As a seasoned crypto investor with years of experience navigating the volatile and ever-evolving digital asset market, I have witnessed the rise and fall of numerous projects, tokens, and platforms. In my journey, Solana has stood out as one of the most intriguing and promising projects due to its unique approach to scalability and its embrace of memecoins, a sector that has been responsible for significant inflows in 2024.
However, I share the concerns of Solana’s founders regarding the potential overhype surrounding AI agents. While I acknowledge their potential, I am cautious about investing in this sector given my experiences with past bubbles and scams in the crypto space. The rapid growth of AI agent tokens in 2024 has been impressive, but as Condz, founder of Acolyte AI, rightly pointed out, it’s important to approach this trend with a critical eye.
One area where Solana truly shines is its ability to handle high transaction volumes, a feat that has earned it the nickname “Ethereum Killer.” However, the mounting MEV problem cannot be ignored. As a long-term investor, I am closely monitoring this issue and will continue to assess the impact it may have on the network’s future performance.
Perhaps one day we’ll see an AI agent that can predict market trends and tell us which coins are actually worth investing in, saving us all from our own FOMO-fueled impulses!
According to a survey released on January 3, the creators of Solana express enthusiasm for meme coins, yet they consider artificial intelligence agents to be inflated in value and express concern about the escalating Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) issue that the network faces.
According to a Blockworks Research poll of 42 Solana leaders, around three-quarters considered memecoins as generally positive. Moreover, they exhibited some reservations towards AI agents, as 16% of them labeled this area as “the most overvalued sector within Solana.
As per the survey findings, I’ve learned that the founders mentioned they would choose alternative platforms if building outside of Solana. Their potential picks include Base, an Ethereum layer-2 solution from Coinbase, or Sui, a competitive layer-1 platform similar to Solana.
Memecoins, AI drive inflows
By the end of 2024, the total value tied to Solana’s DeFi platform (Decentralized Finance) significantly increased, growing from approximately $1.5 billion in January to almost $8.5 billion in December, as shown by data from DefiLlama.
Starting from 2023, Solana (SOL) has shown a remarkable performance that is about eight times greater than Ethereum (ETH), as suggested by TradingView’s data.
The growth of Solana can be primarily attributed to the fact that more individual investors (retail traders) are entering the cryptocurrency market, with speculation escalating around meme coins and AI agent tokens built on the Solana platform, according to a report published by Grayscale in December.
By the year 2024, as per CoinGecko’s data, the cumulative value of memecoins skyrocketed from approximately $20 billion to over $120 billion.
Solana’s Pump.fun has been instrumental in driving growth. The memecoin platform has seen a total trading volume of over $8.5 billion since its launch in January, as per DefiLlama. It frequently exceeds Ethereum’s daily earnings.
In 2024, particularly during the last three months of the year, the value of tokens linked to AI-controlled agents, which are machines pursuing objectives independently, collectively reached around $16 billion, as reported by CoinGecko.
Ever since October, I’ve noticed an influx of AI agents swarming X.com. These agents have been instrumental in propelling around a dozen coins past the $100 million market cap, primarily on the Solana network. Among these are Zerebro (ZEREBRO), Fartcoin (FART), and ai16z (AI16Z).
In a December 29th post on the X platform, the founder of Web3 startup Acolyte AI, Condz, stated that “by 2025, AI agents could see significant growth… However, it’s important to note that crypto AI agents might be overhyped or even non-delivering, as many are either scams or will fail to meet expectations.
Mounting MEV concerns
Approximately 20% of Solana’s founders have labeled MEV (Minimum Viable Extractable Value) and sandwich attacks as the most significant challenge facing Solana.
In simpler terms, when making transactions, users can reward validators to expedite their processing in the creation of new blocks. This means that some transactions may be processed before others within a single block. However, this priority comes at a cost, as it leads to an increase in overall transaction fees.
For the very first time in 2024, validators on the Solana blockchain garnered more revenue from MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) compared to Ethereum’s validators. This event transpired alongside a nearly threefold increase in transaction fees on the Solana network, as indicated by data from Dune Analytics.
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2025-01-03 21:45