the initial talks between the United States and China were not bad (after Trump’s tweet, the two countries confirmed it). It still showed that the entire crypto industry was still a high-risk financial speculation market. Following the economic environment, it had not yet formed an independent market like gold and oil. This also strengthened our search for breakthroughs in the crypto field that could develop in the long term, and AI + WEB3 was the track we valued most at present.

In this article, we would continue with the previous article and review the five waves of AI development in WEB3 in recent years. Here we would summarise it with a table. Of course, we would focus on the current fifth wave:

A review of five waves of Web3 AI projects

Since the intersection of blockchain and AI, the crypto field had experienced five major waves of AI concept enthusiasm . Each wave of enthusiasm was led by representative projects or events, showing an evolution from pure concept hype to gradual technical exploration.

01. The first wave (early exploration period) - Fetch.AI and other AI concept coins are emerging: new wine in old bottles

As early as 2018-2019, there were projects that tried to combine blockchain and AI concepts, but the impact was very limited. What really triggered the first round of enthusiasm was the market reaction after the launch of ChatGPT in early 2023. OpenAI's ChatGPT became popular at the end of 2022, allowing the public to see that the power of AI had entered the general civilian field. It felt a bit like the explosion of the Internet after the popularization of home computers more than 20 years ago, and the hot sales of smartphones 10 years ago led to the craze for mobile Internet products. The emergence of ChatGPT made ordinary users really feel that it could increase their work efficiency.

It should be said that one of the characteristics of the crypto circle was that "any hot spot can be speculated", so ChatGPT had triggered the Crypto market's infinite imagination of the prospects of "AI + blockchain". Since January 2023, the prices of a batch of early AI concept tokens had risen rapidly, opening the first wave of the market. A typical representative was Fetch.ai (FET): As an early project of Binance Launchpad, claiming to build a decentralized AI agent network, the price of FET tokens rose rapidly in January 2023 (several times in one month), and the market value once exceeded 200 million US dollars. During the same period, AI-related currencies such as SingularityNET (AGIX) and Ocean Protocol (OCEAN) also led the market.

The characteristics of this stage were: old projects tell new stories - many AI concept coins issued from 2017 to 2019 had been revived with the help of ChatGPT and became the focus of capital pursuit. However, at that time, the products of these projects were mostly in the early stage, with few applications, and the increase mainly came from market sentiment and the vision of the AI trend.

02. The Second Wave - This Round of "Crypto Bull Market" Gives Birth to AI Meme Coins

If the continued strength of BTC since the end of 2023 was defined as the core theme of this round of "crypto bull market", then there were only two tracks that had brought a lot of heat in the meantime: one was the inscriptions and runes classified as part of the BTC ecosystem, which had brought a large amount of heat with the issuance of innovative assets; the other was the Meme track.

Some meme projects began to incorporate AI concepts, and as generative AI continued to gain popularity, the Crypto community began to see an AI meme coin craze. A typical case was $TURBO, which was said to be the world's first meme token created by AI. Digital artists used ChatGPT to help design and issue TURBO tokens, with a starting capital of only $69. Unexpectedly, this frog-themed meme coin "planned" by artificial intelligence skyrocketed in a short period of time after its launch, attracting a large number of retail investors. TURBO became popular with its unique story of "AI creating the next great meme coin". After landing on many mainstream exchanges, its price rose hundreds of times in just a few weeks, and its market value once ranked among the ranks of popular meme coins.

The core feature of this wave was that AI has become a gimmick and integrated into the crypto subculture. A large number of new projects claim to