Grayscale: The AI investment boom is extending into the crypto market, and major winners may emerge in the next five years.

BlockBeats news, October 4th — Zach Pandl, head of research at Grayscale, wrote that the AI crypto sector rose 54% in September, significantly outperforming the overall crypto market, which gained 24%. Even after this rally, the sector's market capitalization remains only about $15 billion, making it the smallest of the six crypto sectors classified by Grayscale.

Among the sector's representative tokens, NEAR rose 183% in September, Venice (VVV) rose 70%, World (WLD) rose 47%, and Bittensor (TAO) rose 37%. These projects respectively involve agent commerce, privacy AI applications, human identity verification, and an open AI network covering inference, agents, data, and computation.

Grayscale believes that public blockchains can provide open infrastructure for agent payments, identity, privacy computing, and verifiable records, complementing the AI development ecosystem currently concentrated in a few companies. The AI crypto sector may produce one or more major winners over the next five years, and recent performance indicates that investors are beginning to price in the infrastructure role of blockchain in the emerging agent economy.