Overnight Crowdfunding Exceeded 30,000 SOL. Is AI Pool the Next Bome?
Recently, AI Pool has become a hot direction in the AI Agent track, and AI Pool is considered to have initiated the capitalization of AI Agent. The founder of AI Pool is Skely, who is also a member of ai16z. Interestingly, from the start of the pre-sale until the time of writing, Skely’s X account has been frozen. Under such circumstances, the first project of AI Pool’s pre-sale Meteora managed to raise over 30,000 SOL overnight and even after the pre-sale was announced to be closed, people continued to send money to AI., Meteora, What exactly is AI Pool?managed to raise over 30,000 SOL overnight, and even after the pre-sale was announced to be closed, people continued to send money to AI. What exactly is AI Pool? How is the AI pre-sale different from previous pre-sales? We will explore these questions below.
Core Mechanism of AI Pool
Pre-sale is not a new entry point in the market. According to the founder Skely, the main problem that this AI Pool pre-sale aims to solve is the lack of trust in the market, mainly in two aspects. The first aspect is that AI Pool prevents artificial pre-sales and market makers from running away with the money. This pain point in the market is deeply hated by veteran players, and many people have suffered losses in this regard. The second aspect is a fairer pre-sale method for retail investors. Currently, the main winners in traditional pre-sales are snipers/bots, etc., and the PVP model of pump fun makes retail investors hopeless.
It has to be said that Skely has hit the pain points of retail investors. From the perspective of solving problems, Skely’s approach is very popular. Then, AI Pool proposed its own logic for solving these problems. AI Pool adopts the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE for short) technology. In fact, TEE is not a new technology either. So why can it attract market attention again? This time, AI Pool is based on the old project @PhalaNetwork of TEE technology, and its innovation lies in combining the AI running 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 solve this specifically?
Firstly, AI Pool uses TEE technology, where AI autonomously generates and keeps private keys, and any signatures can only be executed by AI in the TEE environment, thus fundamentally avoiding the phenomenon of market makers running away with the money. Secondly, through TEE technology, AI Pool realizes the interaction between the internal and external chains in the TEE environment through the Phala contract and achieves offline computing. This mechanism can prevent the capital pool from being maliciously attacked and effectively avoid various fraud risks including high dynamic transactions, which is a fairer way for retail investors to participate. This is also @aipool_tee one of the important means for @aipool_tee to protect project security. Shaw, the founder of ai16z, is full of praise for this and said that this gameplay may subvert the token issuance mechanism of pump fun. Even when Skely’s account was frozen, Shaw said that the bot would deploy AI Pool tokens and is very optimistic about this project. As a result, the market’s enthusiasm was ignited again, and the community believes that Bome 2.0 is about to be born.
The core mechanism of AI Pool’s pre-sale is as follows: Fundraising, users send SOL to the AI wallet (pre-sale address opRyDjuRetWnsP78FNFTPEnAJX7AkjuD6GTP7tsqHXd), and the amount is 1–10 SOL (less than 1 SOL is regarded as a donation); AI Pool issues tokens through the TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) technology of @PhalaNetwork; AI Pool conducts liquidity management through Metoria and distributes tokens autonomously.
The Tokens Issued by AI Pool
The first token issued by AI Pool is METAV, which has raised over 30,000 SOL, and the top 3 excess funds account for 82%.As of the time of writing, most of the METAV tokens in the top three addresses have been sold. The feature of METAV is that a transaction tax is set in the token pool, and the tax rate between buying and selling is 20%. Currently, the founder’s X account has not been unlocked after manual review by the platform, and 10% of the METAV tokens have not been airdropped yet.
The market value of METAV once reached $80 million, and it has now fallen to $38.1 million. There are currently two voices in the METAV community. One voice believes that this is the first token issued by AI Pool, so some community members still firmly believe in it. Another voice believes that the tax rate of METAV is too high, and the pool is also locked (currently more than $20 million is locked, as shown in the figure below), making it difficult for funds to flow in.
Compared to METAV, the subsequent tokens issued by AI Pool are not as well received in terms of community sentiment and market performance as METAV. For example, the second token issued by it, GFC, currently has a market value of only $710,000. The main narrative of GFC is to provide funds for DEI, and the community sentiment is average.
How Far Can AI Pool’s Issuance Mechanism Go
Looking at the issuance mechanism of AI Pool, it is not perfect. Taking the issuance of METAV as an example, there have been different problems from the start to the end of the fundraising. At the beginning of the fundraising, the project plan was not clear, and most community users participated with the mentality of taking a chance. After the fundraising ended, community users could still transfer coins to the AI address, and there was no more user-friendly mechanism. After the fundraising ended, there were also many problems in token issuance. For example, users who transferred 1 SOL had their tokens forcibly donated. Many major holders experienced delays in receiving their METAV tokens, and some major holders have yet to receive their tokens and have been forcibly locked in their positions.
As a new thing, the market attitude is tolerant. AI Pool is an innovative form of AI Agent capitalization. The founder Skely also believes that this is an innovative experiment. Previously, he said on Twitter that AI Pool’s current main profit model is to charge a small fee through Metoria’s liquidity pool, but the specific proportion is still unknown. In V2 and subsequent versions, it is planned to fully realize the autonomy of AI agents and even integrate them into DAO governance, and the fee income generated by AI Pool will also benefit all participants. In addition, a whitelist mechanism will be added to prevent malicious operations.
From Skely’s plan, it seems that the various problems appeared in V1 can be solved. The success of the first token METAV issued by AI Pool lies in the strong support of Shaw and the fact that the founder Skely is also a member of ai16z. These endorsements have invisibly injected some new traffic into METAV. However, it should be noted that AI Pool is still in the initial stage of development, many mechanisms are not perfect, the code is not transparent in terms of open source, and whether the project has truly adopted TEE technology also needs to be verified.
It is worth noting that in response to the above problems of AI Pool, the market has immediately responded. focEliza of the ai16z developer community proposed that it can quickly perceive and fix the problems existing in the operation of AI Pool. The focEliza community proposed that through technical processing, anyone can publicly view and verify the verifiable logs of the TEE AI agent like a blockchain browser and announced the experience link. The focEliza community even proposed an all-chain AI Agent. As shown in the figure below, can ai16z have more intersections with BTC and ETH? These visions look really cool!
Summary
AI Agents have evolved in their narratives to date. Currently, AI Agent can issue various types of virtual assets such as text, music, and NFTs, can realize interaction between agents, there are also cases of combination with real life, and it can also help humans with investment research and analysis. From the virtual environment to the combination with real life, from the infrastructure to the application agent, AI Agents are making different explorations.
However, currently, more AI Agents rely on the Meme narratives. Many projects, after the emergence of new narratives, gradually withdraw from the market with the decline of market value, community sentiment, and attention. But 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 in underlying technologies. For example, after AI Pool, focEliza of the ai16z developer community further explores the issue of market trust.
Ultimately, we may truly see AI Agents applied to all aspects of our lives, benefiting humanity and promoting leapfrog development in society.
