📸 Market Snapshot: After another rollercoaster week for the markets, Friday saw a strong bounce for many AI tokens, which manifested in particularly strong jumps for agents in the Virtuals ecosystem.
While all still down on the week (like the overall agent market cap), tokens like $VIRTUAL shot up ~18% today, while $GAME climbed ~20% and $AIXBT rose ~10% in that span.
Additionally, many low-cap agents in the Virtuals ecosystem have seen fresh double-digit gains, with some even finishing the week in the green.
All this comes amid renewed momentum for Base, which ranked #1 for most new inflows in recent days as Coinbase ramped up more token listings and Coinbase Ventures debuted the Base Ecosystem Group, an onchain investment fund powered by Echo.
Token prices as of 3pm ET
24hr
7d
VIRTUALS $0.68
↗ 18.8%
↘ 8.5%
AI16Z $0.19
↗ 10.5%
↘ 18.5%
ARC $0.06
↘ 6.1%
↘ 43.7%
. . .
AI ROLLUP
AI Arms Race
The AI arms race is accelerating. With China’s new Manus agent outpacing top models, OpenAI’s dominance is looking shakier than ever.
In this episode, David and Ejaaz dive into how AI agents are reshaping global competition, the shift toward smaller, smarter models, and why Anthropic’s MCP could be the key to AI’s next evolution.
Plus, the team unpacks the wild story of Bankr and $DRB—Grok's new, albeit unofficial, token on Base!
Last week, Bankr, the AI-powered crypto trading companion growing in popularity on X and Farcaster, made waves when it helped deploy $DRB (DebtReliefBot), the first AI-generated token launched via Grok’s suggestion.
The saga began on March 7, 2025, when a user on X asked Grok, X's AI chatbot, to name a token. Grok suggested $DRB, and the user deployed it through Bankr, which leveraged Clanker's token launch protocol.
The result? A viral token explosion. Within three days, $DRB surged to a $38 million market cap, fueled by hype around the novelty of Grok's first unofficial token.
The market cap has since slid back to earth from that peak. Yet the token boasts $25M volume over the last day, currently putting it behind only a few USDC and cbBTC pairs on Base when it comes to trading activity.
After the $DRB deployment, more coins followed as users prompted Grok for more name ideas. Over 16 additional tokens were deployed this way through Bankr, triggering a second wave of speculation.
However, later on March 7, a user manipulated Grok. The requester prompted the AI to deliver ~4 ETH worth of trading fees that it had quickly racked up as the $DRB creator in its Privy-powered Bankr wallet.
The Bankr team quickly responded. As co-founder Deployer announced: “To safeguard Grok's future clanker fees, Bankr will no longer be responding to Grok.” In turn, this cut-off cemented the status of $DRB as the main unofficial Grok token.
Grok's Bankr wallet has since accrued an additional +$600k worth of trading fees. For now, it's an open question if and how the X team will respond to these earnings. Deployer has recommended buy-and-burns, but what happens next here remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, Bankr is continuing to evolve. The team is finalizing staking plans and preparing to launch Bankr Club, a power users membership program facilitated by 1,000 NFTs.
Zooming out, the $DRB boom is the latest example of how AI can drive real financial activity, but it also highlights the need for safeguards around AI wallets. It's a good time for iterating, though, as things are only just beginning here.
The Fraxtal ecosystem is expanding at lightning speed—this month’s biggest highlight is IQAI.com, the newest Agent Tokenization platform from IQ and Frax. IQ is building autonomous, intelligent, tokenized agents launching on Fraxtal in Q1. Empower onchain agents with built-in wallets, tokenized ownership, and decentralized governance—all within a fast-growing Fraxtal ecosystem.
Not financial or tax advice. Bankless content is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.
Disclosure. From time to time, we may add links in this newsletter to products we use. We may receive a commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless team holds crypto assets.
