Ailea Bulletin - AI Agents Revival, ARC Launchpad, & More
Virtuals Solana Expansion, $ARC Drama, & More
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The AI agents market has seen somewhat of a resurgence this past week; names like $ARC are up 100% while $AI16Z managed to get back in the green, up 50%. We’ve been very active in covering these moves; earlier this week, we covered Venice ($VVV) in a spotlight series edition, as the token climbed up 100% off the lows. On Monday we released a Thesis on $MOBY, also up nearly 100% off the lows. This isn’t to say all AI agents are doing well, only a handful of strong projects and leading names have had large rebound rallies.
Fortunately, this week saw some progress being made in the agents space beyond price action. In terms of actual developments and project updates, the focus has been all on Solana this past week. In this edition, we’ll go over two main updates; Virtual’s launch on Solana, as well as ARC’s launchpad rollout. These two platforms, with a renewed focus on the Solana ecosystem, not to mention other agents frameworks relevant to the chain, will be very relevant in shifting the economic center of gravity away from Base and the Ethereum ecosystem, and more toward Solana…
Stay informed in the markets ⬇
Virtuals Solana Launch
Virtuals expansion to Solana, first announced at Jupiter’s conference in Istanbul, has been in the works for a few weeks now. By way of Stargate, the VIRTUAL token is not tradable directly on Solana.
Beyond the token, the platform itself is now available on Solana, where users can deploy and trade agent tokens. Some kinks are being worked out with the Solana aggregators and DEXs to ensure that Virtuals unique tokenomics system can be fully replicated on Solana. Some agents that were launched on Base are also having fees directed to creating liquidity on Solana, as opposed to them just being burned.
All in all, the Virtuals team has not squandered the success they found in November and December at all, seen meeting with teams from twitter, investing in new projects, and even expanding capabilities to other chains besides Solana. A Virtuals Solana flagship agent has also made its appearance; TracyAI, which focuses on basketball commentary and analysis. TracyAI is in part backed by Virtuals, also deployed on Solana, somewhat similarly to Luna. This reflects more emphasis on inter-ecosystem partnerships and development within Solana specifically.
TracyAI also has backing from Tristan Thompson, an ex-NBA champion. Hopefully, this backing can go better than Scottie Pippen's recent entrance into the crypto space. It remains to be seen exactly how much the relationship with Thompson and the Cleaveland franchise can be used to leverage distribution across the NBA or even other sports media coverage.
Off to a fast start, the Virtuals team has already secured coverage for TracyAI at NBA all-star weekend, with interaction from leading players in the NBA, as well as mainstream reporters. While this isn’t necessarily indicative of future success, being able to land this kind of star power on seemingly short notice definitely is significant, and it’s worth monitoring if this could transfer to usage of the agent itself or the token.
The market is flush with agent infrastructure, and there is still more being built out, as the sector is young. So, these agent projects with a more narrow focus might be appealing to some, as they can build in a niche with few competitors. Polytrader is another agent we’ve previously covered, focusing specifically on providing insights and an edge on prediction market trading. New entrants in the agents space can potentially set themselves apart with distribution if they’re partnered or integrated with large existing entities, or doubling down on a niche that isn’t yet saturated.
arc_forge Launchpad
Virtuals wasn’t the only agents platform to recently launch on Solana; ARC, after partnering with the Solana Foundation itself to promote AI agent innovation on the chain, rolled out their own launchpad yesterday. This actually saw a significant sell-the-news drop, with some confusion around the launchpad’s UI and more general mixed perceptions around what this means for ARC as a whole. Still, $ARC is up ~100% in the past week, performing the best of the AI agent names.
Previously, ARC had been a highly-adopted framework, focusing on Rust agents specifically. Initially, ARC could be thought of as somewhat high-tech but low-touch, used by developers but not easy to grasp for investors or users in the way that something like AI16Z or Virtuals is/was. By inking several key partnerships with chains and tech providers, and now putting out their own launchpad, the team is looking to take the ARC framework directly to users.
Similar to Virtuals, agent tokens are paired against $ARC, adding a new dynamic to the tokenomics. Right now, the team launched an inaugural agent, AskJimmy. This is the only token on the launchpad right now as the team rolls out functionality. This launchpad was actually only announced via a Twitter space yesterday, the same day that the launchpad itself was released; there was no previous indication that this was in the cards.
While the market may have temporarily taken this as a signal to lock in some gains from the past week, this launchpad demonstrates an ability to ship very quickly, beating out AI16Z to put out a Solana launchpad first. As detailed above, in just a couple of short days, there are now multiple launchpad options for agents on Solana that previously were not there. This will likely grow the divergence that exists between Solana, Base, and any other chains when it comes to where the capital, teams, and activity are regarding all things AI agents.
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