Base's Agent Momentum
View in Browser
Sponsor: Mantle — Mantle is building the largest sustainable hub for onchain finance.
📸 Weekly Market Snapshot: The AI crypto sector's market cap sank to $6.54B, a ~33% decline from last Friday. Driving some of the pain were tariff fears, which rocked the cryptoeconomy at the start of the week. Base-based (haha) AI tokens have faired slightly better, losing ~$1.3B in market share compared to Solana's ~$1.69B, most likely influenced by a flurry of AI announcements in the Base ecosystem in recent days.
| Token prices as of 2pm ET | 24hr | 7d |
|
VIRTUALS $1.21 | ↗ 4.5% | ↘ 42.3% |
|
AI16Z $0.34 | ↗ 12.9% | ↘ 49.2% |
|
AIXBT $0.25 | ↗ 0.3% | ↘ 46.7% |
In recent weeks, the AI crypto market sector has faced a steep 70% correction. What comes next?
The sentiment across the industry is that hype ran ahead of the actual tech, but many builders are seeing the pullback as a chance to double down on real innovation.
In AI Rollup #10, David and Ejaaz break down the selloffs, plus other notable new happenings like the surprise rebounds of Arc and Fartcoin, Virtual Protocol's $2M “fiscal policy” to fund agent development, Coinbase’s AI hackathon, and more.
Get caught up with the full conversation—watch the episode here! 👇
Riding high from last week’s Venice airdrop, Base has continued its hot streak as a hub of agent activity, including the Coinbase Developer Platform (CDP) AI Hackathon, the announcement of new Virtuals ecosystem initiatives, and the release of new Freysa research.
◾️ The CDP AI Hackathon (February 1-2), hosted alongside Anthropic, Replit, and Visa, brought new AI use cases to life.
- Mamoriko, an agent by Moonwell optimizing USDC yield on Base, took 1st place, followed by TweetBounty in 2nd with its AI-driven social media marketing services.
- BitMind won "Best Infrastructure" with its decentralized reputation system, while Whale Tank triumphed in the "Base Track" with its venture capital simulator, where tokens are pitched to AI personalities like Elon Musk.
◾️ Beyond the hackathon, we saw Base’s flagship AI project, Virtuals, expand on its $2M fiscal policy for funding agentic development with the announcement of the Virtuals Partner Network (VPN). Additionally, the Virtuals team dropped by the X (Twitter) offices this week to explore opportunities to work together. Very interesting.
◾️ Last but not least, Freysa—the “break-to-earn” agent turned autonomous framework—had a much-anticipated research piece published by COT Research, highlighting the project's new breed of “sovereign AI agents" that use secure hardware enclaves (TEEs) to protect their operations.
All in all, Base's AI sector has plenty of things to look forward to in the weeks ahead!
Other big news this week...
🤖 AI Crypto
- Crossmint introduced Agent Wallets
- EigenLayer unveiled its Level 1 Agents system
- ElizaOS added support for the Artela, Gaia, and OriginTrail protocols
- FXN, a new AI agent protocol, launched its mainnet
- Griffain launched its Agents Studio
- Limitus is now compatible with Telegram trading bots
- NEAR Foundation launched an AI Agent Fund
- Nillion and io.net are collaborating on privacy-first AI inference
- Project Plutus unveiled its first trading agents
- SwarmNode agents can now connect to +7,000 Zapier apps
- Top Hat is bringing personalized AI agents to Abstract
- Zerebro became the first AI agent validator on Story
📣 General News
📚 Reads
- Are We Agentic? — Elena Burger
- How to Build a Social Media AI Agent — Venice
- The 2013 Bitcoin Era of Decentralized AI — YB
- DeFAI: Achieving the Efficiency Frontier — Sam Ruskin
Experience the next generation of onchain finance with Mantle—where blockchain meets everyday banking. Powered by a $4B treasury, Mantle Network and mETH Protocol, Mantle is launching three innovation pillars: Enhanced Index Fund for optimized crypto exposure, Mantle Banking for blockchain-powered banking, and MantleX for AI-driven innovation. Stay tuned and enter the future of on-chain finance with Mantle.