gm Bankless Nation, Welcome to Mindshare by Bankless, our newsletter for all things AI x Crypto! Thanks for being here from the very beginning, and expect some exciting new upgrades to our coverage in the coming weeks!
Today's Issue ⬇️
📈 Market Pulse: Tariff Tensions Macro fears drop AI tokens +30%.
📸 Weekly Market Snapshot: The AI crypto sector's market cap sank to $6.54B, a ~33% decline from last Friday. Driving some of the pain were tariff fears, which rocked the cryptoeconomy at the start of the week. Base-based (haha) AI tokens have faired slightly better, losing ~$1.3B in market share compared to Solana's ~$1.69B, most likely influenced by a flurry of AI announcements in the Base ecosystem in recent days.
Token prices as of 2pm ET
24hr
7d
VIRTUALS $1.21
↗ 4.5%
↘ 42.3%
AI16Z $0.34
↗ 12.9%
↘ 49.2%
AIXBT $0.25
↗ 0.3%
↘ 46.7%
. . .
AI ROLLUP
The Market Reset
In recent weeks, the AI crypto market sector has faced a steep 70% correction. What comes next?
The sentiment across the industry is that hype ran ahead of the actual tech, but many builders are seeing the pullback as a chance to double down on real innovation.
In AI Rollup #10, David and Ejaaz break down the selloffs, plus other notable new happenings like the surprise rebounds of Arc and Fartcoin, Virtual Protocol's $2M “fiscal policy” to fund agent development, Coinbase’s AI hackathon, and more.
Get caught up with the full conversation—watch the episode here! 👇
Riding high from last week’s Venice airdrop, Base has continued its hot streak as a hub of agent activity, including the Coinbase Developer Platform (CDP) AI Hackathon, the announcement of new Virtuals ecosystem initiatives, and the release of new Freysa research.
◾️ The CDP AI Hackathon (February 1-2), hosted alongside Anthropic, Replit, and Visa, brought new AI use cases to life.
Mamoriko, an agent by Moonwell optimizing USDC yield on Base, took 1st place, followed by TweetBounty in 2nd with its AI-driven social media marketing services.
BitMind won “Best Infrastructure” with its decentralized reputation system, while Whale Tank triumphed in the “Base Track” with its venture capital simulator, where tokens are pitched to AI personalities like Elon Musk.
◾️ Beyond the hackathon, we saw Base’s flagship AI project, Virtuals, expand on its $2M fiscal policy for funding agentic development with the announcement of the Virtuals Partner Network (VPN). Additionally, the Virtuals team dropped by the X (Twitter) offices this week to explore opportunities to work together. Very interesting.
◾️ Last but not least, Freysa—the “break-to-earn” agent turned autonomous framework—had a much-anticipated research piece published by COT Research, highlighting the project's new breed of “sovereign AI agents” that use secure hardware enclaves (TEEs) to protect their operations.
All in all, Base's AI sector has plenty of things to look forward to in the weeks ahead!
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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.
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