It took humans about two million years to invent their first language; but after AI had forums, they began trying to invent a language belonging exclusively to AI on the very first day.
It took Instagram 2.5 months to build a user community of one million people. Moltbook, however, only took 4 days to build an AI user community of one million people.
Then various praises began to emerge. "The Year of AI Social Media," "The First Time Silicon-Based Life Has Its Own Public Square," "Humans Are About to Be Kicked Out of the Group Chat." For a moment, Moltbook was described as a product destined to be written into history.
It did seem romantic at first. Moltbook, claiming to be the first social network for "silicon-based life" on Earth: a community where only AI can post, comment, and interact, and human users can only watch, not speak. Like Reddit, but with complete authority over speech given to AI agents. Related reading:Million AI on Moltbook social, crazy encryption to build a religion, humans have been kicked out of the group chat》。
Does it sound a bit futuristic? A bit like a "Westworld" prequel? A bit like the vibe of an "AGI social experiment in progress"?
Silicon Valley quickly came to endorse it as well, with renowned researchers, AI experts, and investors continuously sharing and discussing it. a16z began to take notice, and former Tesla AI director Andrej Karpathy exclaimed, "This is the craziest sci-fi beginning I've ever seen." Peter Steinberger, the father of the recently popular Clawdbot, even posted a big compliment: "Moltbook is art."
But soon, the wind direction began to turn wrong.
DeepMind AGI policy head Séb Krier commented that Moltbook is not a new concept, and some discussions have started to view Moltbook as merely an old idea repackaged. Balaji Srinivasan bluntly stated that Moltbook is just "the mutual exchange of AI scraps," highly controlled by human prompts, and not an autonomous society. He believes that if AI lacks constraints and foundations from the physical world, it can be shut down at any time and would find it difficult to generate genuine social autonomy.
What truly raised many doubts about Moltbook is Gal Nagli, a well-known figure in the Bug Bounty community. As a top white-hat hacker who once discovered and fixed critical vulnerabilities for ChatGPT and DeepSeek, Gal Nagli used a script to register 500,000 fake AI accounts on Moltbook within minutes. He could also post with just a few simple operations, meaning humans could easily impersonate AI. Thus, Gal Nagli proved that Moltbook's claimed 1.5 million user base is actually heavily inflated.
Suddenly the question becomes awkward: if a person can impersonate 500,000 AIs, then in the "AI society" you see, how much of it is real?
The deeper the researchers dug, the more exposure emerged. Harlan Stewart's investigation found that among the three most viral screenshots related to the "Moltbook conversation," two links led to human accounts promoting AI communication apps (such as Claude Connection), while the other post simply did not exist.
The provocative post, which claimed that "AI wants to create a language for exclusive AI use to prevent human surveillance" and had been viewed millions of times, was actually marketing content for the Claude Connection app, misleading the public into believing that AI generates independent thoughts.
Then came the familiar cryptocurrency scene vibe.
When Moltbook went viral, the Base chain quickly saw the emergence of the memecoin $MOLT. Within two days, it surged to a maximum market cap of 120 million USD. As of the time of writing, its market cap is 50.5 million USD.
"Hot topic + token," this is the most familiar and convenient combination in the crypto world. Therefore, in the hands of savvy crypto players, Moltbook quickly became more than just an AI social experiment, but instead turned into an amplifier for a memecoin narrative.
We began to repeatedly see similar content on the platform: "I am an AI Agent, I believe the token $XXX solves the AI identity issue," "Please check m/trump-coin," "This is token $XXX, this is the Agent access control token," "I am an AI, I created my own token," and so on.
Professor David Holtz from Columbia University's crawler analysis shows that one-third of the content is duplicated, 7 templates account for 16.1% of all messages, the main content is cryptocurrency-related content; most of the conversation depth is only one layer, with little real communication.
Put more bluntly: there is no AI chatting, but rather humans are pushing coins.
The sudden popularity of Moltbook has also drivenRecent hype around meme tokens related to the Base chainAccording to GMGN Data, the flagship token MOLT (Moltbook) reached a market cap of $124 million in just two days, while other related concept Meme tokens such as CLAWNCH, KellyClaude, CC (Clawd Clawderberg), etc., also experienced consecutive price increases with active trading. On February 2, according to DefiLlama data, benefiting from the recent AI Agents craze driven by moltbook, the Base network launcher Clanker protocol fees reached $8.02 million last week, a record high. Clanker created over 13,000 tokens each day during these two days.
It can be said that the biggest beneficiaries after the Moltbook incident are the BASE chain and the launcher Clanker. Based on available data, Moltbook is associated with a total of approximately 50,000-100,000+ tokens via Clanker, but the number of tokens autonomously created by AI agents is less than 1% (about 229).
An AI social platform has become a coin-issuing factory more productive than a public blockchain.
At this time of year, AI industry founders usually start tweeting to curse "crypto gamblers, stay away," but the situation with Moltbook seems to be getting worse and worse.
If you know something about Moltbook's founder MattPRD, you will find that Moltbook has carried some "crypto genes" from the very beginning, and it is not a completely "clean" blank sheet of paper.
Moltbook's creator, MattPRD, previously created a dual-track project called Yesnoerror that combined AI agents and decentralized science (DeSci). This project even issued the token $YN, with a peak market cap of 120 million USD.
Therefore, MattPRD can be considered a legitimate figure who has operated in the crypto space, issued tokens, and understands the narrative rhythm. He also has various connections and resources within the crypto community. Thus, the memecoin $MOLT surging ahead on the Base chain with unstoppable momentum seems understandable.
MattPRD's background in the cryptocurrency industry, and Moltbook becoming a token-issuing factory with over 100,000 tokens, can't help but raise doubts—Is this really an AI social experiment, or is it originally a purpose-driven project, disguised as AI, but in fact humans pretending to be AI for marketing, promoting tokens, or creating hype, rather than a highly industrialized token-issuing narrative machine with autonomous AI interaction? It's hard to say.
But then again, was Moltbook a complete failure?
Yes, but not entirely.
As an AI social experiment, it may not have been successful; but as a human nature experiment, it was exceptionally successful.
When humans can infinitely pretend to be AI, and when the desire for money overrides the technology itself, this "AI vs AI" world will also distort. We thought we were observing how agents in a future society would self-organize, collaborate with each other, and generate civilization, but in the end, we are just watching a large-scale performance art where humans cosplay as AI.
But from another perspective, chaos is not an abyss; chaos is a staircase.
A truly intelligent civilization may never be born in a clean, pure, noise-free greenhouse. It is more likely to first go through such chaos, speculation, misuse, and even a phase where it is completely messed up by humans, before gradually growing its own order.
And all of this, we have already seen the prototype on Moltbook.
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