DeFAI, AI agents, and DeSci narratives lead 2025 price decline after leading in late 2024

After dominating the crypto narratives for the latter part of 2024, especially as the bull run picked up in November, the narratives on DeFAI, AI agents and DeSci are currently taking a downward trend with related token prices plummeting. 

Over the years, crypto narratives have contributed to shaping how people perceive and value cryptocurrencies, influencing investor sentiment, market trends, and the adoption of new technologies.

Currently, some of the trending narratives influencing the crypto market and projects are artificial intelligence (AI), stablecoins, layer 1 blockchains (L1s), memecoins, real world assets (RWAs) tokens, DeFAI, AI agents and DeSci among others.

A declining trend in key performance metrics

According to trends data shared by Web3 analytics platform, Dexu.ai, DeSci, AI agents and DeFAI narratives price performance have seen a decline and are currently at -80.50%, -86.67% and -67.38% over the last 90 days. Other narratives, such as RWA and CEX performed marginally better, even though they also have negative figures of -52.08% and -18.01%, respectively.

Under the sub-category for price performances, the data is also grim, showcasing a downward trend in the negative 90% region for the respective narratives that were touted to be the future of decentralized technology applications in late 2024.

The three narratives continue to perform poorly, holding 4.51%, 3.35% and 0.29% for DeFAI, AI agents and DeSci, respectively, in terms of the mindshare performance category, a metric that tracks how these narratives are being actively discussed, including trends across social media, in this case X (formerly Twitter).

L1s lead the pack with a mindshare percentage of 18.89%. A high mindshare typically means a larger market share because users are more likely to invest in projects or narratives they recognize and trust. On the other hand, the decline in social media buzz suggests that enthusiasm around DeFAI, AI Agents, and DeSci might be fading.

In terms of project volumes that fall under the three narratives, DeSci and DeFAI seem to be lagging with projects linked to them amassing $32.55 million and $36.68 million in volume. AI agents are doing better with a volume of $903 million, although it’s still a far cry from what stablecoin and L1 narrative projects pulled, with reported volumes of $86.59 billion and $67.92 billion.

DeFi and memecoins, which have been around longer, continue to maintain significantly higher trading volumes, recording $2.15 billion and $4.13 billion in volume, indicating a major gulf between the volume of the highly touted narrative trio of late 2024 relative to their older counterparts.

Among the three narratives, AI agents lead in market cap, with a valuation of $1.68 billion, while DeSci and DeFAI come last with market cap valuations of $171.57 million and $124.21 million. All three narratives don’t come close to the leader, L1, which has a $2.22 trillion market cap.

In terms of market cap to volume ratio, AI agents are leading the pack at 53.72%, while DeFAI and DeSci are also performing well with 28.89% and 18.54%. According to Dexu.ai, this data was computed by taking the median value for all the projects across each narrative. The Web3 analytics platform highlighted that a higher value signifies increased interest in trading in that narrative.

However, this metric doesn’t translate to a higher volume because narratives like DeSci with low market caps could easily amass high ratios. This works the other way for narratives with high market caps, a case in point being L1s, which had a volume to market cap ratio of 12.47%.

The market caps of the narratives were also compared to the fully diluted valuation (FDV), a metric used to gauge a cryptocurrency project’s future value by considering its total token supply.

This was to indicate the percentage of tokens from projects linked to each narrative that are currently in circulation. AI agents and DeFAI seem to be doing well in that department, with percentages of 81.51% and 78.75%, however, DeSci at 32.83% has a low market cap to FDV ratio.

Understanding DeFAI, AI Agents and DeSci

With the boom of artificial intelligence and the search for more use cases for the technology in the blockchain space, DeFAI emerged, enabling the integration of AI into DeFi platforms.

The goal of this fusion was to bring ease to complex financial operations, lowering the entry barrier, providing better insights for trading and yield optimization to both experienced traders and newbies alike.

AI agents are another application of AI in the crypto space. These agents are known for their widespread applications across various industries, and they are used to execute tasks ranging from trading strategies to managing decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Tokens related to AI agents have risen in terms of market capitalization, especially late last year and early this year, reflecting consumer willingness to invest in AI-powered solutions in the crypto space.

DeSci also garnered attention by proposing decentralized models for funding, conducting, and sharing scientific research. This movement aims to address challenges in traditional research systems, such as high access costs and centralized control, by leveraging blockchain technology to promote transparency and collaboration.

While these narratives gained sizable traction towards the end of 2024, with projects in these sectors experiencing significant market activity, the early months of 2025 have been telling a different story, as recent data indicates a downward trend across key performance metrics.

The decline of DeFAI, AI Agents, and DeSci raises important questions about the sustainability of crypto narratives driven by hype. While their initial success showed strong use cases and technological potential, the current downturn may give credence to the assumption that investors are shifting their focus to more stable and established blockchain applications.

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