Is the AI Agent Narrative Over?
AI Agent Narrative was the hottest narrative of the last month, giving easy 10x returns to everyone who decided to hop in during Oct-Nov. Coins like $VIRTUAL pulled 100x, $AIXBT went 1000x, and many other AI agent coins on Solana and Base ended up providing great gains to holders—if they didn’t roundtrip everything.
Now, roundtripping gains is a psychological problem, not a cyclic problem, which you need to handle with care on a personal level. Also, when we talk about the cyclic nature of narrative rotation, we usually see a narrative dominating each quarter, followed by a deep correction, and then going back for round two when a fresh wave of speculation emerges around it.
AI agent narratives run on innovation. People speculated on innovation, thinking they would make something groundbreaking. Many agents explored different use cases in the past few months, but most of them didn’t manage to sustain that energy for long. Many teams have already left building, but a few builders are still pushing forward, trying to catch up with the next evolution of agents.
What we have seen so far were stage 1 and stage 2 agents, and now we are progressing towards stage 3 agents—with their own intelligence layer and model training. That’s where we’re going to see a new wave of speculation, mainly around agents that help crypto with complex tasks that previously had high learning-based entry barriers.
One such example is DeFi yield farming. In a bull market, we see an abundance of different yield farming opportunities offered by various protocols across multiple chains every day—but can we really catch, process, and execute fast enough? It’s hard if you’re not deep in the game, and that’s where you need an AI agent to handle yield farming for you.
You still see people getting into meme launches and making 500x returns, but can you really learn the art and get into the trenches to perform with the best possible outcome? It’s tough—unless you have an AI agent trained to do meme trading for you.
Specialized, profit-focused AI agents will eventually take center stage in the next wave. They will revolve around DeFi—we will call them DeFAI agents. Many smart folks are building great things in this space right now, and we’re going to see some amazing and improved AI agent launches soon.
These will be trained on high-quality data with fine-tuned models, delivering attractive profits. Win rate, ROI, and PnL will be the key metrics driving the next wave of speculation around agents.
Now, the old agents that failed to evolve in this new direction will completely fall out of the attention cycle, and their tokens will be dead for good. Some of the projects where devs are grinding every day to improve the agent, make it smarter, and actively share progress with the community—those are the ones that will bounce back when the attention shifts again.
By Hitesh ✅
