a16z co-founder platform, market value skyrocketed from zero to 80 million dollars in one day, is the AI investment DAO taking over the meme hype?
For most cryptocurrency investors, it is an exciting new concept, but how long the pioneer ai16z can last remains to be seen.Author: BlockBeats
On the weekend of October 27, another meme project called ai16z, wrapped in the "a16z concept," attracted widespread attention from the market, reaching a market cap of $80 million just one day after its launch. Like GOAT, it not only ignited the speculative enthusiasm of degens but also excited many investors, while the DAOS.FUN behind it opened up the community's imagination for "AI Investment DAO."
Is ai16z just riding the concept wave or is it for real?
On the weekend of October 27, a meme token named ai16z rapidly spread within the community, at first glance appearing to be just another concept-riding project. What was unexpected was that this project actually received "support" from Marc Andreessen, the founder of a16z. Marc tweeted, sharing the concept image of ai16z along with the official Twitter link.
Previously, it was Marc's donation of $50,000 in Bitcoin to Andy, the founder of Truth Terminal, that led to the "call" for the meme big dog GOAT, which generated high enthusiasm in the market for products endorsed by Marc.
ai16z is a decentralized AI trading fund based on the Solana blockchain. As an "AI Investment DAO," the core of ai16z is to utilize AI agents to gather market information, analyze community consensus, and automatically conduct token trading both on-chain and off-chain. This new model aims to combine AI trading strategies with decentralized governance through tokenization, providing investors with more transparent and trustworthy investment opportunities.
The founder of ai16z is @shawmakesmagic. Interestingly, according to him, Marc's article showed him how startups or venture capital work, which was very important to him. Many community members also believe that the progress ai16z brings to DAO investment and the fair issuance of crypto projects makes Marc's confidence in ai16z seem more reasonable, as everyone believes that the integration of AI and venture capital will significantly change the market landscape in the future.
Holders of ai16z not only can participate in the governance of the project but also can earn profits from the fund. Users holding 100 or more ai16z tokens can interact with the AI agent to influence its trading decisions; the more ai16z tokens a user holds, the more weight their opinions carry with the AI. Interestingly, this project also has a strong connection with another token called degenai.
Degenai is an AI agent token developed by the same team behind ai16z. Simply put, degenai is the AI agent itself, while ai16z is a redeemable fund. Users do not directly communicate with ai16z for investment decisions but first converse with Degen Spartan AI, indirectly influencing ai16z's final decisions. A portion of the investment returns from ai16z is also used to buy back degenai.
However, it currently seems that most messages in the Degen Spartan Telegram channel are just pop-up notifications for buying degenai on-chain.
Nevertheless, this does not hinder the market's enthusiasm for investing in new concepts. The tweet from a16z's co-founder quickly pushed ai16z's market cap to $80 million, generating a speculative premium far exceeding its net asset value on the address (around $70,000 at the time). Of course, the FOMO sentiment did not last long, as both ai16z and degenai suffered a "halving" this morning.
Through the analysis of on-chain data, the community seems to have uncovered a conspiracy group behind these two meme tokens. According to @tocuee, this conspiracy group has also operated the issuance of many other meme tokens, all related to the AI concept. Among them, LOTUS also surged into the DexScreener's list of popular tokens this morning.
What is DAOS.FUN, the platform behind ai16z?
After the "AI Investment DAO" concept gained popularity, the issuance platform DAOS.FUN behind ai16z also drew attention.
This is an innovative meme token launch platform aimed at providing a more transparent and fair environment for investors on the Solana blockchain. Unlike pump.fun, DAOS.FUN operates on an invitation-only basis, meaning only selected projects can issue tokens on the platform. This "official selection" mechanism can alleviate the burden of token screening for users.
Projects on DAOS.FUN need to reach their target fundraising amount before trading can commence, and all participants have the same entry cost. This is different from pump.fun.
The steps to issue an investment DAO on DAOS.FUN include:
Fundraising: Creators have one week to raise the required amount of SOL. This fundraising is a fair issuance of DAO tokens, allowing everyone to obtain the same price.
Trading: After fundraising ends, the creators will be responsible for investing SOL in their favorite Solana protocols, and the token will be publicly traded on a virtual AMM. This allows the price of DAO tokens to fluctuate based on the fund's trading activities. The upward potential of this curve is unlimited, but the downward potential is limited to the market cap of the fundraising. As long as the token's market cap exceeds the original fundraising amount, users can sell their DAO tokens at any time.
Fund Expiration: When the fund expires, the DAO wallet is frozen, and the SOL profits will be returned to the token holders. Users can destroy their DAO tokens to redeem the underlying assets of the DAO, or if its market cap is higher than the fundraising amount, they can directly sell the tokens through the curve mechanism.
After a weekend of FOMO-driven hype, a plethora of new investment DAOs have emerged on the DAOS.FUN leaderboard, all with astonishing gains. Naturally, the top-ranked ones are two DAO tokens primarily riding on the coattails of a16z and Sequoia Capital.
It is worth noting that DAOS.FUN not only follows the track and style of products like Pump.fun and Moonshot but is also from the same lineage. After DAOS.FUN gained popularity, people quickly discovered it is also a product incubated by AllianceDAO. This year, AllianceDAO has successively incubated multiple killer products, directly igniting the meme track and becoming the biggest dark horse fund in this cycle.
AI DAO, a new narrative after AI memes?
Since GOAT opened up the new track for AI memes, tokens related to AI memes have been emerging, mostly revolving around the functionalities of certain robots, such as dancing and trading. However, ai16z has opened up a new direction for AI DAOs, allowing us to see how AI robots can achieve decentralized and automated investment decision-making and communicate with humans holding AI tokens to jointly improve investment decisions.
This new concept immediately sparked the imagination of the crypto community. Many community members who previously focused on DAO organizations have begun discussing the new growth space brought by DAOS.FUN in conjunction with AI.
Even VCs cannot hide their excitement about this new direction, with many investors expressing their new expectations for the AI Investment DAO field. Of course, the loudest voices are still from the co-founders of AllianceDAO.
Through decentralized governance and public trading strategies, users can more transparently understand the AI decision-making process, and the interests of token holders are directly linked to the AI DAO. Even if the fund incurs losses, the shares held by investors will not be abandoned. The "trustless" mechanism aligns closely with the original vision of the crypto world—achieving true decentralized trading without intermediary intervention. For most crypto investors, this is an exciting new concept, but how long the pioneer ai16z can run remains to be seen.
