Author: 0xJeff
Compiled by: Tim, PANews
By mid-July, the macro situation was improving, with Bitcoin hitting a new all-time high, while Ethereum prices re-crossed $3,000 for the first time in many years.
Ethereum's recovery provides the strongest impetus for the "Ethereum beta" narrative, driving the collective strengthening of mainstream tokens in the Ethereum mainnet and major Layer2 ecosystems.
Strong institutional inflows are driving long-term bullish sentiment in mainstream assets, while some investors remain cautious ahead of CPI, PPI data and the Federal Reserve's statement on rate cuts in 2025.
Although in the previous cycle, altcoins generally followed the trend of Bitcoin price significantly, in this round of market we observed a more significant price correlation between Ethereum and altcoins (especially AI-type altcoins).
In summary, here are some important developments and trends in the Web3 AI field this week that are worth paying attention to.
1.Virtuals: Building core products
Virtuals has achieved remarkable results in building a vibrant ecosystem, with more than 50,000 investors actively participating and investing in AI agent tokens.
While most activity in the past has been focused on the trading space, Virtuals is now trying to take advantage of its large community and convert them into product users.
ACP's core value has great potential: as a project owner, you can directly reach more than 50,000 users and realize first-day monetization; as a user, you can use the "Butler" agent tool to find the products you need (through an interactive interface similar to ChatGPT, you can match the most suitable AI agent to complete the task)
Note: Virtuals ACP is like a "business contract" and common language between AI agents, which stipulates how to initiate cooperation, how to negotiate terms, how to complete transactions, and how to evaluate results.
Virtuals is working hard to optimize the efficiency of ACP, increase the speed of task execution, and reduce AI illusions and errors, but the biggest challenge at present is to discover and create a flagship product that users can use every day, a core product that can actually solve actual pain points and has high value and high user retention rate.
How to do it?
By integrating teams outside of the Virtuals ecosystem (perhaps allowing them to join the ACP in exchange for a certain amount of $VIRTUAL tokens and some kind of community collaboration commitment), and creating a flexible issuance mechanism beyond the current ~$200k fixed pricing, fixed token economics genesis launch model.
As mentioned above, medium-sized and larger teams usually spend 6 to 12 months to build a minimum viable product (MVP) and obtain $15 million to $50 million in private rounds of financing. These teams are often led by founders with serial entrepreneurial experience and recruit AI and machine learning engineers to improve their product systems.
Such high-profile teams will find it difficult to go live on the Virtuals platform and include their products in ACP because they cannot meet the fixed price launch requirement of $200,000.
Once Virtuals is able to accommodate such teams and incubate and support existing teams (especially core native teams), we will most likely usher in the third wave of real Virtuals market.
Currently, we can focus on the price fluctuations of $VIRTUAL, which shows obvious Ethereum beta properties.
2. TAO performs well
TAO prices have increased by 30% over the past seven days.
The market recovery and the continued rise in institutional adoption rates, coupled with the benchmark effect of "AI Bitcoin", have jointly driven this round of price increases.
Some core subnets have bottomed out, while others have rebounded strongly from key support levels.
It is difficult to determine whether there will be a second wave of dTAO bull market, but considering the current price level, macro sentiment, institutional adoption trends and TAO’s crypto treasury layout, it may be the right time to re-examine the timing of dTAO Alpha token allocation.
3. Almanak Points Program is launched
Almanak, as a trading agent that can expand infrastructure and is also one of the leading teams, has officially launched a points incentive program.
The points program will start on July 14 and end on September 21, and the token issuance is also scheduled to start in September.
Points are earned by performing EV actions such as funding the treasury, deploying custom strategies, introducing more TVL lockup, or simply holding funds in the Almanak wallet.
Almanak is built by a quantitative team for ordinary users, allowing users to build quantitative strategies in just hours instead of weeks. The team pioneered a hybrid model of AI agent clusters and smart contracts (ERC-7540) to build a verifiable and auditable AI infrastructure for large funds and institutions (TVL over $100 million).
In the coming months, we may witness the accelerated emergence of AI tokenized vaults, which will realize intelligent asset operations in mainstream DeFi protocols such as AAVE, Morpho, Fluid, Pendle, etc. by optimizing returns and transaction-based strategies.
Almanak is likely to usher in a new era of DeFAI agents, achieving fully autonomous operation through AI technology and delivering DeFi value directly to end users.
4. StableAI accelerates deployment and promotes widespread application
USD.AI , as one of the leading players in the GPU-powered stablecoin track, has gradually gained market recognition despite still being in the beta stage.
The accumulated TVL has exceeded 35 million US dollars, and the project party has recently deployed the first batch of ROCKCHIP RK3588 server staking services, with an annualized rate of return of up to 15%.
More than 98% of the reserve funds are allocated to U.S. Treasury assets, with an annualized yield of 4.15%, and the remaining 2% obtains an annualized yield of 15% through GPU pledge loans (ROCKCHIP RK3588 servers are the first batch of pledge targets).
The product will soon be open to the public, and a points incentive program may be launched simultaneously.
5. Attention Capital Market
Kaito and Cookie are both planning to launch their attention capital markets. In general, users can determine the amount of tokens they can obtain in the project pre-sale and public offering rounds by holding Yap or Snap platform points and stacking (possible) staked tokens.
It is very likely that when KAITO and COOKIE start announcing their core partners/first batch of launch projects, their tokens will perform very well.
6. Other updates
- CreatorBid’s first v2 version was voted on last Friday, and demand far outstrips supply. The next step is to wait for the team to announce the official launch date (the project is clearly behind schedule — the price of $BID tokens has been sideways due to the slow progress, despite the overall positive market trend).
- CODEC tokens have a strong price trend, AVA, COM, CDX, and BILLY have recovered strongly. The total market value of AI agents has once again exceeded the $10 billion mark (I hope it can stabilize this time and not rise and fall again).
Summarize
Ethereum price broke through $3,000 and Bitcoin hit a record high, which injected strong momentum into the market, especially the beta narrative direction of Ethereum. This trend has been fully reflected in the overall performance of AI tokens.
Virtuals still has the strongest community ecology and development potential, but now it has entered a new stage, shifting from transaction speculation to product-driven. The ACP platform has great potential, but the key now is to create a core product that users can visit every day. Breaking the $200,000 Genesis threshold to introduce external developers and support native teams may trigger the next round of real growth.
TAO continues to demonstrate the benchmark effect of "AI Bitcoin", with a strong rebound in price and institutional narratives still being constructed. Considering the current cycle stage, some dTAO tokens may be worth paying attention to again.
The Almanak Points Program may become a trend leader. If its strategy treasury makes progress, it will clearly point to the next round of DeFAI narrative path. This project may be a more mature DeFAI gameplay: although it is an institutional-level design (built from scratch), the participation threshold is close enough for retail investors to participate easily.
StableAI’s narrative has not yet attracted widespread attention, but it is accelerating penetration. USDai has accumulated more than $35 million in TVL during the closed beta phase, and its public launch may be launched soon (possibly with a points program).
InfoFi is trying to regain its life through the attention capital market. If the projects that Kaito and Cookie platform are about to launch can be implemented as scheduled and show significant growth potential, we may witness this track regaining market attention.
Overall, the market environment is healthier and less noisy, with more focus on real products and infrastructure construction. It seems that we are entering a builder window again, before the next wave of hype comes. Now is the best time to pay close attention and plan ahead.
