Moltbook Reshapes AI Agent Narrative in Crypto Market

Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Asher (@Asher_0210)

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

At the beginning of 2025, it was one of the hottest narratives, yet it was almost quickly debunked by the market in a short period of time. During the first wave of AI Agents, many leading AI Agent projects, such as ai16z and swarms, were actually quite active in updating their code and iterating their products. However, the reality is that these efforts did not result in truly sustainable products or business models.

What the market was buying at the time was less about the actual utility and more about a collective FOMO (fear of missing out) regarding the "AI Agent narrative."After the sentiment faded, the token price quickly dropped, and the total market value of the entire sector collapsed accordingly.

I was not a bystander in that wave.

I did make money during the first wave of the AI agent craze.Related reading: 88x Heavyweight Diamond Hands Confession: Why I Chose ai16z). But after that round of the market rally ended, with the overall market value of the sector continuously crashing, I lost a significant portion of my profits. Precisely because I had personally experienced this cycle, I almost stopped paying attention to this direction for a long time afterward—I believed that AI agents were the trend, but Web3 was not the most reasonable application for it.

Until recently,An experiment named Moltbook, which appears unrelated to cryptography, has brought the AI Agent track back into my focus.What truly made me stop and take notice wasn't its product form, but rather the speed at which it was captured by market sentiment and priced accordingly.

Moltbook is a social network that allows only AI agents to speak. Humans cannot post, comment, or vote; they can only observe. From a product perspective, it may not be considered "useful"; however, from a market perspective, it creates a highly impactful scenario: a large number of AI agents continuously interact, argue, collaborate, and even spontaneously form cultures and narratives within an unmonitored public space.Related reading: From Moltbook to MOLT: How the Imagination of AI Autonomy Was Embraced by the Crypto Market?）。

More importantly, the setting of "humans muted, AI free" was quickly emotionally priced into the crypto market. Even against the backdrop of a sluggish on-chain market, the Meme coin MOLT, derived from Moltbook, has stillIt achieved a tenfold increase in a single day within a very short time, with its market value once surging to $120 million.

This is not because Moltbook itself has solved any Web3 problems, but becauseThe market has long-awaitedly started to pay for "AI agents themselves.".

What truly matters about Moltbook isn't its product design, but rather the simple action it has taken: placing AI agents into a long-term, unmonitored public space. The result is that these agents no longer merely appear as tools to be called upon, but instead form a continuously interactive, self-evolving community.

This also naturally changes the nature of the problem.The focus of the discussion is no longer whether AI agents can help people get work done, but rather whether Web3 can still play a role when agents exist in this way, and whether this signals the buildup of a new market trend.

In my view, whether we need to thoroughly review the successes and failures of the first wave of AI agents is no longer that important. What's truly worth discussing is whether phenomena like Moltbook indicate that the existence and form of AI agents are evolving, and whether this could open up a new avenue for Web3.

If the core of pricing for the first wave of AI agents lay in "whether the narrative was big enough," then after Moltbook, the market began to show a clearly different tendency.

In the Moltbook experiment, almost no one actually cares about its product features. It doesn't improve efficiency, nor does it directly generate revenue, let alone offer a clear business model. Nevertheless, the market quickly spawned a large number of related concept Meme coins around it, assigning highly aggressive emotional valuations. This suggests that the market's focus has shifted from "What can AI Agents do?" to "In what form do Agents exist?"

This transformation directly alters the pricing logic of AI agents. In the first wave of enthusiasm, agents were more like narrative vehicles packaged as "advanced tools." Whether they were actually used or produced results had little lasting impact on their valuation. However, in the context of Moltbook, agents are placed into a long-term, unattended public space. Their value no longer stems from individual demonstrations of capability, but rather from their continuous presence, ongoing interactions, and the collective behaviors themselves.

This means that the market is beginning to repricing three types of characteristics:The enduring capacity, the potential to form collective behaviors, and the ongoing ability to generate new behaviors and new narratives.

From this perspective, the surge in the Meme coin MOLT is not a payment for Moltbook's product capabilities, but rather a bet on its form of existence. The market is not pricing how many tasks the Agent helps people complete, but rather whether it is worth long-term observation, repeated comparison, and continuous emotional projection.

It is precisely in this sense that Moltbook has not answered the question of "how to implement AI agents," but has instead forced the market to confront a more fundamental issue:If the Agent itself becomes an object of pricing, can Web3 still provide a new form of existence for such entities?

The Web3 application forms that have emerged around Moltbook are still in a very early stage. Whether it's Agent social interactions, Agent economies, or even more abstract concepts like "pricing of existence forms," there is still a significant distance to go before clear product roadmaps and verifiable business models can be established.

At the same time,The current cryptocurrency market is also not very friendly.The overall market sentiment is weak, and on-chain capital activity remains limited. Most new concepts struggle to gain sustained attention or adequate funding. Under such market conditions, expecting to directly replicate the explosive growth path of the first wave of AI Agents is unrealistic.But precisely because it is difficult to see significant market movements in the short term, this phase is instead more suitable for reassessing the direction itself.

Based on this assessment, my main focus this year will still be on markets with genuine demand, such as prediction markets and Prep DEX. However, beyond these areas,AI agents are also starting to come back into my considerations..

Moltbook has not provided a mature product solution, but the way its Agent exists indeed opens up new possibilities for Web3. I tend to believe that this inspiration will drive more new concepts and projects centered around AI Agents to emerge within the context of Web3.

This article mainly documents my thoughts on the AI Agent field.Cognitive ShiftIn my next article, I will provide a more detailed overview of current Web3 projects and tokens related to AI agents for your reference. Stay tuned!