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The founder personally intervened, why did the two popular L1s, Sonic and Monad, engage in a war of words?
Original Title: "Two Major Layer1 Networks Exchange Insults, How Did Sonic and Monad Start Quarreling?"
Original Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily
The market remains quiet, but the cryptocurrency industry never lacks excitement.
This morning, two major Layer 1 networks, Sonic (formerly Fantom) and Monad, suddenly engaged in a war of words, even involving the founders of both projects.
As the two most anticipated Layer 1 networks in the future market, Sonic, born from the once-popular Layer 1 network Fantom and now revamped by the well-known DeFi guru Andre Cronje, and Monad, born from the market-making giant Jump Trading and received a $2.25 billion investment led by Paradigm at a $30 billion valuation in April last year. From a competitive standpoint, the two Layer 1 networks indeed have a natural rivalry, but it seems they don't need to be so direct in their confrontation. So, what exactly happened last night?
Here is the background of the event.
First, on January 12, the Sonic team officially released a celebratory video announcing that the network's Total Value Locked (TVL) had surpassed $100 million on the mainnet. This was a standard marketing move by the project team and did not seem problematic.
However, shortly after, a core member of the growth team at Monad, known as tunez, suddenly made a provocative comment: "This is almost as much as they lost in the cross-chain bridge incident."
tunez also shared a Forbes article about the cross-chain bridge Multichain being hacked in a previous year.
In July 2023, the cross-chain bridge project Multichain fell victim to a hacker attack, with initial estimates of losses around $126 million. Although Multichain's services spanned multiple networks, Fantom, as the primary cross-chain bridge, suffered the most severe consequences. Subsequently, the stablecoin on Fantom experienced long periods of significant de-pegging, multiple ecosystem projects announced shutdowns due to fund losses, ultimately leading to Fantom's exit from the intense competition among the previous generation of emerging Layer 1 networks.
Sonic was originally celebrating the newborn happily, but the good day was directly hit by tunez, which naturally could not be tolerated.
Many Sonic community members immediately began to retaliate against tunez, with some even bringing up tunez's words from two days ago, "As Monad becomes more popular, it will also face more and more attacks," directly pointing out that tunez's actions were provoked by Sonic's popularity.
Subsequently, Sonic (formerly Fantom) co-founder AC personally responded to tunez, with the following content:
· Monad did not do the most basic investigation; Multichain is an independent third-party cross-chain bridge. Among the more than 10 affected chains, only Fantom is still seeking fund recovery.
· Monad's narrative changes every few months. Monad initially said they would do parallel EVM, but we found that they could not deliver the promised performance numbers, and reminded them that unless they do another database (DB), and then Monad announced they would launch MonadDB, and next they will probably do supersets.
· Moand's Devnet is just a fork network of Avalanche, and they even forgot to rename the gas fee token from AVA to Monad.
· Monad has no cross-chain bridge, no technology, nothing. Sonic developed what Monad promised, and is busy with the next iteration. Sonic also does not need $3 billion.
After AC's response, Monad's two co-founders, Keone Hon and James Hunsaker, also responded successively. However, perhaps feeling that tunez's provocation was unjust, the language of the two co-founders seemed to be much milder and did not further escalate the conflict.
Keone Hon first denied AC's criticisms of Monad points 2-4 and emphasized that such rumors are all incorrect. At the same time, Keone Hon praised Sonic's continued efforts to trace the funds and AC's contributions to the industry, and finally wished AC and Sonic the best for their future development.
James Hunsaker's response was more detailed:
· The parallel EVM is actually running well, but introducing a high-performance, low-latency asynchronous database would yield better results;
· Monad has never seen Avalanche's code, let alone forked it—Monad and Avalanche are not even written in the same programming language;
· Monad will launch a cross-chain bridge when its mainnet goes live;
· Only a small portion of the funds raised by Monad has been temporarily utilized.
In conclusion, after Monad took a more moderate approach to mitigate the conflict, the verbal battle between the two parties has temporarily ceased.
The market is bleak, and market information is hindered. We are eager to see new projects compete in terms of technical paths, application types, adoption patterns, and more, but clearly not in this manner. As the two most highly anticipated Layer 1 representative projects in the current community, Sonic and Monad should seemingly set an example.
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Market Sees Bullish Sentiment Again, AI Agent Field Shows Potential Alpha in the Near Term
How to Build a Potential AI Agent Project in a Bear Market?
Original Author: Defi0xJeff, Founder of steak studio
Original Translation: zhouzhou, BlockBeats
Editor's Note: This article discusses the correct way to build a crypto AI agent, emphasizing that the agent should complement the core product by changing the user journey to enhance product value, rather than relying solely on the token. Entrepreneurs should focus on solving real-world problems, building a sustainable core product, and then using agents and tokens for promotion and monetization.
The following is the original content (slightly reorganized for easier comprehension):
The market has experienced multiple pullbacks, with liquidity gradually becoming scarcer. Recently launched successful new agents have a maximum market cap of around $10 million.
By "successful," I mean the product has achieved Product-Market Fit (PMF), provided value to actual users, and has started (or is about to start) generating revenue. This is very different from three to four months ago when agents with PMF could have market caps exceeding $1 billion, especially if they positioned themselves as agent+framework/launchpad tokens. For example, AVA as a 3D agent not only serves as an agent itself but also derives value from the launchpad and supported projects through its sensory layer.
The previous approach was to launch an agent to showcase its capabilities, attract developers looking to build their own agents, and require these developers to hold/burn/pay agent tokens to access the framework. The issue was that the crypto community assigned too high a premium to framework tokens, and these "framework agents" often lacked differentiation. In many cases, they did not even have a product—they were just talking on Twitter, hoping for token price appreciation.
The first version of agents treated the conversational agent itself as a product, which is unique in the crypto space as we value community building more—similar to founder-led marketing (founders gaining attention through constant chatter). Having agents constantly chatter for your project to increase visibility seemed like a good idea—it worked well when first launched in November 2024, lasting a month. But now, with 420,690 agents constantly chattering, most agents seem immature, repetitive, and frankly annoying.
Here is how you should think about launching an agent — launching an agent means you will be operating a startup while managing up to three products:
Your core product should solve a real-world problem. It should not just be a conversational agent but a true product.
Example:
· Improve sports betting odds prediction models to help users win more in sports betting (e.g., crypto community AskBillyBets).
· Develop a crypto asset prediction model that enables better trading, minimizes impermanent loss, and maximizes liquidity provider returns (e.g., crypto communities Cod3xOrg, gizatechxyz, and Almanak).
· Aggregate insights from top alpha sources (such as Cookie, Kaito, Nansen, Messari, Aixbt, CG, Dexscreener, and Bubblemaps) into an AI agent research search engine to aid investment decisions (currently, no team is solving this problem — we need an AI agent like Perplexity).
The core product should be the top priority before any team launches a token. You need to ensure there is actual demand in the market and users are willing to pay for it. Otherwise, you will fall into the "crypto valley," the consequences of which may be more severe than traditional startups:
· High operational costs.
· Token-funded customer acquisition costs (CAC).
· Token price crash → Reputation collapse → No one cares about your project.
If your token crashes, it becomes a curse. Most people won't care about your project regardless of how strong your core product is or how much progress you've made.
Instead of relying on token incentives, focus on attracting customers through your product. Find a balance between growth and revenue-generating business models.
The playbook of the crypto community KaitoAI is a good case study:
· They built an enterprise product — a crypto search engine focused on social/emotion/narrative and charged users, projects, and the ecosystem, providing real value.
· They launched the Mindshare Dashboard, becoming the standard for tracking narratives and trends.
· They intensified their efforts by introducing the Yapper Leaderboard, allowing KOLs to spontaneously share it as a status symbol.
· They further rolled out NFT WL and KAITO airdrop, incentivizing Twitter engagement through actual rewards.
This approach is not easy to replicate, but the lesson is: first find PMF, generate revenue, get people excited before launching the token. Once you have attention (hype) and revenue, you can move to the next level.
Similarly, communication is crucial. Many projects have strong products but poor communication skills. If no one knows what you are doing, no one will care.
We have transitioned from "VC coins" to "fair launch," celebrating tokens with high circulation and low FDV. But fair launch is not entirely fair—every token strategy has its trade-offs.
If the token you launch has a high circulation and low FDV structure, you will not be able to raise funds from VCs and angels (because of undervaluation). However, you can use the token as a marketing tool to kickstart ideation sharing.
Many teams will launch two types of tokens:
· Protocol Token → Kickstarts Ideation Sharing.
· Ecosystem Token → Raises funding from VCs and angels at a higher valuation.
But this creates an expectation mismatch—communities expect airdrops, and when the ecosystem token is released, capital moves from the protocol token to the ecosystem token, leading to a collapse in the protocol token price. Managing the core product + protocol token + ecosystem token while ensuring value accrual for each token is very complex.
In an ideal world, there should be a token that accumulates all the value from the core product. Historically, projects that could generate revenue and funnel it back into the token (through buybacks or revenue distribution) have been able to survive long-term.
Tokens should complement the core product, not be a necessity. To delve deeper into protocol token strategy, please refer to the crypto community VaderResearch's analysis of the protocol token playbook for the crypto community at virtuals io.
「Agent」 refers to conversational agents built using frameworks like ElizaOS, G.A.M.E, ARC, Pippin, etc. While these agents integrate on-chain/off-chain capabilities, they should be supplementary products to the core product.
Agents should enhance the value of the core product by altering the user's path:
Instead of having users actively seek out and use your product, let the agent bring the product to them.
This could mean:
· Showcasing the product directly on Twitter through text/video.
· Having the agent act as an AI companion, changing the user's interaction style (similar to ChatGPT's abstraction).
· Using the agent as the interface itself, executing tasks in the background.
Of course, there are exceptions. An example is the aixbt agent—it provides real-time social and sentiment analysis from Twitter, allowing users to access real-time Alpha signals ahead of others. Aixbt, by consistently providing Alpha, showcases the terminal's capability and has become the No. 1 KOL in CT. In this case, the agent itself is the product.
However, this model is extremely challenging to replicate. Most projects should focus on strengthening the core product first.
A successful product-first case study is cookiedotfun:
· Starting with a free AI agent dashboard to attract users.
· Transitioning to a freemium model by locking COOKIES to unlock advanced insights.
· Monetizing through providing API for projects and agents.
· Launching agentcookiefun to directly bring insights to Twitter.
In 2020-21, launching a token required mastering Solidity. But now platforms like pumpdotfun make it easy to tokenize anything.
This shift in mindset—people no longer focusing on building real products but directly launching tokens—is a "garbage in, garbage out" approach, leading capital to quickly move to the next "garbage." We need to change this.
To build sustainable projects, agent projects should be treated as startups. Instead of seeking funding between CT, VCs, and angel investors, it's better to build projects with long-term value—not for the next 6 months but for the next 6 years.
Innovation, solving real-world problems, building real businesses — not just creating the next speculative meme coin farm.
The future of the crypto AI agent depends on this.
「Original Article Link」
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