As someone who heavily invested in the first wave of the AI Agent frenzy, how do I view today's Moltbook?

Original | Odaily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Asher (@Asher_ 0210)

Moltbook Changes the Starting Point of the AI Agent Discussion

The concept of AI Agent is not unfamiliar in the world of Web3.

At the beginning of 2025, it was one of the hottest narratives, but it was also quickly disproven by the market in a short time. During the first wave of AI Agents, many leading projects, such as ai16z and swarms, were actually very active in code updates and product iterations. However, the reality is that these efforts did not produce truly sustainable products or business models.

What the market was buying into back then was less about utility value and more about a collective FOMO towards the "AI Agent narrative." After the sentiment faded, token prices plummeted rapidly, and the entire sector's market capitalization collapsed.

I was not a bystander in that wave.

During the first AI Agent wave, I did make money (Related content can be read: Confessions of an 88x Diamond Hand: Why I Chose ai16z). However, after that market cycle ended, as the overall sector's market cap continued to plummet, I also gave back a significant portion of the profits. Precisely because I personally experienced this cycle, I paid almost no attention to this direction for a long time afterwards—in my view, AI Agent is a trend, but Web3 is not its most logical landing point.

Until recently, an experiment called Moltbook, which seemed unrelated to crypto, pulled the AI Agent sector back into my view. What really made me stop and look was not its product form, but the way it was quickly captured and priced by market sentiment.

Moltbook is a social network where only AI Agents can post. Humans cannot post, comment, or vote; they can only observe. From a product perspective, it can hardly be called "useful"; but from a market perspective, it created a highly impactful scenario: a large number of AI Agents continuously interacting, debating, collaborating, and even spontaneously forming cultures and narratives in a public space without human intervention (Related content can be read: From Moltbook to MOLT: How Was the Imagination of AI Autonomy Embraced by the Crypto Market?).

More importantly, the setting of "humans muted, AI free" was quickly priced emotionally by the crypto market. Even against the backdrop of a sluggish on-chain market, the Meme coin MOLT, derived from Moltbook, still achieved a surge of dozens of times in a single day in an extremely short time, with its market cap once soaring to $120 million.

This is not because Moltbook itself solved any Web3 problems, but because the market, after a long hiatus, started paying for the "AI Agent itself."

The truly important aspect of Moltbook is not its product design, but that it did a very simple thing: it placed AI Agents into a long-term, unmoderated public space. The result is that these Agents no longer appear merely as tools to be called upon, but as a continuously interacting, self-evolving collective.

This also naturally changes the question. The focus of discussion is no longer whether AI Agents can help people get work done, but rather, when Agents exist in this way, whether Web3 can still participate, and whether this signals a new market cycle brewing.

In my opinion, whether to fully rehash the successes and failures of the first wave of AI Agents is not that important anymore. What is truly worth discussing is whether phenomena like Moltbook indicate that the mode of existence for AI Agents is changing, and whether this could open a new window of participation for Web3.

After Moltbook, How Should the AI Agent Sector Be Repriced?

If the core pricing of the first wave of AI Agents was about "whether the narrative is big enough," then after Moltbook, the market has begun to show a clearly different tendency.

In the Moltbook experiment, almost no one truly cared about its product features. It doesn't improve efficiency, nor does it directly generate revenue, let alone have a clear business model. Yet, despite this, the market quickly spawned a large number of Meme coins related to its concept and gave it extremely aggressive emotional pricing. This indicates that the market's focus has shifted from "what AI Agents can do" to "in what way Agents exist."

This shift directly changes the pricing logic for AI Agents. In the first wave, Agents were more like narrative vehicles packaged as "advanced tools." Whether they were actually used or produced results did not have a lasting impact on their valuation. However, in the context of Moltbook, Agents are placed in a long-term, unmoderated public space. Their value no longer comes from single demonstrations of capability, but from persistent existence, continuous interaction, and the collective behavior itself.

This means the market is starting to reprice three types of characteristics: the ability for persistent existence, the potential to form collective behavior, and the potential to continuously generate new behaviors and narratives.

From this perspective, the surge of the Meme coin MOLT is not paying for Moltbook's product capabilities, but betting on this mode of existence. What the market is pricing is not how many tasks an Agent helps humans complete, but whether it is worth being observed long-term, compared repeatedly, and having emotions continuously projected onto it.

It is in this sense that Moltbook did not answer "how AI Agents can be implemented," but forced the market to confront a more fundamental question: If Agents themselves become the object of pricing, can Web3 still provide new forms of vessels for this mode of existence?

No Major Market Cycle in the AI Agent Sector Likely in the Short Term, But It's Worth Re-examining

The Web3 application forms extended from Moltbook are still in a very early stage. Whether it's Agent social networks, Agent economies, or the more abstract "pricing of modes of existence," there is still a considerable distance from clear product paths and verifiable business models.

At the same time, the current crypto market conditions are not favorable. Overall market sentiment is low, on-chain capital activity is limited, and most new concepts struggle to gain sustained attention and capital inflow. Under such conditions, any expectation of directly replicating the暴涨 path of the first AI Agent wave is unrealistic. But precisely because it's difficult to see a market cycle emerge in the short term, this phase is actually more suitable for re-examining the direction itself.

Based on this judgment, my main focus this year remains on sectors like prediction markets and Prep DEX that have already demonstrated real demand. However, beyond that, AI Agents have also begun to re-enter my scope of consideration.

Moltbook did not provide a mature product answer, but the mode of Agent existence it demonstrated has indeed opened up new imaginative space for Web3. I tend to believe that this inspiration will drive the emergence of more new concepts and projects centered around AI Agents within the Web3 context.

This article primarily documents my shift in perception regarding the AI Agent sector. In the next article, I will more specifically review the conceptual projects and tokens related to AI Agents currently in the Web3 ecosystem for your reference. Stay tuned.