Exploring AI Agents: Evolution, Applications, Token Roles, and Capital Scale

Author: Dappradar; Compiled by: Felix, PANews

Since the beginning of 2025, on-chain activities related to AI have surged by 86%, with the number of daily active unique wallets (dUAW) reaching approximately 4.5 million. This has brought AI's dominance to 19%, just behind gaming at 20%. Considering its market share was only 9% at the beginning of the year, this is a significant change.

This explosive growth is not only due to speculation; it reflects a structural change in how users interact with dApps. Whether through DeFi, social agents, or autonomous gaming assistants, AI agents are becoming the new layer of on-chain interaction. They do not replace users but expand their capabilities, enabling automation, optimization, and representation in interactions.

Data confirms this statement: AI has dominated the discussions around Web3 in the past month and is likely to define the direction of its next phase of development. This report explores the development history of AI agents, application scenarios, the role of tokens, and the scale of capital supporting this shift.

Key Points

• In June, the dominance of AI on the blockchain rose from 9% in January to 19%, with trading activity increasing by 86% and the number of daily active unique wallets reaching 4.5 million.
• As of June 2025, AI agent projects have raised $1.39 billion, a 9.4% increase compared to the total financing for the entire year of 2024.
• Since November 2024, there have been 17,124 agents launched on the Virtuals Protocol, with an average of over 85 new agents added daily.
• Although the market value of AI tokens has decreased by 64% from its high point in early June, it still stands at $5.9 billion, with a 24-hour trading volume of $1.4 billion.
• Europe (26.2%) and Asia (21.9%) are the regions with the highest usage of AI dApps, followed by North America (15.8%).

1 What is an AI agent?

AI agents are autonomous software programs that can perform tasks, make decisions, or interact with users based on goals, prompts, or real-time data. Traditional AI agents cover industries such as finance, healthcare, or customer service, while the Web3 ecosystem is giving rise to crypto-native agents with unique capabilities and roles.

In Web3, AI agents are evolving towards specialization. Some act as on-chain DeFi agents, executing trades, managing yield strategies, or serving as portfolio "managers." Others are social agents, representing users in decentralized social applications, managing profiles, and even responding to messages and interactions. In the gaming sector, a new class of native game agents has emerged; these AI companions are trained on game backgrounds, game mechanics, or player behavior, serving as helpful guides or even becoming opponents.

This is not just theoretical talk. According to data from cookie.fun tracking the proxy economy, there are currently 1,748 AI proxies active across various environments. Since its launch in November 2024, the Virtuals Protocol, which allows users to create and deploy their own AI proxies, has already gone live with over 17,000 proxies. The actual number may be even higher, as multiple chains are currently prioritizing the construction of infrastructure for the creation, training, and deployment of AI proxies.

The agency economy is taking shape and developing rapidly.

2. AI Proxy Tokens: Utility, Speculation, and Capital

In Web3, most AI agents are not launched individually, but come with tokens. The role of these tokens depends on the vision of the project and can serve various functions. In many cases, they are intended to support community governance, provide access to premium features, or act as a fundraising mechanism for development, especially when training and maintaining AI agents still require significant resources.

For others, tokens are merely a capitalization strategy, a way to obtain liquidity, reward early adopters, or take advantage of market momentum. In some cases, they resemble meme coins disguised as AI, issued around vague agency narratives, lacking technical substance, simply riding the wave of speculative frenzy.

Despite the various noises in the market, the AI agent token market has still made remarkable progress. As of the writing of this article, the total market value of AI-related tokens has reached 5.9 billion dollars, accounting for 0.18% of the entire cryptocurrency market. The daily trading volume in the past 24 hours has also been quite considerable, exceeding 1.4 billion dollars.

However, the recent trend is not optimistic. At the beginning of this month, the market value of the AI agent sector was $16.6 billion, which means that the market value of this sector has shrunk by 64% in just a few weeks. This decline reflects a broader market condition, not just attitudes towards AI. But it also indicates the volatility inherent in early-stage sectors, where token speculation often exceeds actual utility.

AI agents will exist for a long time. But what about their tokens?

3 Top Blockchain Empowering AI Dapps

Although AI agents are typically the visible layer used for interacting with users, executing transactions, or providing in-game assistance, their success largely depends on the underlying infrastructure. Blockchains that support high-capacity AI dapps are effectively laying the foundation for the deployment, training, and interaction of AI agents.

From January to June 24, 2025, the following blockchains showed the most active usage in AI dapps:

Matchain dominates with nearly 1.9 million daily active users, indicating that AI infrastructure is thriving under the impetus of social or agent-oriented dapps. opBNB and Nebula follow closely behind, both showing strong usage rates associated with lightweight to gamified AI services.

Although not all of these dapps have deployed proxies yet, their development momentum is evident. With the maturity of AI proxy frameworks, these blockchains may usher in the next wave of autonomous agents, whether in DeFi, gaming, or social applications.

Currently, we may still be in the infrastructure construction phase of the AI agent boom, and these networks are leading the way in this process.

Where do users come from?

AI agents may exist on the blockchain, but their users are spread across the globe. Understanding the sources of user participation helps to gain a clearer insight into adoption trends, localization needs, and potential market opportunities.

From January to June 2025, according to Dapprader traffic data, Europe leads in interactions with AI-related dapps, accounting for 26.2%. Following closely is Asia with 21.9%, and then North America with 15.8%. South America has a smaller share at 2.5%, but its user base is continuously growing. Interestingly, 33% of the traffic comes from unspecified or hard-to-classify regions, collectively referred to as "others."

This global distribution indicates that AI agents are not limited to a specific region. Whether it's DeFi agents managing trades in Asia, social agents representing users in Europe, or gaming partners interacting with players in North America, the demand shows diversity and increasingly exhibits transcontinental characteristics.

As the industry matures, it is expected that more localized agency behaviors will emerge, along with better language modeling, and even agency personalities with specific regional characteristics. Currently, the competitive landscape is vast, and the race for user attention is global.

5 capital inflow AI agent

AI narratives continue to dominate headlines and funding rounds. Despite centralized AI giants like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral raising billions of dollars, the AI agent economy within Web3 is also beginning to attract attention.

By 2025, AI agent projects have raised $1.39 billion, representing a 9.4% increase from 2024. This indicates that investors are increasingly convinced that autonomous on-chain agents may become the next frontier. Although this figure is still far below the investment amount in centralized AI, it is noteworthy that the financing in the AI agent space is now comparable to or even surpassing that of other Web3 segments such as blockchain gaming.

This contrast is significant. Centralized AI investments still dominate, with hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into model development, chips, and infrastructure. However, in the Web3 space, investors are increasingly viewing AI agents as a new "primitive" that can reshape how users interact with protocols, navigate DApps, and even automate personal finance strategies.

This momentum is growing stronger. If this momentum continues, 2025 could become the year when AI agents attract more funding than any other Web3 vertical.

6 Conclusion

The rise of AI agents marks a profound shift in the way users interact with decentralized systems. From DeFi traders and social companions to game-native assistants, agents are rapidly evolving from experimental bots into infrastructure.

These figures confirm this statement. Since the end of 2024, more than 17,000 virtual agents have gone online. Even in a sluggish market, the AI token market has reached a size of $5.9 billion and continues to grow. Just this year, startups focused on agents have raised $1.39 billion in funding. Moreover, user participation is global, showing strong performance in Europe, Asia, and North America.

However, challenges still exist. Many tokens are driven more by speculation than by utility. Not all agents can fulfill their promises of autonomy. Moreover, cross-chain infrastructure remains uneven. However, with the maturity of tools and the proliferation of real use cases, the agent economy is approaching a new baseline where interaction with on-chain AI is no longer the exception, but the norm.

The competition to create smarter agents, a more powerful ecosystem, and clearer standards has already begun. However, it is still in its infancy.