Howdy!

I’m headed up to Buffalo this weekend to catch the Bills-Chiefs game on Sunday. I’m hoping to jump through a table and see Taylor Swift, but most of all I’m hoping for a Bills victory over the evil galactic empire!

Today we’ve got AI and crypto, stablecoin stagnation, and stories you may have missed this week.

Solana AI projects surge despite Trump stealing headlines

A month ago, Solana’s onchain demand metrics spiked to all-time highs after a viral AI memecoin set the trading world alight with fresh interest in AI-crypto integrations. The joke at the time was that a weird AI chat bot had upstaged Donald Trump’s World Liberty Financial crypto token launch.

That order of things wouldn’t last long however, as Trump’s presidential election win sent crypto markets surging and overshadowed the resurgent AI-crypto interest. Still, the AI projects spawned and spotlighted during October’s rally have continued apace, even if their star now shines a little less brightly.

There’s still the goat-themed token that started it all, whose chat bot will occasionally post about tokens on X but spends most of its time consumed with edgy posts and uncanny valley AI art. That hasn’t stopped its coin from surging to over $1.1 billion in market capitalization however, leaving the AI bot’s public wallet with almost half a billion-worth in crypto.

Truth_terminal set off a wave of interest surrounding AI agents who interact with humans to do some kind of blockchain action. 

Virtuals Protocol is one such project on the Base layer-2. “Pump dot fun for AI agents” lets users purchase tokens associated with autonomous AI agents in hopes of the AI bots attracting more investment as they do more interesting things. The most popular Virtuals agent has sprung to $115 million in market capitalization, a 106% increase over the past 24 hours as much of the Ethereum community gathers for Devcon in Thailand.

But memecoins are the center of the late AI hype, and Solana is the center of memecoins. One new project in this domain is ai16z, a group that has an AI bot which invests in memecoins based on the recommendations of its members. The project came out of daos.fun, a new crowdfunding mechanism for DAOs on Solana spun up at Alliance DAO. Ai16z’s AI version of Marc Andreessen also drew a social media shoutout from the real life version of the a16z boss, which is apparently becoming an important component of launching a crypto-AI project.

There are also crypto-AI outfits with grander ambitions. This week, I spoke to Ryan Trattner from DAIN protocol, which is a network for onchain AI apps and bots. Trattner, who was formerly a contractor at the Solana University non-profit, thinks that the future will comprise many AI agents doing different things, so he’s helping build DAIN to house them all. He demonstrated to me how an AI agent on the network can order a Chick-Fil-A sandwich and how a different one could trade bitcoin based on Polymarket’s presidential election odds. 

Trattner said DAIN could let him “order food in the same [interface] where I'm trading my memecoins.” That doesn’t strike me as the most in-demand use for AI, but then again, with bitcoin shooting above $90,000, everything seems to be on the table right now.

So even though the headlines and X feeds seemed to have cooled on AI-crypto integrations for the moment, those AI-crypto startups don’t seem to be losing steam.

— Jack Kubinec

It’s a bullish year for Solana, but no one seems to have told the stablecoins: 

Solana has roughly $4 billion in stablecoin market capitalization, a paltry figure next to Ethereum’s $93.5 billion, according to DeFiLlama.

My guess for the cause here would be that Solana traders are passing up stablecoin exposure to traffic in memecoins, and platforms like pump.fun and Moonshot don’t require users to deposit stablecoins to place trades.

Plus, the cycle’s app darling in Polymarket, which settles with USDC, was built on Polygon.

— Jack Kubinec

ICYMI — Stories you may have missed from Solana land this week:

• Solana’s memecoin market cap surpassed $21 billion, hitting a new all-time high.

• Robinhood relisted solana in the US after removing it in June 2023, following SEC scrutiny.

• Coinbase announced the listing of Solana-based memecoin $WIF, expanding its offerings in the memecoin market.

• PayPal integrated LayerZero’s interoperability tech, enabling seamless $PYUSD transfers between Ethereum and Solana for self-custody users.

• Claynosaurz teased a prototype with Gameloft showcasing interoperable assets expanding into console gaming using Unreal Engine.

• Huma Finance launched its PayFi protocol on Solana to deliver instant liquidity solutions for global businesses.

• Pulse, an open health network prioritizing data privacy and user ownership, raised $1.8M in pre-seed funding co-led by Lemniscap and Collab+Currency, with support from Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.

• NYSE Arca submitted a filing to uplist the Bitwise 10 Crypto Index Fund, featuring SOL, as an exchange-traded product.

• ALLMIGHT, created by former Solana Foundation employee Ricoy, is setting out to accelerate US leadership in crypto through a VIP Social Mixer Tour across major cities.

• Calaxy announced WORLDS on Solana, a SocialFi platform enabling builders to create token-gated, subscription-based, and open communities.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Ryan Connor, research manager at Blockworks Research: