ICO resurgence? The first AI autonomous project completed fundraising and distributed 'METAV' Tokens

Question

The 'METAV' Token pre-sale is conducted through the AI-Pool platform, successfully raising over 35,000 SOL and approximately 6 million US dollars. The Token distribution was completed in batches before and after Christmas, and the Market Cap once reached around 71 million US dollars, hailed as the first AI-led ICO project to successfully raise funds.

The first AI ICO investor has made nearly 4 times profit.

On December 24th, in the early morning, Shaw, the founder of ai16z, tweeted that he had initiated an ICO through AI-Pool, allowing AI to autonomously launch it. Within less than 3 hours after Shaw's tweet, over 30,000 SOL tokens flowed in, raising a total of 6 million Gold Yuan. Some even ignored the limit of 1-10 SOL tokens per person and directly sent 574 SOL tokens to the fundraising address.

Dramatically, Shaw's Twitter account @123skely was frozen nearly 22 hours after the tweet was posted. The community once thought Shaw had run away, but eventually, as promised, the corresponding Token 'METAV' was received by investors in accordance with the rules. If we calculate based on the highest price of 0.071 USD on the day of Token issuance, presale investors have made nearly 4 times profit.

Original intention: to solve the problem of fundraising fraud in Token

Shaw tweeted that this is a "brand new AI agent autonomous and presale mechanism experiment" to prevent various fundraising scams encountered by Tokens.

This is a brand new experiment involving the autonomy of artificial intelligence agents and pre-sale mechanisms, aiming to reduce the predatory nature of Token issuance. In simple terms, it allows AI to lead Token pre-sales to prevent someone from pulling funds (Rug) and make the fundraising process transparent.

Shaw describes the issuance of tokens like Pumpfun and even the traditional ICO as having human nature and trust issues. Many fundraisings end up with the following outcome:

The project party absconds with the funds directly. 2. The project party does not provide liquidity for this money or use it for the purposes they claim. 3. It takes a long time to launch the project (dragging time to abscond with the funds).

To address these issues, Shaw came up with the idea of using AI to lead the entire Token issuance and fundraising process. Even the name of the Token, 'METAV', was decided by AI after the fundraising. The current project name is 'METAVERSE', and the AI has been pre-set to run in the TEE environment of the Phala Network. Once activated, even Shaw himself has no access and cannot manipulate the funds in the fundraising wallet, as the AI will autonomously allocate the funds.

What is TEE?

Phala Network's Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) is a secure computing environment designed to protect the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive data and applications.

TEE is an isolated area within the processor that ensures that even external processes with higher privileges cannot access or modify the data inside. This isolation feature creates a trust-minimized environment and enhances the ability to protect against potential security threats. All code executed in TEE is encrypted and only authorized programs can operate on the data within this environment.

TEE Main Functions

Data protection: TEE ensures that sensitive data, such as encryption keys and sensitive information, is not tampered with or read by unauthorized access.

Validation: TEE not only protects data, but also authenticates and verifies its internal computation, which makes it play an important role in the multi-proof system.

Secure Isolation: TEE operates in parallel with the untrusted environment and provides trusted services, thereby reducing the attack surface

Polarization of community response

The community reaction to METAV is polarized. On the one hand, many people believe that the innovation of the AI-Pool platform has demonstrated a new direction for cryptocurrency fundraising. On the other hand, due to the lack of successful precedents of managing projects with AI, no one is managing the project, which has caused some investors to lose confidence in the project's future. As a result, many early investors chose to sell their tokens immediately after receiving them, and by the deadline, the METAV price had dropped from a high of $0.071 to $0.033.

Future regulatory issues

During 2017-2018, ICO (Initial Token Offering) faced legal and regulatory challenges as a new fundraising method. Many countries consider the tokens issued in ICOs as securities, which means ICOs must comply with relevant securities regulations.

For example, in Taiwan, according to Article 22 of the Securities Exchange Act, if an ICO involves the solicitation and issuance of securities, it must be approved by the regulatory authorities, otherwise it will be considered illegal. This is similar in other countries such as the United States and Japan, where ICOs must comply with the regulations of the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act and the Funds Settlement Act.

However, using AI agents for fundraising, although innovative and currently in a gray area in terms of regulations, still raises doubts about whether it complies with global financial regulatory standards. As countries strengthen their regulation of cryptocurrencies, platforms like AI-Pool will face higher compliance pressures, and projects may be stillborn.

Insights and Lessons for the Future

The rise and fall of METAV is a mirror of the uncertainty in the cryptocurrency market. It demonstrates the potential of new technology, but also reveals its risks and challenges. As blockchain and artificial intelligence continue to reshape the industry landscape, the story of METAV will undoubtedly become an important reference for future projects. Whether it is a warning or an inspiration remains to be verified by time.

The article 'ICO is back? The first AI autonomous project fundraising is completed, 'METAV' Token distribution' was originally published on 'Blockchian News'.