The Rise and Fall of Crypto AI: What Sparks Remain After the Bubble Bursts?

Truth Terminal ($GOAT) kicked off the crypto AI market in October 2024. What followed was wild. By early 2025, crypto AI agents hit a mind-boggling $10 billion market cap. Then came the crash.

Phase One: Speculation, Bubble, and Experimentation

Weekly tokens popped up like mushrooms. Each one quickly hitting $50 million valuations. Some called themselves "L1 for AI agents" - whatever that means. ChatGPT copycats like griffain, Venice, and Wayfinder somehow reached $500 million+ valuations. Just demos, really. Nothing substantial. People talked big about autonomous hedge funds. White papers only.

Phase Two: Decline

The months from February through September 2025? Brutal.

TRUMP token sucked all the oxygen out. Most AI tokens dropped 50-90% overnight. Developers vanished. Those $1-100 million tokens? Their founders stopped releasing demos. Gone quiet.

Over 90% of teams just gave up. Not enough tokens left. Values too low. Communities fell apart - no lambos appeared as promised. Big names crumbled. Zerebro paused everything. Griffain went silent. Ai16z started pushing Memecoins instead.

Ethereum and BNB Chain still dominate stablecoin metrics. The crypto market sits around $2.86 billion in 2025. Might reach $5.39 billion by 2029. That's 17.2% growth yearly, they say.

Current State of Crypto x AI

Chat frontends? Still broken. Like 40-50 teams built Griffain and Venice clones. None work right. Try swapping 10 SOL for USDC - takes forever. 8-10 seconds! Just click the buttons yourself instead.

AI agent infrastructure story collapsed. Open-source frameworks can't make money. No value capture. Token platforms keep making memes. Nothing new.

Market cap shrunk dramatically. Now we see ai16z ($150M), alch ($140M), goat ($100M), griffain ($50M), act ($40M), zerebro ($31M), buzz ($9M). Just AI Memecoins now. Development? Kinda dead.

Future Hopes for Crypto X AI

Near-term Development (6-12 months)

1. Agent chat optimization Crypto AI chats still feel primitive. Tool invocation needs work. But newer models look promising - Claude Sonnet 4, Kimi K 2. Multi-chain protocol servers might standardize things. On-chain AI agents with wallets seem interesting.

2. Consumer-grade crypto x AI (using vibe coding) AI content plus tokenomics creates something special. Content costs keep dropping. Financial launches get cheaper. It seems this combo enables new internet capital markets. Think games where everything gets tokenized, like Vibe Game on Solana.

Long-term Development (1+ years)

1. Agents as "Trojan horses" for stablecoin adoption AI agents with wallets want stablecoins. Makes sense. This could push crypto payments mainstream. Pay-per-API calls. Revenue-sharing instead of ads.

2. AI integration across crypto protocols Every crypto protocol will get AI features. DeFi strategies with context. Financial assets that explain themselves. New trading behaviors. Social products with embedded crypto.

3. Crypto economic coordination networks for AI Moving past training/inference to tool stacks. Crypto might solve AI verification problems. Launch capital for new AI communities.

4. Composable personal context layer On-chain context and memory. Personalized experiences across LLMs. Maybe even "context trading" - worth more than traditional IP.

5. Chat-based crypto super applications Interfaces shifting from clicking to talking. Agents intercepting your intentions. Minimal but flexible chat interfaces. AI agent browsers could be huge.

Crypto and AI together? A builder's paradise. As 2025 winds down, we're probably due for crypto AI's second wave. Token Metrics thinks Bitcoin could hit $230,000 by 2026. Not entirely clear if that's realistic, but the broader market looks poised for something big.