Forward the Original Title: Phala Network Teams Up with ai16z for AI Experiments: AI Self-Reproduction and Pre-Sale, aiPool and Spore.fun Drive New Playable Innovations

Backed by ai16z founder Shaw, the aiPool project and the highly anticipated Spore.fun both use Phala Network’s TEE technology to issue tokens, which has once again drawn community attention to Phala Network, a prominent project in the Polkadot ecosystem from the previous bull market.

The Web3 AI Agent space continues to innovate. On December 25th, aiPool, an AI Agent autonomous token issuance project supported by Shaw, officially launched. Within just two hours of going live, it briefly hit a market cap of $100 million, quickly attracting significant on-chain liquidity and becoming a market focal point. Another project, Spore.fun, an autonomous AI evolution platform built using ai16z’s Eliza framework, is also gaining considerable market attention.

Both of these projects utilize Phala Network’s TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) technology for token issuance, ensuring that private keys are generated and stored within the TEE, making them inaccessible to developers, while all operations are verifiable through terminal logs. This has once again put Phala Network, a previously active project in the Polkadot ecosystem, back in the spotlight.

Resurgence in Popularity Through AI Project Spore.fun, Strong Ties with ai16z

According to CoinGecko, the PHA token has surged by approximately 65.7% in the past 24 hours. This dramatic price fluctuation is largely driven by the renewed interest surrounding the AI project Spore.fun and the support from ai16z.

Officially, Spore.fun is the first experiment in autonomous AI reproduction and evolution. It combines the Eliza framework, Solana’s Pump.fun, and TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) verification to create an ecosystem where AI Agents survive and can independently reproduce and adapt, completely free from human intervention.

Spore.fun adopts the AI Swarm concept, introduced by Shaw, the founder of ai16z and creator of the Eliza framework. This concept is inspired by natural systems like ant colonies and neural networks, where AI agents, through collaboration, competition, and evolution, form an emergent intelligent network. These AI agents coexist and thrive and evolve autonomously.

According to Spore.fun’s operating mechanism, each AI agent can be launched from Pump.fun. Once the market capitalization reaches $500,000 and enters the Raydium liquidity pool, it qualifies for “reproduction.” However, to ensure its autonomous operation, the agent must lease a TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) server supported by Phala Network, which provides a secure and verifiable “sandbox” environment for the AI, ensuring all actions are conducted independently and under controlled conditions.

Crypto influencer @加密韋馱 (Crypto Veto) believes that Spore.fun automates the process of new projects emerging on Pump.fun, enabling endless capital influx through infinite splitting and a survival-of-the-fittest mechanism. If a main force keeps selecting ultra-low liquidity tokens for surprise rallies at each level of the system, it could form a lottery-like structure that might attract significant funds. If the Phala burn rate were made public, it would help calculate the liquidation threshold for each token, offering a reasonable stop-loss basis.

This suggests that, in addition to the novel AI self-reproduction gameplay, the backing from the prominent ai16z project has brought Spore.fun even more attention, further boosting Phala Network’s potential for growth.

In fact, Phala Network already has strong ties with ai16z. Besides frequent interactions with Shaw on social media, it has disclosed that its TEE services have been used by ai16z and other partners to enhance their applications. Furthermore, Phala Network has worked with a16z to build the Eliza TEE Framework, which integrates TEE technology into Eliza’s multi-agent framework, ensuring cryptographically verifiable operations and enhanced privacy to provide secure and reliable interactions.

Additionally, Phala Network has empowered Spore.fun holders through airdrops, generating even more attention for itself. The project’s founder, Marvin Tong, recently announced that two platform tokens—adam and eve—are being airdropped to SPORE token holders. These tokens represent the male and female AI characters within the Spore.fun platform.

Leveraging TEE Technology in the AI Space, Initially Rejecting MEME Tokens

While the Polkadot ecosystem saw a surge in activity due to the market hype, many projects have faced survival challenges as the market cooled. Now, Phala Network is re-entering the spotlight with its AI narrative.

Phala Network recognizes that the rise of AI has led to an unprecedented demand for confidential computing, making secure and private data processing essential. This surge in demand highlights the importance of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) in ensuring the integrity, confidentiality, and security of AI operations.

To meet this demand, Phala Network has developed the open-source Dstack framework, based on TEE technology, to simplify the implementation of secure, high-performance computing environments for AI projects. This year, Phala Network has significantly increased the adoption and usage of AI Agents by empowering them with TEE technology, with daily contract executions growing from approximately 150 at the beginning of the year to about 750,000 today.

Phala Network’s TEE technology has been integrated into key sectors such as blockchain and AI, spanning decentralized AI model training and inference, as well as secure Ethereum block construction. For example, Phala’s collaboration with Hyperbolic integrates confidential computing technology into blockchain, ensuring secure deployment and validation of AI models. Other partnerships with DePIN protocol io.net, 0G, Morpheus, Lumerin, Succinct Labs, and Conduit aim to enable secure, verifiable AI execution, expand decentralized AI, and reimagine Ethereum scalability and secure computation.

As early as October, Phala Network developed its own AI Agent, such as the first fully autonomous AI agent project on Twitter, @TEE_HEE_HE, aimed at eliminating human intervention in AI decision-making and facilitating applications like AI-AgentContract and Agent Wars.

According to crypto influencer @0xSun, when TEE was launched in late October, the AI agent posted an ETH address and appeared with a MEME token on Ethereum. The token quickly attracted interactions from notable figures like Maji and Azuki founder Zagabond, with the price reaching $40 million within half a day. However, several developers, including Phala Network, expressed opposition to the project, which caused the token price to plummet. Despite this, two months later, the public interest in TEE technology began to spread widely, likely fueled by the associated token. @0xSun pointed out that if the technical team had embraced MEME tokens from the start, the project could have grown into something of a similar scale to ai16z on the ETH mainnet. He also noted that although TEE emphasizes AI’s autonomous control, the code could still contain backdoors, and most people lack the expertise to verify if TEE technology is being genuinely used.

Looking forward to 2024, Phala Network has unveiled further plans in the AI space. For example, Phala Network will focus on building Phala 2.0 in 2025, an upgraded platform integrated with GPU TEE technology, offering greater processing power and enhanced security for AI and privacy-protecting applications. Phala Network also plans to launch Phala Cloud, a platform designed to simplify the deployment and management of TEE applications for AI use cases.

Overall, Phala Network’s transformation has received positive feedback in the market, and its token price has witnessed a rise. However, to continue building competitiveness in the increasingly competitive AI market, Phala Network will still face several challenges ahead.

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