From Griffain to Almanak: An In-Depth Analysis of DeFAI Track Leaders and Their Operating Mechanisms

The Glory and Bottlenecks of DeFi

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is undoubtedly the cornerstone of Web3, building a permissionless, globally open financial system that frees lending, trading, and asset management from traditional intermediaries. However, after years of development, DeFi faces obvious user experience bottlenecks: complex wallet operations, high Gas fees, fragmented multi-chain ecosystems, and frequent security incidents, creating barriers that ordinary users find difficult to overcome. Against this backdrop, a new paradigm combining Artificial Intelligence (AI) and decentralized finance—DeFAI—has emerged, aiming to make DeFi intelligent, simple, and ubiquitous.

What is DeFAI? Definition and Core Vision

DeFAI is a portmanteau of “DeFi + AI,” with the core mission of abstracting DeFi’s complexity through AI technology, lowering user participation barriers, and introducing autonomous decision-making and automation capabilities to unlock greater financial efficiency and creativity. It does not aim to replace DeFi but to upgrade it intelligently. Currently, the DeFAI ecosystem mainly revolves around three main directions:

1. Abstraction Layer: Hiding underlying operational complexity through natural language interfaces.
2. Autonomous Trading Agents: Deploying AI traders capable of self-learning, executing, and optimizing strategies.
3. AI-powered dApps: Deeply integrating AI into specific decentralized applications to enhance their functionality.

Core Areas of the DeFAI Ecosystem and Representative Projects Analysis

Abstraction Layer: Making DeFi interactions as simple as conversation

The goal of the abstraction layer is to become an intelligent translator between users and complex blockchain protocols. Early intent-centric centralized architectures optimized transaction paths, but now with AI, users can perform complex on-chain operations through chat-like natural language commands.

• Griffain: A general-purpose AI agent platform that allows users to execute a range of operations—from basic transfers to complex automation (like DCA investments), creating Memecoins, and setting conditional airdrops—greatly expanding the capabilities of non-technical users.
• Orbit: Emphasizing cross-chain functionality, reportedly integrated with over 117 chains and 200 protocols. Users can seamlessly perform cross-chain asset swaps, staking, and more within a single interface, effectively managing multi-chain asset portfolios.
• Neur: Positioned as “Solana ecosystem’s co-pilot,” built on Solana Agent Kit, focusing on providing intelligent on-chain operation assistance for Solana users. Its open-source nature fosters rapid community development and innovation.

Autonomous Trading Agents: Your 24/7 AI Trader

Unlike traditional rule-based trading bots, autonomous trading agents can understand environments, reason, and continuously learn and evolve. They represent a leap from “automation” to “intelligence.”

• Almanak: Provides institutional-grade quantitative AI agents. Its core innovation involves forked EVM chains, conducting Monte Carlo simulations in a simulated environment, incorporating real variables like MEV and Gas costs into strategy testing. It also uses Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) to protect strategy privacy and non-custodial wallets to ensure fund security.
• Importance of Verification Infrastructure: As agents manage larger funds, verifiability of their behavior becomes critical. Besides TEE, transparent execution frameworks like zero-knowledge machine learning (zkML) are developing to ensure the reliability and trustworthiness of AI decision-making. This is a key challenge and opportunity at the DeFAI infrastructure layer.

AI-driven dApps: Intelligent financial applications

These applications deeply embed AI into specific financial scenarios, creating entirely new product forms.

• Mode Network Ecosystem: As a Layer 2 attracting AI+DeFi developers, Mode has spawned multiple innovative projects, such as ARMA (autonomous stablecoin mining agent) developed by Giza Tech and Modius (autonomous Balancer LP mining agent based on Autonolas). Its native token $MODE stakers can receive airdrops of AI agent projects within the ecosystem.
• Other innovative directions: For example, ASYM, an agent focused on Memecoin trend prediction, analyzes on-chain and social media big data to find alpha; platforms like Cod3x aim to provide no-code tools enabling users to easily create and customize their own trading agents.

Market Data on Key Projects

The DeFAI space is still in early stages, with high project volatility.

Future Outlook

DeFAI marks the transition of DeFi from “programmable finance” to “intelligent finance.” From simplified interaction layers, autonomous decision-making trading agents, to native intelligent dApps, this track is reshaping our imagination of decentralized finance. It is foreseeable that future competition will focus on the reliability of AI models, the sustainable profitability of agent strategies, and the overall security of the entire stack.

For Gate community explorers, when exploring this frontier, it is recommended to:

1. Deepen understanding and grasp the essence: distinguish whether projects are driven by technology or hype, focus on their AI models or agents’ real use cases, verification mechanisms, and team backgrounds.
2. Try small steps and manage risks: experience products through testnets or small funds to assess their ability to solve real problems. Most projects in this field are very early, with high volatility and risk.
3. Pay attention to ecosystem and infrastructure: besides application-layer projects, underlying infrastructure supporting DeFAI (such as TEE, zkML, decentralized computing power) also holds long-term value opportunities.

The next chapter of DeFi will be written by AI, and Gate will continue providing you with cutting-edge insights, secure trading environments, and a rich selection of projects. Visit Gate now to explore the endless possibilities of DeFAI and other emerging crypto ecosystems.