Sahara AI ($SAHARA ) recorded an 850% increase in trading volume and a 42% rise in price over the past week.
The sudden surge is said to be in response to the launch of its Data Services Platform (DSP), which allowed users to earn tokens by completing simple AI-related tasks. This indicates the spot/futures volume was inflated by artificial activity, not by an increase in demand (of people actually using the AI services).
I imagine these tasks where part of a marketing campaign, and might have involved either staking or social media posts promoting the token in one way or another.
Why else would an "obscure" (fairly new or unknown, and unused) token would gain so much attention?
AI tokens like $FET or $IQ were in the Spotlight last year. Today, people barely mention them. AI providers can hardly compete with offers made by paid services such as chatGPT, Gemini or Grok (for their sophistications). Nor against hugging face for development (training custom models).
Just because a project is related to AI products, does not mean they are sophisticated.