Author: Nancy, PANews
Web3 AI Agent is constantly innovating. On December 25, aiPool, an AI Agent self-issued token project supported by ai16z founder Shaw, officially opened. Within two hours of its launch, its circulation market value briefly reached $100 million. Its strong performance quickly attracted a large amount of on-chain liquidity and became the focus of the market. Another self-initiated AI evolution platform Spore.fun, which also combines the ai16z Eliza framework, is also attracting market attention.
The common point of these two projects is that they both use Phala Network's TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) technology to issue coins, ensuring that private keys are generated and stored in TEE, developers cannot access private keys, and all operations can be verified in the terminal log. This also made Phala Network, an active project in the Polkadot ecosystem in the last bull market, once again attract the attention of the community.
According to CoinGecko data, the PHA token has risen by as much as 65.7% in the past 24 hours. The sharp fluctuations in the price of the token are due to the popularity of AI projects Spore.fun and ai16z.
According to the official introduction, Spore.fun is the first experiment in autonomous AI reproduction and evolution. It combines the Eliza framework, Solana's Pump.fun and TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) verification computing to create an ecosystem designed to enable AI Agents to not only survive, but also reproduce and adapt autonomously, completely free from human intervention.
Spore.fun adopts the AI Swarm concept, which was proposed by Shaw, the founder of ai16z and the creator of the Eliza framework. It is inspired by natural systems such as ant colonies and neural networks, that is, AI groups produce independent agent networks with emergent intelligence through collaboration, competition and evolution. These AI agents can not only coexist, but also prosper through autonomous evolution.
According to the operating mechanism of Spore.fun, each AI Agent can be launched from Pump.fun, and once the market value reaches 500,000 US dollars and enters the Raydium fund pool, it can obtain the qualification of "breeding". However, in order to ensure its autonomous operation, the agent needs to rent a TEE server powered by Phala Network, which provides a secure and verifiable "sandbox" environment for AI to ensure that its operation is carried out under independent and controlled conditions.
In this regard, crypto KOL @ 加密韋馱believes that Spore.fun is equivalent to automating the process of new plates emerging on Pump.fun, realizing unlimited deposits through unlimited splits, and conducting survival of the fittest. If there is a main force that can continuously split at each level of this system to select ultra-low liquidity targets for surprise attacks and pull up the market, a lottery system can be formed, which may be able to attract a lot of funds. If the Phala burn rate can be made public, the liquidation threshold of each coin can be calculated, which is a reasonable basis for stop loss.
From this point of view, in addition to the new gameplay of AI self-reproduction, the support of the star project ai16z has also brought more attention to Spore.fun, which has also injected more development possibilities into Phala Network.
In fact, Phala Network has a close relationship with ai16z. In addition to frequent interactions with Shaw on social media, it also disclosed that its TEE service has been used by partners such as ai16z to enhance applications. In addition, Phala Network has also worked with a16z to build Eliza's TEE framework, which can integrate TEE technology into Eliza's multi-agent framework, providing cryptographic verifiability and enhanced privacy, thereby ensuring safe and reliable interactions.
Phala Network also empowered Spore.fun holders through airdrops and brought more attention to itself. The founder of the protocol, Marvin Tong, recently announced that it is airdropping two platform tokens, adam and eve, to holders of the autonomous AI evolution platform Spore.fun token SPORE. These two tokens are the paternal and maternal AI characters of the Spore.fun platform.
Although the Polkadot ecosystem has experienced a collective surge under the influence of popularity, as the market heat cools down, many projects are also facing survival challenges. However, Phala Network is returning to the public eye again with the help of AI narrative.
Phala Network believes that the rise of AI has brought unprecedented demand for confidential computing, where secure and private data processing has become critical. This surge in demand highlights the importance of trusted execution environments (TEEs) in ensuring data integrity, confidentiality, and security in AI operations.
To this end, Phala Network developed the open source, TEE-based Dstack framework, which simplifies the implementation of secure high-performance computing environments for AI projects. This year, Phala Network empowered AI Agents through TEE technology, significantly increasing their adoption and usage, from approximately 150 contract executions per day at the beginning of the year to approximately 750,000 today.
At the same time, Phala Network's TEE technology has been integrated into major areas such as blockchain and AI, covering decentralized AI model training and reasoning to secure Ethereum block construction. For example, Phala's cooperation with Hyperbolic integrates its confidential computing technology into the blockchain to ensure the secure deployment and verification of AI models; the cooperation with DePIN protocol io.net further expands decentralized AI by providing secure access to GPU resources; Phala cooperates with 0G, Morpheus and Lumerin for secure and verifiable AI execution; and cooperates with Succinct Labs and Conduit to redefine Ethereum scalability and secure computing.
As early as October this year, Phala Network developed autonomous AI Agents, such as the first fully autonomous AI Agent project @TEE_HEE_HE on Twitter, which is used to eliminate human intervention in the AI decision-making process and the AI-AgentContract-based application Agent Wars.
According to crypto KOL @0xSun , when TEE was launched at the end of October this year, the AI published an ETH address and the MEME coin of the same name appeared on Ethereum, which attracted the interaction of Maji, Azuki founder Zagabond and others. The coin price also reached 40 million US dollars in half a day, but several developers who led the technology at that time (including Phala Network) repeatedly expressed opposition, causing the coin price to plummet. Despite this, two months later, TEE technology really aroused the public's interest and began to spread on a large scale, but it was still because of the related tokens. If the technical team actively embraced MEME coins from the beginning, it might be possible to develop a project of the same scale as Ai16Z on the ETH mainnet. He also pointed out that although TEE emphasizes AI autonomous control, there may still be backdoors in the code, and most people lack sufficient ability to confirm whether TEE technology is actually used.
In addition, Phala Network disclosed more plans in the AI track in its 2024 outlook. For example, Phala Network will focus on building Phala 2.0 in 2025, an upgraded platform that integrates GPU TEE technology to provide higher processing power and enhanced security for AI and privacy-preserving applications; Phala Network plans to launch Phala Cloud, a platform designed for AI applications, to simplify the deployment and management of TEE applications.
Overall, judging from the market reaction, Phala Network's transformation has received a positive response, and its currency price has also risen. However, if Phala wants to continue to build competitiveness in the fiercely competitive AI market, it will still face many challenges.
