Tokens tied to artificial intelligence agents are poised to soar in value to a total market capitalization of as high as $60 billion in 2025, Gracy Chen, CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Bitget, told Cointelegraph.
Initial use cases for AI agents will include crypto transactions, such as trading and wallet management, Chen said. Additionally, crypto exchanges will start launching AI agents to automate operations and improve customer service, she added.
“The technology is not mature enough for large-scale investments due to the need for human control,” Chen cautioned, adding that investors should “opt for tokens backed by practical solutions [such as] those replacing a programmer or automating tasks.”
Agentic AI tokens already command roughly $15 billion in total market capitalization and approximately $875 million in daily trading volume, according to Chen.
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Burgeoning market
In the fourth quarter of 2024, the market cap of AI agent tokens surged by 222%, rising from less than $5 billion in October to upward of $15 billion by the end of the year, according to a report by CoinGecko.
Agentic AI tokens took off as a category shortly after the launch of the Goatseus Maximus (GOAT) coin on Solana in October, CoinGecko said.
Since then, Solana emerged as the dominant blockchain for AI agents, holding a 56.48% market share with a capitalization of $8.44 billion, per the report.
Industry executives expect AI agents to transform Web3 in 2025, with cryptocurrency trading as an early use case.
In 2025, “AI agents are expected to take on a more prominent role within decentralized communities,” J.D. Seraphine, CEO of Web3 AI developer Raiinmaker, told Cointelegraph.
As of December, Web3 hosted around 10,000 AI agents that collectively earned millions of dollars from onchain activities each week, according to a report by VanEck. It expects upward of 1 million AI agents to populate blockchain networks by the end of 2025.
Memecoin dominance
Despite an expected 4x increase, the aggregate market cap of AI agent tokens will still lag that of memecoins, which Chen said “will likely experience another growth cycle this year.”
Memecoins took the top spot for mindshare in the crypto space this year, with almost a third of investor interest focused on the highly speculative tokens, a CoinGecko study found.
By comparison, interest in artificial intelligence-related crypto tokens was the runner-up narrative to memecoins, according to CoinGecko.
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