1) The continuous antics of celebrity coins and various MEME coins do not bring about a major wealth feast but rather drain the remaining liquidity in the market, overdraw the progress and expectations of the bull market. This is because everyone expects presidential coins to be 'certain opportunities', valuing their presidential reputation and the endorsement effect of real-world influence, but the logic is clearly flawed, as Trump has demonstrated. Such coins cannot escape zero-sum games, resulting in only a small portion of people making money, while most retail investors are more likely to lose money and exit, exacerbating the structural collapse of the market's primary and secondary levels, transforming from a previous balance dominated by VC-driven builders to a pure pump-and-dump bubble model, which will require a long time for disaster recovery after the chaos.
2) The first wave of AI Agents is represented by the AI MEME craze with $GOAT and $ACT; the second wave is represented by the AI Infra evolution narrative of #ai16z and #Virtual, which has seen the emergence of a series of value-specific niches including standalone AI applications, framework standards, chain integration, and DeFai. For the third wave, I tend to believe that a breakthrough will occur in a specific niche of AI infra, following a high-barrier value creation path driven by both VC and community. Although ai16z has brought a wave of market enthusiasm with its open-source community innovation as the cultural axis, it has been proven that this AI Agent trend has not shed the essence of MEME-ification. A large number of wild Web2 developers and hardcore Web3 speculative projects have dominated the field, resulting in a short-term emergence of numerous AI MEME projects disguised in 'value clothing'. Therefore, when a simpler and more viral presidential coin MEME like $TRUMP appeared, the AI Infra market was quickly reverted to its original state.
3) Why is it driven by both VC and community? Pure VC-driven projects would lose the early advantages of community-based MEME issuance, which is clearly not viable. On the other hand, purely MEME-driven projects could quickly turn into a mess due to the schemes of behind-the-scenes groups, leading to even worse situations. Only early VC involvement can provide project teams with basic expectations for innovative building, reduce the financing needs of developers during the MEME issuance phase, and simultaneously increase the barriers for behind-the-scenes groups to speed through, ultimately leading to a healthy balance between on-chain asset issuance and project empowerment. It is currently difficult to determine how to grasp such a balance point and in what form similar projects will emerge. However, it is highly likely that DeFi + AI (DeFai) will be a potential breakthrough niche. This is because AI Agents managing assets autonomously can resolve the traditional DeFi human-induced rug pull dilemma, while their autonomous trading decisions will prominently showcase the capabilities of AI Agents. Most importantly, AI Agents only represent a new front-end for DeFi; the back-end infrastructure such as DeFi fundamentals and chain abstraction is already sufficiently mature, allowing for rapid evaluation of the on-ground value of AI Agents combined with Crypto. Finally, although the AI Agent sector has temporarily entered a downturn, after a thorough reshuffling, some projects with excellent developers, mature product-market fit development paths, and reasonable community asset incentive distribution plans will be reborn. Of course, these are based on the sustainable inner value concept of the sector's developmental trajectory, as only in this way can a major bull market be expected in the process of market technological innovation evolution, allowing most people to seize their respective opportunities. Once the market departs from the core of value creation, the concept of 'bull market' may no longer exist, because short-term prosperity driven purely by gambling speculation is irrelevant to bull and bear trends.
