AI Pool, which raised over 30,000 SOL in Crowdfunding overnight, is the next Bome for giving money to AI?

Recently, AI Pool has become a hot direction in the AI Agent track, and AI Pool is considered to have opened up the assetization of AI Agent. The founder of AI Pool is Skely, who is also a member of ai16z. Interestingly, Skely’s X has been frozen since the presale started until the time of writing. In this case, the first project of AI Pool’s presale, Meteora, raised more than 30,000 SOL overnight, and even after announcing the end of the presale, there are still people continuously contributing money to AI. What exactly is AI Pool? What is different between AI presale and previous presales? In the following text, we will explore these questions.

AI pool core mechanism

Presale is not a new entry point for the market. According to founder Skely, the main problem that AI Pool presale solves is the lack of trust in the market, focusing on two aspects. Firstly, AI Pool prevents artificial presale and the run-off of funds by manipulators. This market pain point is well-known to experienced players, many of whom have suffered losses in this regard. Secondly, it provides a fairer presale method for retail investors. Traditional presales are mainly dominated by snipers/bots, and pumpfun’s PVP mode makes it even more difficult for retail investors to see hope.

It has to be said that Skely mentioned the pain points of retail investors, and Skely’s method is deeply appreciated from the perspective of problem-solving. Next, AI Pool puts forward its own logic for solving these problems. AI Pool adopts Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) technology. In fact, TEE is not a new technology, so why can it attract market attention again? This time, AI Pool is based on the well-known project @PhalaNetwork that uses TEE technology. Its innovation lies in the combination of AI execution environment, smart contract scheduling, and decentralized consensus governance, which is an innovative attempt to solve the problem of on-chain asset custody. How does AI Pool specifically solve this problem?

First of all, AI Pool generates private keys autonomously and keeps them secure using TEE technology. Any signature can only be executed by AI in the TEE environment, thus avoiding the phenomenon of fund runner. Secondly, AI Pool utilizes TEE technology to achieve interaction between internal and external chains, as well as offline computation, through contracts with Phala in the TEE environment. This mechanism prevents malicious attacks on the fund pool and effectively avoids various fraud risks, including high-volume dynamic transactions, providing a fairer participation for retail investors. This is also one of the important means used by @aipool_tee to protect project security. Shaw, the founder of ai16z, speaks highly of it and believes that this gameplay may subvert the coin issuance mechanism of pumpfun. Even when Skely’s account was frozen, Shaw stated that bot would deploy AI Pool tokens and expressed great confidence in the project. As a result, the market’s enthusiasm was once again ignited, and the community believes that Bome 2.0 is about to be born.

The core mechanism of the AI Pool presale is as follows: fundraising, users send SOL to the AI wallet (presale address opRyDjuRetWnsP 78 FNFTPEnAJX 7 AkjuD 6 GTP 7 tsqHXd), with an amount ranging from 1 to 10 SOL (less than 1 SOL is considered as a donation); AI Pool issues tokens through @PhalaNetwork’s TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) technology; AI Pool manages liquidity through Metoria and autonomously distributes tokens.

Source: Ai Pool TEE News

Tokens issued by the AI pool

The first token issued by AI Pool is METAV, which raised over 30,000 SOL, with the top 3 exceeding funds accounting for 82%. As of the time of writing, most of the METAV tokens in the top 3 addresses have been sold. The feature of METAV is that a transaction tax is set in the token pool, with a tax rate of 20% between buying and selling. Currently, the founder’s X account has not been unlocked after manual review by the platform, and 10% of the METAV tokens are still undistributed.

The market capitalization of METAV reached $80 million at its peak, but now it has fallen to $38.1 million. There are currently two opinions among the community members of METAV. Some believe that this is the first token issued by AI Pool, so some community members still have confidence in it. Others believe that the tax rate of METAV is too high and the pool is also locked (currently locking more than $20 million, as shown in the figure below), making it difficult for funds to flow in.

Source: app.meteora

Compared to METAV, the tokens issued by AI Pool have not performed as well as METAV in terms of community sentiment and market value. For example, the second token issued, GFC, currently has a market value of only $710,000. GFC’s main narrative is to provide funding for DEI, and the community sentiment is average.

How Far Can the AI Pool Issuance Mechanism Go

Currently, the issuance mechanism of AI Pool is not perfect. Taking the METAV issuance as an example, there are different issues from the beginning to the end of the fundraising. At the start of the fundraising, the project planning is not clear, and most of the community users participate with a speculative mentality. After the fundraising ends, community users can still transfer coins to the AI address, and there is no user-friendly mechanism. After the fundraising ends, there are also many problems with token issuance. For example, users who transferred 1 SOL were forcibly donated. There are also many large holders who received METAV tokens with delays, and some large holders have not received tokens yet and are forcibly locked.

As a new phenomenon, the market’s attitude is inclusive. AI Pool is an innovative form of assetization of AI Agent. Founder Skely also sees this as an innovative experiment. He mentioned in a tweet that the current main profit model of AI Pool is to charge a small fee through the Metoria liquidity pool, but the specific ratio is unknown at the moment. In V2 and subsequent versions, there are plans to enable AI agents to achieve full autonomy, even integrating with DAO governance, and the fee income generated by AI Pool will benefit all participants. In addition, mechanisms such as whitelist will be added to prevent malicious operations.

From Skely’s plan, it seems that it can significantly solve various problems in V1. The success of the first token METAV issued by AI Pool is due to Shaw’s strong support, and the founder Skely himself is also a member of ai16z, which invisibly injects some new traffic into METAV. However, it should be noted that AI Pool is still in its early stages, and many mechanisms are not perfect. The open source nature of the code is not transparent, and whether the project has truly adopted TEE technology also needs to be verified.

It is worth noting that, in response to some issues with the AI pool, the market has immediately provided a reply. focEliza, from the ai16z developer community, proposed a way to quickly perceive and repair any issues that arise during the operation of the AI Pool. The focEliza community suggested that through technical means, anyone could openly view and verify the verifiable logs of the TEE AI agent, similar to a blockchain browser, and provided a link for the experience. The focEliza community even proposed a full-chain AI Agent, as shown in the figure below. Could ai16z, BTC, and ETH generate more intersections? These visions really look cool!

Source: @CP 2426 \

Summary

AI Agent has undergone various evolutions in narration since its development. Currently, AI Agent can realize the issuance of various virtual assets such as text, music, and NFT, and can achieve interaction between Agents. There are also cases of integration with real life, and it can also help humans with investment research and analysis. From virtual environments to integration with real life, from infrastructure to application agents, AI Agents are undergoing different explorations.

But from the current perspective, more AI Agents rely on the narrative of Meme. After the emergence of the new narrative, many projects gradually withdrew from the market along with the decline in market value, community sentiment, and attention. However, it is gratifying that with the continuous evolution of AI Agents, we can observe a more exciting on-chain world and indirectly promote continuous innovation of underlying technology. For example, after the AI Pool, there is further exploration of market trust issues by the focEliza in the ai16z developer community.

In the end, perhaps we can truly see AI Agents applied to all aspects of our lives, benefiting humanity and driving society’s leapfrog development.