Crypto-related artificial intelligence agents may be one of this year’s emerging trends but still remain highly speculative according to Switzerland-based crypto bank Sygnum Bank.
“Interest in AI-related crypto projects has grown substantially with the emerging niche of crypto AI agents,” wrote researchers from Sygnum in a recent quarterly investment outlook report.
However, while AI agents have gained “remarkable traction” so far, they have “struggled to prove their worth beyond speculation,” said the researchers.
It added that while the AI agent niche “remains mostly speculative,” AI infrastructure projects — such as Bittensor (TAO), the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (FET) and Phala Network — “are addressing the more practical challenges by attempting to integrate AI services and their data requirements with decentralized applications.”
Meanwhile, crypto research AI agents and AI-driven crypto market intelligence platforms such as aixbt are also gaining traction, it said.
Sygnum added that tokens of leading AI agent-creation protocols, such as Virtuals and ai16z, “may continue to benefit as the potential for AI agents to create value continues to be explored.”
Additionally, the emerging AI agents niche subsector has more than doubled over the last quarter to a market capitalization of $10 billion, it wrote. CoinGecko reported that the market cap for the sector soared above $15 billion in Q4, 2024.
Agentic AI automates processes and decision-making as agents are able to understand complex goals, execute multi-step reasoning processes, and take actions with minimal human intervention.
Sygnum isn’t the only company with a forward-looking take on agentic AI in recent months.
Researchers at Franklin Templeton said AI agents would “revolutionize” social media, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted that AI agents might “join the workforce” in 2025, Google has touted a “new agentic era,” and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg said AI assistants would reach more than a billion people this year.
Meanwhile, the chief operating officer of Bitget Wallet, Alvin Kan, told Cointelegraph that AI projects and tokens were “poised for growth in 2025.”
“Emerging narratives like AI-driven investments, decentralized AI agents, and tokenized assets hint at a tech-driven shift, though with added risk,” he said in December.
Related: AI agents in DeFi: How real-time data ensures market safety
However, the Sygnum researchers also cautioned that despite growing optimism around decentralized AI, “the emergence of cheap and efficient Chinese AI also led to a sell-off among crypto AI projects.”
The launch of the latest model from Chinese AI firm DeepSeek in January rattled US AI stocks and AI-focused crypto projects, but they appear to have bounced back with AI tokens leading today’s crypto market recovery.
Magazine: You should ‘go and build’ your own AI agent: Jesse Pollak, X Hall of Flame
