There’s been a recent phenomenon happening lately onchain, which has seemed to have sparked some life and excitement again into the market. This primarily centers around open source AI founders, developers and engineers tapping into crypto for bootstrapping resources, similar to what we saw in the agent meta and ICM craze. Compared to the previous meta, this wave seems to be much further rooted in real development in the real world. These founders are primarily leveraging @BagsApp creator fees to seek crowdfunded resources to help bootstrap development and growth. The tokens launched are ‘memecoins’, with no real claim on the underlying business/equity, however, it is an interesting mechanism where outsiders are able to tap into what crypto best enables — trading and speculation to help further scale their business.
The interesting difference to point out comparing the past wave of AI speculation to this one is the direct economic alignment. These launches and tokens do represent creator royalties. Bags enables developers to earn royalty fees directly from the tradeable token. This creates a structural feedback loop where increased speculation -> higher trading volume -> more royalties -> more capital and resources for development. This unique model enables founders and developers to fund ongoing work without selling tokens, which has been historically a bottleneck for onchain-centered launches and projects.
One particular development that has amassed worldwide adoption is Ralph Wiggum developed by @GeoffreyHuntley. Ralph is a Claude plugin that turns AI into a relentless, persistent, autonomous coding agent by ‘looping’ on its own failures and outputs until it finally achieves success. The AI reads the current state of the codebase, makes changes, runs tests and the loop continues until the AI itself signals completion. Ralph is turning frontier models into autonomous developers. This ultimately lowers software development cost and time, enables autonomous overnight shipping, scales large complex tasks, and represents a shift towards human + AI symbiosis. This is quite literally the biggest breakthrough in AI, Claude and coding currently — founders from Vercel, Claude, Cursor and countless other founders, employees and builders have been praising Ralph. You can look across Google, YouTube, Reddit, or X at the adoption and positive feedback Ralph is gaining too. Ralph is a step towards AGI. And it's progress is being accelerated via onchain rails and participants.
Back to the crypto element, recently the founder of Ralph stated that he has fully endorsed the $RALPH token (https://x.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/2011737319402078383). The creator economy on Solana has enabled Geoff to further advance Ralph Wiggum development. Geoff has also pointed out that he will be redirecting earnings/fees to buy $RALPH and improve liquidity in the onchain pool. Interesting to note the acceptance and dedication to the token here.
There are a handful of other tokens launched on Bags that have adopted a similar strategy to Geoff/Ralph. Most of these tokens trade at very low valuations and present significant risk, especially given the lack of claim or ownership. But to be fair, the majority of this industry is experiencing this at the moment. I am not 100% certain where this approach heads from here. I do, however, find it interesting as a way to onboard and bridge traditional startup and AI talent into the industry, primarily onto Solana. The Internet Capital Markets thesis is constantly growing, expanding and consists of so many different enablements now, and that is cool to see. All of this is happening on Solana.
None of this is financial or investment advice. For full disclosure I own SOL and I do own a little bit of RALPH as a way to observe, learn and test this hypothesis.
