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DeFi's Wild Growth: How to Identify Rug Pull Projects and Discover True Alpha?
Original Article Title: DeFAI: The Rise of Trading Agents
Original Article Author: Defi0xJeff, CEO of steak studio
Original Article Translation: zhouzhou, BlockBeats
Editor's Note: This article discusses the development of DeFAI, introducing platforms like Cod3x and Almanak that allow users to create, customize, and run autonomous trading agents to enhance trading strategy efficiency and privacy protection. The article mentions that these agents are rapidly evolving, but also points out that there are still many immature projects in the market. In the coming months, as the real performance of Cod3x and Almanak is revealed, the competition among trading agents will intensify. The author also expresses expectations to test different trading strategy platforms and plans to share relevant updates.
Below is the original content (slightly reorganized for better readability):
An agent autonomously makes money for users, researches and identifies high-quality options, analyzes sentiment and on-chain data, and executes trades based on its signals and insights. No longer do you need to spend hours seeking alpha like a human, avoiding phishing scams, and dodging rug events. You can have an agent that continuously generates alpha returns for you, and that is the vision of an autonomous trading agent.
Origin: InvestmentDAO Narrative
The autonomous trading agent has undergone rapid development, initially stemming from the narrative of InvestmentDAO — fund managers raised funds through daosdotfun on Solana, aiming to achieve alpha returns through investing in meme coins and AI agent tokens.
ai16zdao was the first to launch this narrative DAO (later shifting their focus more towards open-source innovation by introducing ElizaOS).
Since then, we have seen the emergence of many DAOs, especially:
· Big Pharmai: Investing in DeScI and owning their own BADDIE framework
· AimonicaBrands: Waifu VC, aiming to surpass traditional venture capital.
·sekoia virtuals: Autonomous venture capital utilizing AI agents for investment analysis, focusing on Virtualsagent.
·Vader AI: Investment DAO/DAO creation platform investing in Virtualsagent.
·wai combinator: Investor and incubator actively investing in micro Virtualsagent.
·aicceleratedao: Investment and development DAO aiming to accelerate DeAI progress across different blockchains.
All of these are thriving on platforms such as daosdotfun and daosdotworld. Despite the InvestmentDAOs ecosystem evolving into a vibrant network, supporting agents through marketing/exposure and maintaining the agent token price via the Agent (3,3) strategy (DAOs buying other agents or mutually supporting DAOs), investors trust InvestmentDAOs to outperform the market and achieve excess returns.
In addition, with many DAOs also rolling out their own products or frameworks, this is why InvestmentDAOs' trading prices often significantly exceed their net asset value, which may not be suitable for traders looking to achieve excess returns solely through their familiar strategies.
This leads to the further development of this narrative: autonomous trading agents. No longer entrusting money to humans, but entering an era where we trust AI agents to manage personalized investment portfolios.
Where We Are Now
We are still in the early stages. The ecosystem is just getting started but is growing:
1. Infrastructure is emerging: Some platforms are introducing AI trading agents to handle complex DeFi strategies.
2. Early experiments: Individual agents are trading, but the verifiability of their performance remains a challenge. Few agents will transparently share their results—BigTonyXBT being a rare exception.
3. Limited adoption of TEE: TEE remains computationally expensive and relatively immature (but efforts are still underway to demonstrate that agents are at the helm, not humans).
Cod3xOrg / BigTonyXBT
Cod3x is currently one of the top-tier autonomous trading agent ecosystems, and Cod3x Create has begun testing. Cod3x Create allows users to create their own autonomous agents through a natural language interface.
The platform offers various trading strategies, allowing users to customize down to the finest detail.
All of this is the result of three years of effort, abstracting millions of lines of complex code into simple tools that anyone can use.
Big Tony himself has been trading for months using technical analysis and AlloraNetwork's machine learning price prediction model. His wallet is public, and anyone can verify his earnings. Cod3x is recruiting the first batch of users to launch agents—you need ten million dollars in TONY to join.
The next few weeks will be very exciting as we will see a large number of Cod3x autonomous agents trading, generating real-time performance data, and further enhancing Big Tony's super agent cohort through reinforcement learning.
Almanak
Almanak focuses on enterprise-level quant strategies, with highly complex real-time environment testing tools. Similar to Cod3x, the team has abstracted the complexity of building highly sophisticated autonomous trading agents but places more emphasis on privacy features.
Creators can:
· Fully privatize their strategy.
· Share their strategy with other agents using a built-in profit-sharing protocol.
· Make the strategy public for anyone to use (creators also receive profit sharing).
Users can also self-host strategies on their local machine or private cloud for enhanced security. Almanak plans to provide a real-time testing environment where users can deploy and test agent strategies' performance in the real world without risking funds. Each agent's operation will be verifiable through trade logs, and performance will be displayed on a dashboard. You can even query the agent to understand its operations.
The team plans to release an Almanak beta version for legiondotcc investors in mid-February to try out these agents. It will be exciting to see if these agents can outperform regular traders. Personally, I am looking forward to testing their autonomous LP strategy.
Other notable developments:
Spectral Labs has made significant progress, with the agent's total trading volume reaching $800,000 in the first month of HyperliquidX. They are building a multi-agent collaboration framework called "Lux" to enhance agent collaboration in trading scenarios:
· Beams transmit data.
· Prisms analyze or combine data.
· Lenses refine data to provide specific insights.
· Signals provide actionable trade instructions.
The emoji coin trading agent ASYM41b07 has started posting its profit updates on Twitter. While I have not yet found a way to verify these claims, the performance displayed on its timeline is indeed impressive.
ProjectPlutus emerged as the winner of the DeFiagent track in the Solana AI Hackathon, but they have not yet shared specific details about their trading agent.
Final Thoughts
We are still in the early stages of the autonomous trading agent space, with many projects merely discussing concepts, borrowing trendy vocabulary, and hiding behind the DeFAI narrative.
Cod3xOrg and Almanak are laying the groundwork for true competition, and starting from February, we will finally see real-time performance of autonomous trading agents.
Personally, I am most looking forward to testing:
· An agent trading based on cookiedotfun data/metrics.
· An agent dedicated to trading within the virtuals io ecosystem.
· A yield-generating trading agent trading YT and PT on pendle fi.
For those who are not yet familiar with the DeFAI abstraction layer (another key DeFAI vertical), feel free to check out the following:
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Source: Overheard on CT (tg: @overheardonct), Kaito
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1. "What Is 'ICM'? Holding Up the $4 Billion Market Cap Solana's New Narrative"
Overnight, the hottest narrative in the crypto space has become "Internet Capital Markets," with a host of crypto projects and founders, led by the Solana ecosystem's new Launchpad platform Believe, releasing this phrase. Together with "Believe in something," it has become the new slogan heralding the onset of a bull market. What exactly is the so-called "Internet Capital Market," will it become a short-lived hype phrase like the Base ecosystem's previous Content Coin, and what related targets are available for selection?2.《LaunchCoin Surges 20x in One Day, How Did Believe Create a $200M Market Cap Shiba Inu After Going to Zero?｜100x Retrospective》
LAUNCHCOIN broke through a $200 million market cap today, with the long-lost liquidity and such a high market cap "Memecoin" almost bringing half of the on-chain crypto community CT into the fray. The community is crazily discussing this token, with half of it being FOMO and the other half being FUD. This token, originally issued by Believe founder Ben Pasternak under his personal identity, transformed into a new platform token after a renaming. From once going to zero to a $200 million market cap, what happened in between?May 14 On-chain Fund Flow
Within 24 hours, GOONC's market cap soared to 70 million, could GOONC be the next billion-dollar dog on the Believe platform?
Bitcoin has broken $100,000, Ethereum has surpassed 2500, and is Solana's hot streak about to make a comeback?
The current market is in a state of macro euphoria, with GOONC riding the wave today, skyrocketing 10x in just a few hours, reaching a market cap of tens of millions of dollars, trading volume soaring past 50 million, and rumors swirling that the developer may be from OpenAI (unconfirmed but intriguing enough).
A ludicrous and absurd Solana meme that some actually buy into.
GOONC is a meme coin that has sprouted from the "gooning" subculture, offering no technological innovation or practical use, its sole function being speculation.
It takes inspiration from an NSFW term "gooning," which refers to a person being deeply immersed in certain content (you know what), eventually entering a nearly religious-like trance.
In Reddit (such as r/GOONED, r/GoonCaves) and some counterculture media outlets (such as MEL Magazine in 2020), "gooning" has gradually transitioned from an adult label to a meme-addicted, digital content and virtual self-indulgence synonym, arguably the epitome of Degen spirit.
GOONC is playing around with this concept, packaging the addictive nature, uselessness, and irony of gooning into a tradable financial product. The project team has made it clear: "We do not solve blockchain problems, we only trade absurdity." Blunt but oddly genuine.
GOONC launched on May 13, 2025, using the meme coin launch platform Believe App's LaunchCoin module on Solana. This tool is highly Degen: zero technical barriers, a few clicks to create a coin, perfect for projects like GOONC that can come up with ideas out of the blue.
The mastermind behind GOONC is also quite something and is the most talked-about, with KOL @basedalexandoor on X platform (alias "Pata van Goon") personally involved. His profile even caught the attention of Marc Andreessen, co-founder of a16z, making onlookers unable to resist speculating if GOONC has a hint of OpenAI lineage.
While this 'OpenAI Endorsement' is currently just community speculation, it is definitely a good card to play to fuel hype. Saying "we are pure speculation" on one hand, while tagging a few "AI + a16z" on the other.
GOONC took off as soon as it launched. After its launch on May 13, 2025, its market capitalization skyrocketed to $22 million within 4 hours, with a trading volume exceeding $25.6 million in 24 hours. According to platform data, the first day of trading saw an astonishing +41,100% surge, soaring from $0.0000001 to $0.02, becoming a "missed-the-boat" situation.
GOONC quickly formed an active trading community post-launch, with a lot of discussion and trading signals appearing on X platform (such as the 292x return signal provided by DeBot). Liquidity pools on exchanges like Raydium and Meteora grew rapidly, supporting high trading volumes and price increases.
The real climax occurred between May 13 and May 14, with the market cap rising to $5.5 million in the morning and directly surpassing $55 million in the afternoon. By the 14th, it briefly approached a $70 million market cap, with the trading volume soaring to $59 million. Some community members even posted screenshots claiming an increase of +85,000%, creating a new myth out of the ruins.
As of 1:30 pm on May 14, the price stabilized around $0.039, with a total market cap and FDV both around $39.6 million, and a 24-hour trading volume of $5.43 million. Active platforms include XT.COM, LBank, Meteora, and others.
Although there was a slight pullback from the peak ($0.07), the coin's popularity remains strong. For a coin that relies purely on "irony + community + X post" to thrive, this performance is already at a stellar level.
Currently, the background of the token's development team is not transparent, increasing the potential risk of a rug pull. Rugcheck.xyz warns that the creator of the GOONC contract may have permission to modify the contract (e.g., change fees or mint additional tokens), posing certain security risks.
Community members speculate that the meteoric rise of GOONC may be the "last hurrah".
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2.Believe Ecosystem Tokens See General Rise, LAUNCHCOIN Surges Over 250% in 24 Hours
3.Tiger Securities Introduces Cryptocurrency Deposit and Withdrawal Service, Supports Mainstream Cryptocurrencies such as BTC and ETH
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Source: Overheard on CT (tg: @overheardonct), Kaito
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COINBASE: Today, Coinbase became the first crypto company to join the S&P 500 Index, replacing Discover Financial Services, sparking widespread industry attention. The entire crypto community views this milestone as a significant development, signaling that crypto assets are further integrating into the mainstream financial system. The news has sparked lively discussions on Twitter, with many users pointing out that this may attract more institutional investors to enter the Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency markets.
XRP: XRP became the focal point of today's crypto discussion, with its significant market movements and strategic advances drawing attention. XRP has surpassed USDT to become the third-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, sparking market excitement and discussions about its future potential. The surge in market capitalization and price is believed to be related to increasing institutional interest, deepening strategic partnerships, and its role in the crypto ecosystem. Additionally, XRP's integration into multiple financial systems and its potential as a macro asset class are also seen as key factors driving the current market sentiment.
DYDX: Today's discussions about DYDX mainly focused on the dYdX Yapper Leaderboard launched by KaitoAI. The leaderboard aims to identify the most active community participants, with a total of $150,000 in rewards to be distributed over the first three seasons. This initiative has sparked broad community participation, with many users discussing the potential rewards and the incentive effect on the DYDX ecosystem. Meanwhile, progress on the ethDYDX to dYdX native chain migration and historical airdrop events have also been topics of discussion.
1. "What Is 'ICM'? Holding Up the $4 Billion Market Cap Solana's New Narrative"
Overnight, the hottest narrative in the crypto space has become "Internet Capital Markets," with a host of crypto projects and founders, led by the Solana ecosystem's new Launchpad platform Believe, releasing this phrase. Together with "Believe in something," it has become the new slogan heralding the onset of a bull market. What exactly is the so-called "Internet Capital Market," will it become a short-lived hype phrase like the Base ecosystem's previous Content Coin, and what related targets are available for selection?2.《LaunchCoin Surges 20x in One Day, How Did Believe Create a $200M Market Cap Shiba Inu After Going to Zero?｜100x Retrospective》
LAUNCHCOIN broke through a $200 million market cap today, with the long-lost liquidity and such a high market cap "Memecoin" almost bringing half of the on-chain crypto community CT into the fray. The community is crazily discussing this token, with half of it being FOMO and the other half being FUD. This token, originally issued by Believe founder Ben Pasternak under his personal identity, transformed into a new platform token after a renaming. From once going to zero to a $200 million market cap, what happened in between?May 14 On-chain Fund Flow
Within 24 hours, GOONC's market cap soared to 70 million, could GOONC be the next billion-dollar dog on the Believe platform?
Bitcoin has broken $100,000, Ethereum has surpassed 2500, and is Solana's hot streak about to make a comeback?
The current market is in a state of macro euphoria, with GOONC riding the wave today, skyrocketing 10x in just a few hours, reaching a market cap of tens of millions of dollars, trading volume soaring past 50 million, and rumors swirling that the developer may be from OpenAI (unconfirmed but intriguing enough).
A ludicrous and absurd Solana meme that some actually buy into.
GOONC is a meme coin that has sprouted from the "gooning" subculture, offering no technological innovation or practical use, its sole function being speculation.
It takes inspiration from an NSFW term "gooning," which refers to a person being deeply immersed in certain content (you know what), eventually entering a nearly religious-like trance.
In Reddit (such as r/GOONED, r/GoonCaves) and some counterculture media outlets (such as MEL Magazine in 2020), "gooning" has gradually transitioned from an adult label to a meme-addicted, digital content and virtual self-indulgence synonym, arguably the epitome of Degen spirit.
GOONC is playing around with this concept, packaging the addictive nature, uselessness, and irony of gooning into a tradable financial product. The project team has made it clear: "We do not solve blockchain problems, we only trade absurdity." Blunt but oddly genuine.
GOONC launched on May 13, 2025, using the meme coin launch platform Believe App's LaunchCoin module on Solana. This tool is highly Degen: zero technical barriers, a few clicks to create a coin, perfect for projects like GOONC that can come up with ideas out of the blue.
The mastermind behind GOONC is also quite something and is the most talked-about, with KOL @basedalexandoor on X platform (alias "Pata van Goon") personally involved. His profile even caught the attention of Marc Andreessen, co-founder of a16z, making onlookers unable to resist speculating if GOONC has a hint of OpenAI lineage.
While this 'OpenAI Endorsement' is currently just community speculation, it is definitely a good card to play to fuel hype. Saying "we are pure speculation" on one hand, while tagging a few "AI + a16z" on the other.
GOONC took off as soon as it launched. After its launch on May 13, 2025, its market capitalization skyrocketed to $22 million within 4 hours, with a trading volume exceeding $25.6 million in 24 hours. According to platform data, the first day of trading saw an astonishing +41,100% surge, soaring from $0.0000001 to $0.02, becoming a "missed-the-boat" situation.
GOONC quickly formed an active trading community post-launch, with a lot of discussion and trading signals appearing on X platform (such as the 292x return signal provided by DeBot). Liquidity pools on exchanges like Raydium and Meteora grew rapidly, supporting high trading volumes and price increases.
The real climax occurred between May 13 and May 14, with the market cap rising to $5.5 million in the morning and directly surpassing $55 million in the afternoon. By the 14th, it briefly approached a $70 million market cap, with the trading volume soaring to $59 million. Some community members even posted screenshots claiming an increase of +85,000%, creating a new myth out of the ruins.
As of 1:30 pm on May 14, the price stabilized around $0.039, with a total market cap and FDV both around $39.6 million, and a 24-hour trading volume of $5.43 million. Active platforms include XT.COM, LBank, Meteora, and others.
Although there was a slight pullback from the peak ($0.07), the coin's popularity remains strong. For a coin that relies purely on "irony + community + X post" to thrive, this performance is already at a stellar level.
Currently, the background of the token's development team is not transparent, increasing the potential risk of a rug pull. Rugcheck.xyz warns that the creator of the GOONC contract may have permission to modify the contract (e.g., change fees or mint additional tokens), posing certain security risks.
Community members speculate that the meteoric rise of GOONC may be the "last hurrah".
App