Ailea Bulletin - DeFAI, Hey Anon, & More: What You Need to Know
AI Mindshare, AI Agents in Gaming & More
We’ve been covering AI a lot recently, with newsletters related to AI agents comprising a significant amount of our coverage recently. Whether it’s via our newsletter, on X, or in reports released on our platform; we’ve been proactive in covering the AI agents space.
To commit to more dedicated coverage, we’ve decided to roll out an AI-agent specific newsletter each week; the Ailea Bulletin.
In this weekly newsletter, we’ll go over some key trends and developments from the past week or so and go over further trends to watch in the days ahead. Whether it’s price action, project updates, and upgrades, or even Web2’s coverage of AI agents, we’re on it.
Read our inaugural edition below ⬇
It is shaping up to be another exciting week in the AI agents space. Even if price action in the broader markets is down, there is still lots to cover. We can observe that the AI agents sector has retreated to $15.7B marketcap, down from a peak of nearly $19B.
Smart engagement and mindshare only continues to increase. AI currently stands at 60% of the total crypto narrative mindshare. Gaming has surprisingly risen to become the third largest narrative (more on this later).
The uptrend in AI mindshare continues, and while mindshare has fallen this past week from over 70% at its peak in 2025, it looks almost safe to say that AI’s mean mindshare is over 50% of the crypto total.
When it comes to price action, AI names across the board are down significantly within the past 48 hours. It’s worth noting however that several names, including large caps and industry leaders, are still positive YTD (past 7 days), a testament to the strength and outperformance of the AI agents sector compared to most alts, which have receded back to levels from December or even earlier.
This looks to be caused by greater short-term macro pressures not necessarily indicative of a prolonged halt to the kind of positive price action market participants are looking forward to in Q1 2025.
Institutional Involvement
We’ve seen how important institutional adoption has been for $BTC and the rest of crypto. This is likely no different for AI agents. While a lot of these agents (particularly AI16Z) have grassroots, open-source roots, partnerships, alignments, and investment from reputable institutions is the next step on the path to increasing legitimacy for the sector.
Whether you want to call it, AI Agents, AgentFi, or now, DeFAI (a sect within the AI agents category), there’s no denying that this entire sector looks bound to boom. And crypto institutions have caught onto this. Market Makers like Wintermute have been involved with Virtuals and other AI agent tokens, while DWF Labs dedicated a $20M fund specifically for AI agents. Aethir has promoted its interest in AI agents, which is significant considering the protocol has a pre-existing $100M ecosystem fund specifically for AI.
Steps like these from large protocols and institutions are crucial for growing the total AI agents marketcap and creating a more sustainable rally beyond copy+paste reply bots.
DeFAI
A new buzzword has hit the AI agents space; DeFAI. No, this phrase isn’t related to Freysa or the FAI token; it refers to use of AI agents in the DeFi services sector.
First coined by @0xJeff, the term refers to AI solutions aimed at abstracting away the complexities of DeFi. This is somewhat adjacent to the broader intents and chain abstraction conversation, a way for humans to interact more naturally with protocols and aggregators.
DeFAI has the ability to iterate upon previous DeFi abstraction efforts by incorporating agents, which can source information, adapt autonomously, and ideally communicate with their deployers/owners better.
Many have expressed the view that the natural next step for AI agents beyond X reply bots is autonomous trading and wallet control. This was always a goal from the start, with both Virtuals and AI16Z building this capability, but these functions have not yet been fully developed. Early agents like Luna on Virtuals already have made onchain transactions with individuals; more activity in this area is the inevitable next step to take AI agents to the next level.
DeFAI refers to AI agents that exist specifically to engage with DeFi and make it easier to use for users. DeFAI has already seen a lot of attention and focus from companies and chains in the space, which brings us to our next topic…
Hey Anon
Within this sector, you’ll notice Hey Anon ($ANON). This might be a bit of a blast to the past for 2nd cyclers, as this project is actually deployed by Daniele Sesta, the man behind WAGMI, Magic Internet Money ($SPELL), and Popsicle Finance, notable projects from last cycle that fetched large TVL and valuations at the peak of the 2021 bull market. These projects largely faded from mainstream crypto view due to some serious allegations involving one of the key team members and his questionable past.
But with $ANON’s significant rally, market participants are forced to pay attention whether they want to or not. Hey Anon’s core capability is serving as a natural language intents layer, facilitated through telegram. You can think of the project as similar to the Telegram trading bots that we saw take off in 2023, but for general-purpose DeFi, including bridging and other activities.
This might be a bit unique compared to the llm X chatbots that have become commonplace in the AI agents space, but it’s not the first time developers have taken a crack at this problem.
There have been other protocols also looking to bring natural language functionality to DeFi, including Aperture Finance and Self Chain.
AI Metaverse Arc?
Last but not least, we’ll discuss an emerging trend; the use of AI agents in games. While most proclaimed the metaverse narrative to be ‘dead’ long ago, if even a fraction of the hype, attention, and capital behind the AI agents narrative can flow downstream to gaming and the metaverse, this could breathe new life into the sector.
Just within the past couple days, Hyperfy initiated a substantial airdrop to $AI16Z holders of size. The Hyperfy team is close-knit with AI16Z, and it’s offerings are somewhat akin to a customizable world builder, as seen with some projects in 2021. The main differentiator here is the explicit emphasis on ELIZA-based agents to live in and interact within Hyperfy worlds.
You can read more about our Hyperfy here.
Beyond Hyperfy, we’ve also seen Virtuals play more into its gaming roots. Virtuals initially launched as a gaming project, and is extremely ‘metaverse-native’ you could say. The project first started as a gaming DAO (PathDAO), which would provide in-game assets to players among other services.
Now, Virtuals is returning to these roots, as a key market for AI agents. Just yesterday, Illivium partnered with Virtuals to bring autonomous agent NPCs into its in-game environment. Illivium is one of the largest crypto games by marketcap ($270M), with over $60M raised to date. Now other large figures in the gaming space have also taken note and speculated on how these agents might be integrated into their games and infrastructure. Below is a tweet from Jihoz, Co-founder of Axie Infinity and the Ronin chain.
This could be an ambitious possibility for the Ronin team to act on, and even if it’s a while before anything comes of this, the fact that the largest teams in the gaming and metaverse sphere are actively committing and speculating around AI agent integration is a testament to the narrative’s wide impact scope. Virtuals will have a twitter space in a few hours to discuss more details about this foray (linked below).
This concludes our first edition of Ailea Bulletin; if you found this informative make sure to share and tag us on X.
Also, stay tuned for more AI product announcements soon…
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