A Grok token—not THE token, since it's not officially attached to Elon Musk's recently launched AI service—hit a $160 million market capitalization just eight days after its debut.
But as an 8-day-old meme coin that's not actually issued by the AI chatbot that it shares a name with, it's experiencing a lot of volatility. While this story was being written, the GROK token's market capitalization dropped as low as $78 million according to DexTools.
Its value has soared by 13,000% over the past week, with a doubling of prices in just 24 hours. But to be clear, that means it has reached an all-time high of $0.02, according to CoinGecko. Despite having 11,500 holders and significant trading volumes, the liquidity for GROK-USD is limited, which raises the risk of a price crash if large amounts are sold off.
Meanwhile, Grok—the AI chatbot service launched by social app X, noted for its less censored and humorous nature—has contributed to the token's popularity, despite the tokens themselves being unaffiliated with the actual AI service. The ease of token creation and trading on decentralized exchanges has led to a proliferation of such speculative assets.
It's a meme-fueled narrative that's played out many times before. A BALD token (named because Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is bald) launched on Base, a Layer 2 that the crypto exchange incubated, before its creators made off with millions. Pepecoin garnered tons of attention and saw its market capitalization surpass $1.5 billion before the team behind the meme coin darling transferred millions worth of PEPE tokens to exchanges without warning. And there's still an entire CoinGecko category for dog-themed coins for tokens that pay homage to the original meme coin: Dogecoin.
The sense that there are layers of memes in the GROK launch is further heightened by the fact that the Tesla CEO and founder himself is a self-professed Dogefather. He's been embroiled in a class action lawsuit alleging that he timed his buying and selling of DOGE with social media posts that would hike up the price. Since buying Twitter for $44 billion, he's twice teased that he would change the company's logo to the Shiba Inu behind the Doge meme.
Meanwhile, Musk's Grok AI will be competing with several recent high-profile AI chatbot launches. One of the contenders is Google's Bard, an experimental chatbot aimed at expanding Google's reach to billions of users, which highlights the tech giant's ambition in the AI space. And there's the main competitor: OpenAI. The company introduced ChatGPT Plus, a subscription-based version of its widely used AI chatbot, ChatGPT, offering enhanced features.
Social media platforms are also entering the fray, with Snapchat unveiling "My AI," a chatbot powered by the latest version of OpenAI's GPT technology. Meanwhile, LinkedIn has launched a new AI chatbot designed as a "job seeker coach," complementing their suite of generative AI tools for Premium members, which coincided with their announcement of surpassing 1 billion members.
Editor’s note: This article was written with the assistance of AI. Edited and fact-checked by Stacy Elliott.