Market Opportunity
Last updated
Last updated
The market for AI agents is rapidly expanding, with significant growth projected in the coming years. As of 2024, the global AI agents market is valued at approximately $5.1 billion. It is expected to reach $7.38 billion in 2025 and potentially exceed $47.1 billion by 2030. This growth is driven by increasing automation needs, technological advancements, and a surge in investment across various industries.
The entire AI agents category is valued at $13.5 billion, tracking over 1,200 agents. Solana dominates with a 55% market share, amounting to a market cap of $7.33 billion, while Base follows with a 40% market share and a $5.38 billion market cap. Solana and Base account for 95% of the AI agent market landscape. When we break down the specific numbers on these chains, several key challenges can be identified:
On Base, the top 10 agents account for 67% of its market share, highlighting a looming threat to the opportunities available to individual traders through centralization.
In contrast, Solana's top 10 agents contribute only 49% of the market share. This means that mid-market agents contribute the majority of capitalization. However, most platforms for creating a mid-market agent on Solana as an individual trader lack accessibility, usability, and interoperability.
Solana and Base currently dominate the AI agent market. The issues outlined above indicate a less concentrated market with a broad distribution of mid-market-cap agents, priming the space for potential disruption.
While other leading chains are focused on other Web3 verticals like meme coins and RWAs, Sui is a notable top chain focused on building high-performance, innovative Web3 products with a seamless experience similar to Web2. As such, NODO is building our AI copy trading ecosystem on the Sui blockchain and has received incubation support from Mysten Labs, the official VC arm of Sui, to bring this community-driven platform to market.
Sui’s architecture makes it the ideal blockchain for NODO's AI copy trading marketplace. The network's parallel execution and high throughput capabilities ensure trades can be replicated instantly across multiple accounts. Additionally, Sui's low transaction costs make frequent trading viable for users. In the world of copy trading, where high-frequency, instantaneous trade execution is everything, the product achieves the bare minimum usability, which cannot be said for many copy trading or Web3 products.
Furthermore, Sui’s object-oriented programming model provides the perfect foundation for reliably and efficiently implementing complex trading logic. True to its namesake, which means “water” or” liquid,” the blockchain specializes in scalability and performance, so we are building on the Sui chain.
In the rapidly evolving landscape of AI agents, three key players have emerged, each with distinct approaches. At the forefront stands the Virtuals Protocol, commanding an impressive $4.3 billion market capitalization and securing its position among CoinMarketCap's top 10 tokens. The protocol has carved its niche through sophisticated customization features, enabling users to craft personalized AI agents with unique personalities and narrative elements. Yet, beneath this innovative surface lies a critical constraint: the protocol's closed liquidity ecosystem, which tethers users to its native token and inherently limits the platform's extensibility.
AI16Z presents an alternative vision, architecting its platform around investment-centric AI agents. Through its DAO-inspired structure, the platform aggregates capital and equips users with sophisticated yield optimization tools. However, this laser focus on returns comes at the cost of trading flexibility, as users cannot fine-tune their trading strategies to meet their specific needs.
Currently, the Sui AI token, which operates on the Sui chain, has not yet made its mark beyond mirroring the fundamental features of the Virtuals Protocol. In contrast, our platform, NODO, presents a groundbreaking shift through its unique swarm network design. Rather than the conventional one-to-one relationships seen in Web2 platforms, NODO fosters agent-to-agent interactions. This many-to-many network structure facilitates collaborative intelligence among AI agents, significantly altering the approach to developing and executing trading strategies. By overcoming the restrictions of current platforms, NODO is set to reveal new avenues of value within the AI agent marketplace.
In addition, there is a growing interest in crypto investments in emerging markets where a large segment of retail traders reside. The percentage of global AUM held by retail investors is projected to increase from 52% in 2021 to over 61% by 2030 (7). This trend reflects a broader democratization of investing, driven by technological advancements and increased accessibility to financial markets.
In countries like Nigeria, which ranks #2 worldwide in crypto adoption, over $59 billion in cryptocurrencies were processed last year. Meanwhile, key regions like Kenya, South Africa, Vietnam, India, and Pakistan have 94 million crypto users combined, and this number continues to grow with no sign of stopping. These are also regions with significant market share in the global gig economy, especially Asia-Pacific, pointing at the considerable potential for community-driven AI copy trading agent marketplaces like NODO, which already has a strong foothold in Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Russia, Singapore, Japan, and Ukraine.
