New and Old AI Concept Tokens: A Comparative Analysis

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Original｜Odaily Planet Daily

Author: Wenser

At the CES2025 U.S. Consumer Electronics Show on January 7, Nvidia founder Jensen Huang, a leading figure in the AI industry, said bluntly : "AI Agent is expected to become the next robotics industry, with an industry scale of trillions of dollars." Although the audience at the event had a lukewarm reaction to this bold statement, the crypto industry has already bought in to AI Agents. AI Agent-related tokens such as VIRTUAL, ai16z, and swarms have become one of the few focuses of attention in the market recently, and their price trends are still impressive compared to the broader market. In contrast, a number of old-line AI concept-related projects, such as FET, WLD, and ARKM, have been a little lonely recently, and their prices have fallen sharply compared to their highs.

Odaily Planet Daily will conduct a comparative analysis of new and old AI concept tokens in this article to gain a glimpse into the market trends.

Current status of new and old AI concept coins: AI Agent tokens are popular, while AI concept coins are unpopular

From a market perspective, AI Agent tokens represented by VIRTUAL, ai16z, and swarms are undoubtedly the most eye-catching projects at the moment. Compared with AI concept tokens such as FET, WLD, and ARKM, the former not only combines the AI concept, but also has a more ambitious narrative angle, a lower participation threshold, and greater expected returns. The reasons for this are mainly the following:

Market inertia of buying new cars instead of old ones: new cars are easier to carry, old cars are too heavy

As an industry that operates 24/7, the cryptocurrency market’s pursuit of new hot spots and new technologies can be said to be a common industry feature, which has also led to the practice of “speculating on new but not old” tokens: for retail investors and the crypto community, compared with “old AI coins” with a large number of buyers, concentrated distribution of chips, and a large number of locked-in groups, new coins with AI Agent-related concepts are undoubtedly more attractive - the buying threshold is lower, and there are more opportunities to get on board, whether from the perspective of the price of a single token or the overall market value.

Narratives are sexier: AI Agents are far more attractive than just “using AI concepts”

From the perspective of the most discussed narrative in the cryptocurrency industry, events such as AI Agent issuing coins, speculating on coins, publishing social media content and interacting with fans are undoubtedly more interesting, more fun and more discussed than doing a serious project to "hard-core" and try to use the AI concept.

After the emergence of Truth Terminal (GOAT), the cryptocurrency industry opened a Pandora's box of AI Agents, liberating the power of AI in a way that many people had not expected before, and endowing cryptocurrency with stronger technological attributes, future attributes, and more imaginative narratives - AI Agents in the encryption field can do more than just help humans produce content, but have the possibility of directly participating in human social and economic activities and currency transactions.

Differences in project routes: teams, technologies, and development directions are very different

In terms of project development routes, current AI Agent and token projects also have certain differences compared to previous old AI concept coin projects.

At the team level , AI Agent and token projects are often developed by lone developers in their early stages. On the one hand, AI and AI Agent provide developers and even ordinary people with a lower-cost and lower-threshold development path; on the other hand, relatively independent developers can follow up on market hot spots in a more rapid manner and adjust project directions according to market feedback. The decision-making cost and optimization iteration cost are relatively lower. To put it bluntly, it is more in line with the positioning of a "grassroots team"; the old AI concept projects in the past often started with mature teams, with grand missions and visions, and emphasized attracting high-value investments through grand narratives. The project development progress is measured in years, and relatively speaking, it is more responsible to investors rather than originating from the community. FET ( Fetch.ai ) is a typical case. It not only raised US$5 million and US$40 million in March 2021 and March 2023, respectively, but is also the second crowdfunding project issued by Binance IEO. It can be said to be a product of top resources.

From a technical perspective , previous AI concept coin-related projects viewed technology more as a tool and packaging, emphasizing practical use cases and user scenarios, but the actual business implementation was far from AI and had a strong sense of distance from users. Today's AI Agent and token projects are relatively simpler and cruder. Their technical origin lies in AI technology after a technological explosion. The threshold for understanding is relatively low, and the technology is more extensible. Users can