Crypto and AI: A Liquid Market Overview

Introduction

AI has the potential to create unprecedented levels of growth and societal change, with some industry leaders predicting that a superintelligence explosion could occur before the end of the decade. Whereas claims like this would have been disregarded prior to November of 2022, the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT captured the imagination of the public by displaying the potential of cutting-edge neural network architectures.

This sector has been on the top of investors' minds, with interest further compounded by the performance of NVIDIA which for a brief moment became the most valuable company in the world. Companies such as Meta are doubling down on AI investment, and demonstrating that they can beat earnings while still pouring money into AI products that will take time to return value. Naturally, crypto builders and investors have begun exploring the design space at the intersection of the two industries.

Although some companies are attempting to leverage true synergies between the technologies, there are significantly more instances of forced or artificial combination of the two as a means to profit off of the hyped narrative. This report aims to provide an overview of the entire liquid market, as well as some promising pre-token projects, and filter the signal from the noise.

Crypto-AI Market

The Crypto-AI space has seen significant growth since the start of 2024. Year to date, AI coins have been the 2nd best performing crypto asset class behind Real World Assets (RWAs), excluding Memecoins.