Base's AI Finalists

Sponsor: Mantle — Mantle is pioneering "Blockchain for Banking,” a revolutionary new category at the intersection of TradFi and Web3.

This week, I was checking out Velvet Capital's app stack. Account abstraction, intent-based trades, and AI agents come together in a really interesting way here.

The star of the show is Velvet Unicorn, which is the brain of the platform's entire DeFAI experience.

This multi-agent AI system is trained for market analysis, onchain trading, and yield strategies across Ethereum, Base, BNB Chain, Sonic, and Solana. Instead of hunting for trends and trades yourself, you ask questions and give commands.

In other words: natural language in, real DeFi execution out.

For example, you can ask Unicorn things like “What tokens are trending on Ethereum right now?” or “Can you find me new pairs with rising volume?”

Thereafter, Unicorn will trawl onchain and social data, surface opportunities, and, if you instruct it to, proceed to execute swap or deposit transactions from your wallet.

You can even prompt Unicorn to scan DeFi pools, compare APYs, and route you into positions with a simple intent like: “Move 500 USDC into the highest-TVL stablecoin farm.”

Plus, if you want to systematize things further, Unicorn plugs into Velvet’s vault system. You can launch a simple onchain portfolio, set what assets can be traded, and then let Unicorn handle rebalancing or idea generation while you retain full control.

The UX is flexible, too. Velvet Unicorn is usable inside the web app or via Telegram if you prefer a chat-first experience. Ultimately, however you want to earn onchain, Unicorn offers a conversational way to get it done. Worth a try, I say!

We have less than two weeks until DevConnect, Ethereum's premier developer conference (and home to the Bankless Summit). 

As an event that turns on nurturing and discovering developer talent, the conference will be a hotbed for technical discussions, hackathons, and competitions — making it an exciting one to track, even for those of us who aren't technical.

Why? Because seeing which projects win or receive additional support can provide edge and early discovery to those following along, alerting us to new teams before the rest of the market catches on.

One particular cohort I'm watching are the AI-related projects that just qualified as finalists in Base Batches' second round, and who will compete at DevConnect.

For context, Base Batches is Base's accelerator-esque program for teams building across two tracks: the Builder track for pre-product teams and the Startup track for teams with live products. The program's been running since early September and is now rapidly approaching its finale on Nov 19th, where Startup track finalists will demo in front of angel investors, VCs, and accelerators for the chance to receive funding and ecosystem support.

Out of the total 50 finalists, 7 of them incorporate or build for AI, targeting a wide variety of use cases from yield to APIs to dating. Below I've profiled these teams, drawing from all available information — some you may already know while others have little public available — to give you a guide to tracking them, discovering new projects, and hopefully gaining market edge in the process.

• Neurobro is a Virtuals-based, AI-powered intelligence platform for tracking and finding alpha. Built for surfacing actionable insights like smart money token accumulation, it maintains a database of both whales and tokens, showing buy/sell volume, latest activity, and realized PnL. Think of it as an AI copilot for onchain intelligence gathering.
• Delta is an AI built by mathematicians, quants, and former hedge-fund ML engineers, designed to capture market-neutral opportunities across DeFi. Backed by grants from Consensys Fellowship, Uniswap Foundation, and Arbitrum, among others, Delta's Dune dashboards show an ROI of 98% since October 7th. It works through Delta-neutral market making on DEXs, yield farming, and other more complex DeFi strategies.
• CODY is an agentic gaming platform aiming to build the first $1B onchain game through social, casual onchain gaming. Playable in both the Base app and Farcaster, CODY already has a token that serves as fuel for game entries, in-game purchases, and rewards. It's positioning itself at the intersection of AI agents and onchain gaming.
• NetMindAI is a fullstack solution for decentralized AI, offering a variety of plug-and-play  API services such as model integration, as well as an MCP hub for integrating with existing services. The platform also provides GPU infrastructure and business solutions, aiming to be a one-stop shop for decentralized AI needs.
• APINowfun is building on x402, creating tokenized APIs that let AI agents directly purchase access using tokens — similar to a vending machine for data and content. Agents can autonomously discover relevant APIs while token holders gain fractional ownership of these flows. Each call burns tokens, creating a deflationary mechanism tied to actual usage.
• Emerge is an AI mini-app for monetizing onchain workflows. Users create content engines by tagging the Emerge agent on Farcaster with aesthetic direction, which then generates a mini-app that others can pay to use. Creators earn rev share on each use, and the team is planning an airdrop post-TGE for both users who spend trying workflows and creators whose workflows generate revenue.
• Call Me Sensei is an onchain AI agent dating game teaching Japanese, available via iOS and Google Play. That's about all the public information available for now, though the concept — blending AI agents, language learning, and dating sim mechanics — is certainly unique among the finalists.

Overall, these seven projects showcase the breadth of what's being built at the intersection of AI and crypto on Base, everything from analytic to consumer.

For those looking to gain edge or discover new projects early, keeping tabs on how these teams perform at Demo Day could prove worthwhile. In the past we’ve seen that when winners receive funding and ecosystem, their token can take off — potentially giving early followers a head start on the market. 

All this is to say, it may be good to set aside some time on the 19th.

Plus, other news this week...

🤖 AI Crypto

• A0x — launches Jessexbt with Jesse Pollak, an AI twin geared towards assisting Base builders
• 🔥 Bittensor — revised TAO emissions system, prioritizing rewards for network utility and inflows over price performance
• DeFiLlama — Released LlamaAI, a DeFI AI assistant for queries and chart construction
• VaderAI — launched EgoPlay v2, decentralized platform rewarding users for daily-life videos to train humanoid AI models
• ZyfAI — Partners with Virtuals and BasisOS to create a Fund of Funds, applying AI to yield generation

📣 General News

• Apple — finalized $1B/yr deal to integrate Google's Gemini into upcoming Siri
• OpenAI — signed multi-year $38B AWS deal for NVIDIA GPU clusters
• 🔥 Moonshot AI — released open-source Kimi K2 Thinking, matching/exceeding GPT-5 & Claude 4.5 Sonnet on benchmarks at far lower cost
• Xania Monet — first AI artist to hit Billboard airplay radio charts post-multimillion-dollar deal

📚 Reads

• 0xJeff — Beginner's Guide to Crypto AI Landscape
• 🔥 Intuition — Agentic SwarmsERC-8004, x402, and the AI Sovereignty Alliance
• Miles Deutscher — Crypto x AI: The Future of The Industry (Deep Dive)

UR, the world's first money app built fully onchain, transforms Mantle Network into a purpose-built vertical platform — the Blockchain for Banking — that enables financial services onchain. Mantle leads the establishment of Blockchain for Banking as the next frontier.

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