Solana AI projects surge despite Trump stealing headlines

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.

---

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.

---

Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

• Blockworks Daily: The newsletter that helps thousands of investors understand crypto and the markets, by Byron Gilliam.
• Empire: Start your morning with the top news and analysis to inform your day in crypto.
• Forward Guidance: Reporting and analysis on the growing intersection of crypto and macroeconomics, policy and finance.
• 0xResearch: Alpha directly in your inbox. Market highlights, data, degen trade ideas, governance updates, token performance and more.
• Lightspeed: Built for Solana investors, developers and community members. The latest from one of crypto’s hottest networks.
• The Drop: For crypto collectors and traders, covering apps, games, memes and more.
• Supply Shock: Tracking Bitcoin’s rise from internet plaything worth less than a penny to global phenomenon disrupting money as we know it.