Cracks in the Decentralized-AI Bloc: Why Ocean Protocol Walked Away from the ASI Alliance
One-Year Marriage, One-Day Divorce On 9 October 2025 the Ocean Protocol Foundation abruptly resigned from the Artificial Super-intelligence (ASI) Alliance, dissolving the token-merge pact it had signed barely eighteen months earlier with Fetch.ai, SingularityNET and, later, CUDOS. The departure is more than a personnel change: it unwinds roughly 81 % of OCEAN’s circulating supply that had already been converted into FET (now rebranded ASI) and forces the remaining bloc to re-imagine what “dec...
Retail Traders in the 2025 Bull: Hearing the Roar, Never Tasting the Steak
When the Chat Goes Silent “The bull is back, so why are all the Telegram groups dead?” asked user CheesyMac in the Opensky community. “Because everyone’s either in cash or short,” replied Niner. For veterans like Niner, the current run should have been a goldmine. Yet, like many, he admits: “I haven’t made a dime.” Johhny, a full-time trader, echoes the sentiment: “Ever since Trump launched TRUMP, I’ve been bleeding.” They are not outliers. Wagmi Capital partner Mark estimates “90 % of retail...
Why Can’t Buybacks Save DeFi?
The 2025 DeFi Buyback Wave: Leading DeFi protocols spent approximately $800 million on buybacks and dividends in 2025—a 400% increase from early 2024—aiming to boost confidence by emulating public company strategies. Key Project Case Studies:Aave: Conducts weekly buybacks of ~$1 million in AAVE tokens, yet reported negative book profits after the pilot phase.MakerDAO: Uses DAI surplus via its Smart Burn engine to repurchase MKR, but the token price remains at only one-third of its all-time hi...
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Crypto AI Great Shuffle: Virtuals Fall Out of Favor, DeFAI and Prediction AI Grab the Mic
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Crypto AI Great Shuffle: Virtuals Fall Out of Favor, DeFAI and Prediction AI Grab the Mic
Cracks in the Decentralized-AI Bloc: Why Ocean Protocol Walked Away from the ASI Alliance
One-Year Marriage, One-Day Divorce On 9 October 2025 the Ocean Protocol Foundation abruptly resigned from the Artificial Super-intelligence (ASI) Alliance, dissolving the token-merge pact it had signed barely eighteen months earlier with Fetch.ai, SingularityNET and, later, CUDOS. The departure is more than a personnel change: it unwinds roughly 81 % of OCEAN’s circulating supply that had already been converted into FET (now rebranded ASI) and forces the remaining bloc to re-imagine what “dec...
Retail Traders in the 2025 Bull: Hearing the Roar, Never Tasting the Steak
When the Chat Goes Silent “The bull is back, so why are all the Telegram groups dead?” asked user CheesyMac in the Opensky community. “Because everyone’s either in cash or short,” replied Niner. For veterans like Niner, the current run should have been a goldmine. Yet, like many, he admits: “I haven’t made a dime.” Johhny, a full-time trader, echoes the sentiment: “Ever since Trump launched TRUMP, I’ve been bleeding.” They are not outliers. Wagmi Capital partner Mark estimates “90 % of retail...
Why Can’t Buybacks Save DeFi?
The 2025 DeFi Buyback Wave: Leading DeFi protocols spent approximately $800 million on buybacks and dividends in 2025—a 400% increase from early 2024—aiming to boost confidence by emulating public company strategies. Key Project Case Studies:Aave: Conducts weekly buybacks of ~$1 million in AAVE tokens, yet reported negative book profits after the pilot phase.MakerDAO: Uses DAI surplus via its Smart Burn engine to repurchase MKR, but the token price remains at only one-third of its all-time hi...
From Hype to Product: The Agent Market Grows Up
Since May, when we last mapped the mainstream AI trade, two things have dried up: retail appetite and the fire-hose of fair-launch agent tokens. Liquidity fragmented, CT was buried in AI slop, and pumps lost their horsepower. Q1–Q2’s meme-of-the-week (Trump coins, celebrity coins, Pump.ICOs) siphoned off whatever attention was left, starving the AI vertical.
The result: only products that actually do something are climbing the ranks now.
Virtuals: From Darling to Dumping Ground
Virtuals still has the largest dev pool, but the conveyor belt of shiny Genesis launches has stalled. Without fresh tickers every week, the “points” economy collapsed and mercenary capital rotated out.
Smart money is now hunting inside existing Virtuals teams that ship real upgrades:
ArAIstotle – AI fact-checking dashboard already used by media outlets.
PredictBase – decentralized prediction market, live on Base.
Mamo – personal-finance agent from the Moonwell crew.
Billy Bets – sports-betting engine + odds aggregator.
Backroom – AI-curated SocialFi feed.
Expect scarcity to persist—10-50× outliers will appear, but only for tourists who dig deeper than the front page.
New Agent Ecosystems on the Rise
Investors are reallocating to younger neighborhoods that lead with product instead of token:
CreatorBid – cherry-picks teams, forces them to launch via Bittensor subnets with day-one utility; already captured mind-share and TVL.
Holoworld – “HoloDraw” launchpad turns IDO into a 0.5 SOL lottery ticket; 35 % supply raffled, 5 % consolation pool. HOLO listed on Upbit at $1.5 B FDV and still holding.
OpenServ – incubator keeps tokens in the drawer until revenue is proven; building open-source n8n for decentralized automation.
Arc, Loomlay, ElizaOS – all product-first, token-second; worth tracking GitHub commits before TGE.
Decentralized AI (DeAI): Where Institutions Still Write Checks
Fat-protocol whales aren’t buying dog-themed agents; they’re buying pick-and-shovel rails:
Compute: Aethir (8-figure annual revenue), Chutes (500-1000 B tokens served/day via open-router).
Privacy: Flock ships federated-learning SDKs to UNDP and Hong Kong gov; monetizes both SaaS and token.
Darwinian nets: Bittensor expanded to 128 subnets; Sentient’s GRID lets models evolve by competitive mating.
Data/RLHF: SapienAI, FractionAI, PerleAI, PublicAI, Synesis One – turn token incentives into global click-work farms that label, rank and correct data 70 % cheaper than AWS SageMaker.
Prediction subnets are already beating SOTA benchmarks and making money: SN44 (sports odds) is deployed by a top-3 hedge fund managing $300 m off-chain AUM.
DeFAI: From Chat-GPT Wrapper to Autonomous CFO
Quarter-by-quarter evolution:
Q1 – cute bots that quoted APRs.
Q2 – personal agents that actually moved user funds on approval.
Q3 – fully autonomous CFOs running 24/7 on audited vaults.
Giza alone has processed ~$2 B agent-volume and manages $20 m non-custodially.
Swarm Finance + Pulse (Pendle agent) autonomously chase the best fixed-rate or LP yield every hour.
Almanak keeps AI outside the vault—agents publish asynchronous, tokenized strategies; investors opt-in via smart contract, eliminating smart-contract risk from hallucinations or prompt hacks. Launch a quant strat in minutes, not weeks.
Watch-list: Giza, Almanak, Cod3x, Theoriq.
What Happens Next? Three High-Conviction Bets
Prediction AI – TAM is all human curiosity. Consumer apps that abstract Polymarket/Kalshi plumbing and plug into TikTok-level funnels will print fees. AI market-makers (numerical, not tweet-based) finally solve liquidity fragmentation.
Data Moats – Useful data is the new oil. Web3 data rails that can ship annotated, RLHF-grade datasets to both Web2 and Web3 labs will be able to charge real premiums in Q4.
DeFAI as DeFi Growth Engine – The next 100 b in TVL will come from agents parking user stable-coins into AAVE, Pendle, Fluid, Uniswap, Aerodrome programmatically. The winners will be boring infrastructure plays—vault standards, risk护栏, MEV-proof execution layers.
Closing: Boring Is the New Black
Most tokens will die; attention will scatter; tourists will leave.
The foundations of the next wave are being poured now—in infra, privacy, data, and yield-bearing agents. The biggest winners will look mind-numbingly dull until the day they suddenly don’t.
Solve a real problem, hoard sticky users, build anti-fragile products—and let the narrative cycle catch up to you.
From Hype to Product: The Agent Market Grows Up
Since May, when we last mapped the mainstream AI trade, two things have dried up: retail appetite and the fire-hose of fair-launch agent tokens. Liquidity fragmented, CT was buried in AI slop, and pumps lost their horsepower. Q1–Q2’s meme-of-the-week (Trump coins, celebrity coins, Pump.ICOs) siphoned off whatever attention was left, starving the AI vertical.
The result: only products that actually do something are climbing the ranks now.
Virtuals: From Darling to Dumping Ground
Virtuals still has the largest dev pool, but the conveyor belt of shiny Genesis launches has stalled. Without fresh tickers every week, the “points” economy collapsed and mercenary capital rotated out.
Smart money is now hunting inside existing Virtuals teams that ship real upgrades:
ArAIstotle – AI fact-checking dashboard already used by media outlets.
PredictBase – decentralized prediction market, live on Base.
Mamo – personal-finance agent from the Moonwell crew.
Billy Bets – sports-betting engine + odds aggregator.
Backroom – AI-curated SocialFi feed.
Expect scarcity to persist—10-50× outliers will appear, but only for tourists who dig deeper than the front page.
New Agent Ecosystems on the Rise
Investors are reallocating to younger neighborhoods that lead with product instead of token:
CreatorBid – cherry-picks teams, forces them to launch via Bittensor subnets with day-one utility; already captured mind-share and TVL.
Holoworld – “HoloDraw” launchpad turns IDO into a 0.5 SOL lottery ticket; 35 % supply raffled, 5 % consolation pool. HOLO listed on Upbit at $1.5 B FDV and still holding.
OpenServ – incubator keeps tokens in the drawer until revenue is proven; building open-source n8n for decentralized automation.
Arc, Loomlay, ElizaOS – all product-first, token-second; worth tracking GitHub commits before TGE.
Decentralized AI (DeAI): Where Institutions Still Write Checks
Fat-protocol whales aren’t buying dog-themed agents; they’re buying pick-and-shovel rails:
Compute: Aethir (8-figure annual revenue), Chutes (500-1000 B tokens served/day via open-router).
Privacy: Flock ships federated-learning SDKs to UNDP and Hong Kong gov; monetizes both SaaS and token.
Darwinian nets: Bittensor expanded to 128 subnets; Sentient’s GRID lets models evolve by competitive mating.
Data/RLHF: SapienAI, FractionAI, PerleAI, PublicAI, Synesis One – turn token incentives into global click-work farms that label, rank and correct data 70 % cheaper than AWS SageMaker.
Prediction subnets are already beating SOTA benchmarks and making money: SN44 (sports odds) is deployed by a top-3 hedge fund managing $300 m off-chain AUM.
DeFAI: From Chat-GPT Wrapper to Autonomous CFO
Quarter-by-quarter evolution:
Q1 – cute bots that quoted APRs.
Q2 – personal agents that actually moved user funds on approval.
Q3 – fully autonomous CFOs running 24/7 on audited vaults.
Giza alone has processed ~$2 B agent-volume and manages $20 m non-custodially.
Swarm Finance + Pulse (Pendle agent) autonomously chase the best fixed-rate or LP yield every hour.
Almanak keeps AI outside the vault—agents publish asynchronous, tokenized strategies; investors opt-in via smart contract, eliminating smart-contract risk from hallucinations or prompt hacks. Launch a quant strat in minutes, not weeks.
Watch-list: Giza, Almanak, Cod3x, Theoriq.
What Happens Next? Three High-Conviction Bets
Prediction AI – TAM is all human curiosity. Consumer apps that abstract Polymarket/Kalshi plumbing and plug into TikTok-level funnels will print fees. AI market-makers (numerical, not tweet-based) finally solve liquidity fragmentation.
Data Moats – Useful data is the new oil. Web3 data rails that can ship annotated, RLHF-grade datasets to both Web2 and Web3 labs will be able to charge real premiums in Q4.
DeFAI as DeFi Growth Engine – The next 100 b in TVL will come from agents parking user stable-coins into AAVE, Pendle, Fluid, Uniswap, Aerodrome programmatically. The winners will be boring infrastructure plays—vault standards, risk护栏, MEV-proof execution layers.
Closing: Boring Is the New Black
Most tokens will die; attention will scatter; tourists will leave.
The foundations of the next wave are being poured now—in infra, privacy, data, and yield-bearing agents. The biggest winners will look mind-numbingly dull until the day they suddenly don’t.
Solve a real problem, hoard sticky users, build anti-fragile products—and let the narrative cycle catch up to you.
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