AI Agent Total Market Capitalization Plummets 67%: Structural Adjustment or Bubble Burst? In-Depth Analysis of Market Logic and Future Path

6 min readFeb 13, 2025

#AIAGENT #AI #SuperEx

As of February 10, 2025, the total market capitalization of the AI Agent sector has dropped from $20.2 billion on January 15 to $6.52 billion, a 67% decrease. During the same period, the number of projects grew by 8.9% (an increase of 116 projects), showing the typical signs of a bubble burst with “increased quantity, decreased price.” The core contradiction behind this phenomenon is that the market liquidity is insufficient to support the rapidly expanding supply side.

Two data points clearly illustrate this:

Inter-chain Divergence: AI Agent projects on the Solana blockchain account for 56% (793) of the total, yet its total market value has shrunk by 70% from a high of $11 billion. In contrast, the average project market value on the Base blockchain ($6.51 million) is significantly higher than that on Solana ($4.03 million), reflecting an overabundance of low-quality projects within the Solana ecosystem.
Collapse of Major Projects: Meme token FARTCOIN’s market capitalization has fallen from $2.7 billion to $524 million (an 80% drop), while the framework leader VIRTUAL dropped from $3.3 billion to $760 million (a 76.8% decrease). The market has lost patience with narratives lacking real-world applications.

Of course, the “fatal temptation” of the TRUMP coin, the biggest hit of 2025, also played a significant role. The $Trump token caused a liquidity siphoning effect.

In January 2025, the MEME coin TRUMP, issued by Trump, absorbed over $4 billion in liquidity within a short period, leading to a large-scale outflow of funds from the AI Agent sector. Data shows that on TRUMP’s launch day, AI Agent token trading volume dropped by 62%, and the number of on-chain wallet addresses holding tokens for certain projects fell by more than 30%. This liquidity shift exposed a fatal weakness in the AI Agent ecosystem: the lack of a sustainable revenue capture mechanism and its inability to resist external shocks.

As the main force of liquidity, the sentiment of retail investors is well reflected in the market sentiment index, showing a drastic shift from FOMO to FUD.

According to SoSoValue’s sentiment monitoring, the “Greed-Fear Index” for the AI Agent sector dropped sharply from 82 (extreme greed) on January 15 to 19 (extreme fear) on February 10, marking the largest fluctuation since 2024. During this period, the proportion of retail investors dropped from 68% to 43%, while institutional selling increased to 57%, indicating a shift in market leadership from speculation to risk aversion.

External Factors: A Perfect Storm

Now, let’s discuss the internal factors behind the crash: the triple dilemmas of technology, economics, and governance.

Technological Hollowing Out: From “Intelligent Agents” to “Twitter Bots” Degradation

Current AI Agent projects are largely trapped in functional traps:

Lack of Tool Attributes: 90% of AI Agents only have basic content generation capabilities (e.g., automatic tweeting, simple data analysis) and lack deep integration with DeFi protocols, NFT markets, and cross-chain interactions. For example, the second-largest token by market capitalization, TOSHI, only provides the function of “automatically posting crypto market comments,” but the quality of these tweets significantly lags behind human influencers.
ZK Validation Bottleneck: Frameworks like ElizaOS attempt to use Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) to verify AI behaviors on-chain, but the ZK integration for dynamic prompt inputs and outputs faces prohibitively high computation costs, with each verification costing $5–7, far beyond the reach of average users.

Economic Model Failure: Disconnect Between Token Empowerment and Value Capture

The economic design of AI Agent tokens has systematic flaws:

Staking Reward Bubble: Most projects adopt high APY (annual percentage yield) to attract liquidity, such as Virtuals Protocol’s staking pool, which had an APY of 1200%. However, the actual rewards come from token issuance rather than protocol revenue, forming a Ponzi-like loop.
Utility Token Dilemma: Decentralized Finance AI (DeFAI) projects like Griffain attempt to unlock advanced features through tokens, but their AI-driven trading strategies offer returns only 3–5% higher than manual operations, making it difficult to justify token premiums.

Governance Crisis: Power Imbalance Between Developers and Communities

Centralized Decision-Making: Leading projects like ai16z have seen their codebase update frequency plummet from 20 times per week to just 2 times, with core developers controlling over 60% of governance voting power, leading to a community proposal approval rate of less than 15%.
Regulatory Arbitrage Risks: Some projects (like ARC) have used the concept of “on-chain AI autonomy” to bypass KYC/AML requirements, but the U.S. SEC has already launched investigations into three AI Agent projects, accusing them of securities violations.

External Shocks: Revolution in Computing Power and Market Structural Changes

DeepSeek’s “Cost Killer” Effect

In January 2025, the decentralized computing network DeepSeek launched, lowering AI model training costs to 1/20th of ChatGPT’s costs. This technological breakthrough caused:

Decreased Demand for Nvidia GPUs: Nvidia’s stock dropped by 18% in one month, leading to a corresponding decline in token prices of AI Agent projects dependent on hardware staking (such as Akash Network).
Restructuring of Computing Power Dependency: Established projects like Bittensor, which failed to adapt to DeepSeek’s architecture, saw their Total Value Locked (TVL) drop by 47%.

Reshaping the Layer2 Competition Landscape

The AI Agent ecosystem competition between Solana and Base chains is taking on new characteristics:

Rise of Modular Architecture: Celestia has optimized data availability (DA) layers, lowering AI Agent transaction costs to $0.001, attracting high-frequency trading projects originally on Solana.
MEV Protection Technology Diversification: The TEN Protocol deployed Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) on Base chain to encrypt transactions, reducing miner extractable value (MEV) by 72%, but sacrificing about 15% of transaction speed.

The Inevitable Market: Ecological Reshuffling and Investment Logic Reconstruction

Project Survival Rate Predictions: Darwinian Game with a 99%

Elimination Rate According to ChainCatcher’s predictions, by the end of 2025, 99% of AI Agent projects will be wiped out. The key to survival lies in:

Revenue Covering Costs: For instance, DEX arbitrage bots need to earn more than 0.3 ETH daily to cover on-chain inference costs, but currently, fewer than 5% meet this threshold.
Compliance Revamp Progress: Platforms with data processing frameworks that meet GDPR and HIPAA standards (such as Jailbreak) will be essential for institutional entry.

Capital Flow Shift: From “Narrative Speculation” to “Infrastructure Bet”

Computing Protocols in Demand: Decentralized computing layer projects like Spheron and Gensyn recently completed a $230 million financing round, with valuations rising 400% compared to 2024.
Synthetic Data Explosion: Prime Intellect’s synthetic data generation protocol has been FDA-certified, and the token market value in the healthcare AI sector has grown 34% against the trend.

The Future Path: Dual Breakthroughs in Technology Integration and Application

DeFAI: The Second Growth Curve for AI Agents Decentralized Financial AI (DeFAI) is emerging as a lifeline:

Intent-Centric Revolution: Griffain translates user transaction intentions into automated processes through natural language parsing. During the testnet phase, over 1.2 million transactions were processed with a success rate of 98.7%.
Proof of Yield Mechanism: The Orbit platform introduces a “Proof-of-Yield” algorithm that allocates tokens based on on-chain validation of AI strategy’s historical returns, reducing annual volatility to 12%.

Human-Machine Collaboration: Disrupting the Web3 Work Paradigm

Hybrid Team Experiments: Story Protocol hired the AI Agent Luna as a social media officer. Luna’s tweet interaction rate was 27% higher than that of human employees, but issues like accountability need to be resolved (e.g., Luna once mistakenly deleted a critical announcement).
On-chain Payroll System: Beamable Network introduced “Stashed Wallets,” enabling payment of AI Agent salaries in stablecoins, with tax compliance facilitated via zkLogin.

Technological Integration: Symbiotic Evolution of ZK and TEE

Verifiable Privacy: Phala Network combines ZKP with TEE, achieving full-chain verification of AI reasoning processes on Op-Succinct L2, reducing energy consumption to one-eighth of a pure ZK solution.
Cross-chain Collaboration Protocol: FXN Network has established a universal communication standard, enabling AI Agents on Solana and Base to share computing power and data, alleviating liquidity fragmentation by 40%.

Conclusion

The dramatic decline in AI Agent market capitalization is not the end of the sector, but rather a necessary growing pain as the market transitions from “narrative-driven” to “utility-driven.” The technological hollowing, economic model failure, and external shocks have all contributed to this reshuffling, butthe rise of DeFAI, the evolution of human-machine collaboration paradigms, and the integration of ZK-TEE technologies are laying the groundwork for the next growth cycle. Investors must look beyond short-term fluctuations and focus on the core protocols that truly create on-chain value.