Last weekend, the AI sector experienced a rollercoaster ride in the market.
On Saturday, the OpenAI board announced on Twitter that it had completed its review conducted by the law firm WilmerHale, and Sam Altman and Greg Brockman would continue to lead OpenAI. As a result of this news, the cryptocurrency market further boosted its enthusiasm for the AI sector. AI projects such as Render (RNDR), Fetch.ai (FET), SingularityNET (AGIX), and Arkham (ARKM) all saw a 24-hour increase of over 15%.
Meanwhile, Sam Altman’s Worldcoin (WLD), as the founder, reached a new all-time high, surpassing $10 with a 24-hour increase of over 40%. The decentralized streaming platform LPT, which had previously doubled in value within three days due to the launch of OpenAI’s video generation model Sora, also experienced a significant surge, briefly surpassing $26 with a 24-hour increase of over 65%.
However, after the strong rally that attracted market expectations, the AI sector experienced a general decline the next day.
Why the decline?
Profit-taking by major investors caused a sell-off.
Why did it suddenly drop? The community speculated that one possible reason was that the ARKM major investor, qklpj.eth, decided to take profits and sell off their holdings.
Based on discussions within the community, it was revealed that qklpj.eth had been holding ARKM for the past eight months and had previously transferred all their 10.9 million ARKM (worth $3.16 million) to Binance in November 2023 at a price of $0.386. Over the weekend, ARKM reached a high of $3.9.
According to data from Ember, on March 2nd, a newly created address withdrew 2.99 million $ARKM from Binance, worth over $7 million. The GAS for this address was sourced from the 0x1729 address, which is associated with qklpj.eth. The next day, a new address (0x81DA) suspected to belong to qklpj.eth continued to withdraw 1.01 million $ARKM ($2.51 million) from Binance. In just over a day, a total of 4 million $ARKM, worth over tens of millions of dollars, was withdrawn from Binance.
After ARKM achieved over a 38% increase on Saturday, qklpj.eth transferred the previously withdrawn 4 million ARKM back to Binance on Sunday. If sold at the time, qklpj.eth would have made a profit of approximately $2.8 million from these three transactions over the course of 8 days. However, this was only a portion of their total ARKM holdings, which amount to 10.9 million, acquired at a price of $0.386. If sold at the peak, their investment of less than $4 million would have yielded nearly $40 million.
Nvidia closes down over 5%
In addition to the sell-off by major investors, the sharp decline in Nvidia’s stock over the weekend also provides an explanation. On Friday, Nvidia saw an intraday increase of over 5%, but its closing stock price dropped by 5.6%, marking the largest single-day decline since May 31, 2020. It is reported that this single-day decline also wiped out approximately $130 billion of Nvidia’s market value, making it one of the largest single-day market value evaporations in the history of the US stock market.
Currently, the narrative of AI projects in the crypto field cannot be separated from the optimistic view of Nvidia’s chip advantage. The sudden steep drop after a continuous rise in this “theme” would naturally have an impact on the AI sector. However, with Sam’s return to the OpenAI board yesterday, the downward trend has temporarily halted.
AI token price movements
AI-driven data analytics platform Arkham (ARKM) fell below $3, experiencing a 17.5% decrease within 5 minutes yesterday. It is currently priced at $3.1, with a 24-hour decrease of over 20%.
Worldcoin (WLD) fell below $10, with a 24-hour decrease of over 20%, currently priced at $9.3.
AI agent Fetch.ai (FET), decentralized storage network Arweave (AR), and others also saw declines ranging from 10% to 15%.
The AI-driven user-generated content platform NFPrompt (NFP) experienced a decrease of over 15% in the past 24 hours and continues to decline. The decentralized AI marketplace SingularityNET (AGIX) also dropped over 10% from its peak.
