Back in mid-December 2024, we announced the launch of a new thematic index category: AI Agents.
For this index, we decided to focus on AI Agent infrastructure projects that enable the deployment of agents. As of January 10th 2025, an equal-weighted AI Agent index now has 12 holdings, including well known names AI16Z, Virtuals Protocol, Tokenbot, and Griffain.
Over the past 30 days, the AI Agent index has outperformed Bitcoin, Ether, and the Memecoin index. The index reached a high of 106.14 percent on January 2nd before retracing to 52.07 percent as of January 10th. For comparison, Bitcoin is down -3.56 percent over the same period, while Ether and Memecoins have posted negative double-digit returns.
This pullback could present a buying opportunity but it’s worth noting the risk. If Bitcoin breaks below a key support level of US$91,000, it could trigger deeper retracements across altcoins. As always, keep an eye on the broader market dynamics when making decisions.
What makes the performance of the AI Agent index even more significant is that 50 percent of AI Agent index tokens are built on Solana. Yet over the past 30 days, tokens built on Solana collectively sold off -31.26 percent. Clearly the AI Agent index represents a high-performance sub-segment of the Solana token universe.
When thinking about where to from here for the AI agent sector, we believe a few things will happen. Agents will become more intelligent, chains will be more traversable, the tasks and actions agents can do will expand, barriers to deploy an AI agent will reduce, and overall AI agent transaction volumes will grow rapidly. We also know that strong competitor platforms will continue to enter the space - just this week Swarms entered our AI Agent index, and we saw its market cap rise from $155m to $610m in just a few days.
Are we already seeing who will be the long-term performers of the AI agent space, or are these platforms merely the precursors to the future ‘greats’? Are names like Swarms, Griffain, Virtuals and Tokenbot the Netscapes of this era, or could they become the Googles? It's too soon to tell, in our view, however one way to maximise your chances of exposure to the winners is with an index.
