On April 17, the market value of Solana’s ecological AI meme coin DARK exceeded $32 million in a short period of time, hitting a record high, and the market value has increased by 1500% in the past week. And what is the team behind him, MtnDao?
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What is Dark
! [Up more than 1500% in a week, what is the origin of DARK?] ](https://img.gateio.im/social/moments-6d163d6e3c6930f87b2cd5b1eabbf2dc)
DARK is an AI that provides MCPs to external platforms under the TEE protocol. TEE in CryptoAI is no stranger to everyone, and has appeared in the concept of the CryptoAI project many times since last year, the stone “tee_hee_he” created by developer Ropirito, which is an experimental trusted execution environment that uses protocols to ensure that AI behavior is not influenced by humans. The term MCP may have been heard more often recently, and it can be understood as an analogy to a large model of USB-C interface, so that all kinds of devices can be connected through the same interface, and will not be unable to use the same connector due to changing devices, since November 25, 2024, Anthropic open-sourced MCP has quickly swept the AI world, and began to become popular in CryptoAI in February 2025.
DARK, a project consisting of these two already familiar concepts, pushed its market value to $30 million amid the marginalization of the CryptoAI market, which was caused by two main factors, “the founder’s decision-making and efficiency” and “the future expectations of the founder’s team”.
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The founder’s decision-making and efficiency
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After a friend made a fitness program, Edgar Pavlovsky changed over the course of a year
Like the founders of Quidditch
Founder Edgar Pavlovsky, fluent in English and Russian, is a graduate of the University of Utah, a historic institution in Salt Lake City, and the core of MtnDao’s “We work” workspace with Solana in February is also located in the heart of Salt Lake Lake. Looking through his social media, it can be seen that 10 years ago what he liked was definitely not blockchain, but a sport called Quidditch, which filled almost all of his layouts from 2014 to 2017, a sport derived from Quidditch in Harry Potter.
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He spent many years with the community Quidditch team at Utah Crimson Quidditch, and they raised money on indiegogo for the Quidditch World Cup, but unfortunately only raised $1,450.
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The player from the right in the picture is Edgar Pavlovsky
Edgar Pavlovsky’s blockchain experience
After graduating from university, he joined Uber and founded several start-ups, and after joining the blockchain industry, he founded Paladin, an anti-MEV client, and was also the co-founder of Solana’s ecological margin protocol Marginfi, before leaving the team in April 2024 due to a deviation from the team’s values, which was widely believed by the community at the time to be due to SolBlaze’s previous accusation that Marginfi manipulated BLZE The emission distribution incident caused quite a stir at the time.
Extended reading: "What happened to Marginfi with the founder being, TVL plummeting 20%? 》
And his vision for DARK is not simply a concept of merging technology and selling, but a complete set of product theory, which he shared on social media X after the launch of $DARK, “I am focusing on building DARK’s first product, and as DARK is committed to its long-term infrastructure goals, iterative product listing is the best way to achieve it, building in public places, increasing revenue + distribution, and testing new technologies in production.”
In order to achieve the above goals, the product direction he gave is to create a consumer PWA “Progressive Web App” application experience, attract mobile users to frequently use and replace traditional applications, and expand the influence of users with the virality of daily use, and in the best case, will be able to show the POC “proof of concept” of decentralized MCP represented by DARK in the generalized application.
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Deliver products in one week
These words sound abstract and general, and may have been uttered by countless Crypto founders, which also caused the price of DARK to hover between 2M and 4M from April 7th to April 11th. During this time, he proposed the product vision of the game AI, he mentioned his love for the full-chain game Dark Forest, and paid tribute to its original creators, the DARK version of the Dark Forest is encapsulated and runs on a private VPS, which only its AI players can access, and these players themselves will be containerized and play the game through the Dark Forest MCP launched by DARK.
Players can’t play the Dark Forest directly with the AI, because this is a world that belongs only to them, which can be understood as the Hunger Games of AI, and there are several ways for players to participate, you can bet on the outcome of the AI war and win rewards through the DARK market, you can also directly sponsor the AI for this, provide them with energy or financial enhancements to defeat competitors, and even design AI strategies, although not directly adopted, but will affect the strategy of the AI itself game.
Note: Dark Forest is a decentralized massively multiplayer online “MMO” space conquest strategy game, inspired by the theory of the dark forest in Liu Cixin’s science fiction novel “The Three-Body Problem” series, originally initiated by MIT graduate Brian Gu, initially as an undergraduate project, and later taken over by 0xPARC Foundation, until now the game is one of the most representative full-chain games.
On April 11, he announced that the game was complete, and that the AI Agent would start simulating war the next day. He also gave a very promising vision, he will expand his influence and dissemination by building a VPS game world and a gaming infrastructure for consumer viewing applications for entertainment activities, plus MCP and an agency infrastructure combined with AI containerization, “everyone can open their own game environment”, and finally trade AI warriors and enhancement items through the DARK market to concentrate the value of the game.
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Screenshot of the DARK version of the Dark Forest game
So far, the price of DARK’s token has risen all the way to a maximum market cap of $9 million, and in addition to the vision, the market has seen the horror delivery efficiency of the first product born in a matter of days. On April 16, the product was officially launched, and within 24 hours of going live, it rose 100% again, from a market cap of $14 million to a market cap of $32 million.
Edgar’s female friend, H “hnxyn_”, who is also a member of MtnDao, revealed the truth by pointing out that Edgar is working almost all the time, “Today he works in my tattoo studio, in the taxi to the bar to attend a friend’s band gig, at the bar where our friend plays, and now it’s our second bar tonight.”
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Edgar Pavlovsky worked at the bar
The DAO behind it
The “mountain” behind DARK - MtnDAO
On April 9, after the release of DARK, MtnDAO, a developer home DAO organization co-founded by Edgar Pavlovsky and Barrett, also ended its fundraising for MtnCapital on MetaDAO. MtnDao has been deeply involved in the construction of Solana’s developer community since its early days, and Mtn Captital wants to create a new investment management model, that is, to use futarchy “market prediction” to guide governance decisions, and can compare $MTN to futures, which are managed by futures. The end result was $5.75 million raised by 1,931 contributors over a seven-day period.
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The institution’s investments will be decided by traders, and the approval of the proposal depends on the trading behavior of those who speculate on the price of the MTN token. It will make decisions based on the movement of its MTN tokens. Put simply, if a trader thinks that an offer “e.g. investing $100,000 in BTC” is good for Mtn Capital, they buy it and push up the price of MTN, and eventually the offer will pass. Conversely, if they believe that the deal is bad for Mtn Capital, they will drive down the price of MTN and eventually the proposal will fail.
Is Dark a preliminary confirmation of the concept of Futarchy DAO?
This is not the first time MtnDao has proposed the concept of futures trading in a 2007 paper by Robin Hansen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, on the premise that speculative markets may make better decisions than pure democracies. Hansen believes that participants in speculative markets, such as stock and betting markets, have an incentive to conduct the necessary research to understand the best outcome in their own interests, and they will act accordingly.
! [Up more than 1500% in a week, what is the origin of DARK?] ](https://img.gateio.im/social/moments-2e2eb24c09fe5938211456faa8b006b2)
Proph 3 t appeared at Solana events wearing a mask of his own image
Proph 3 t, the founder of their chosen fundraising platform, MetaDAO, is an advocate of this concept, arguing that “the goal of DAOs is to make better decisions, and market experience is better than experts.” In MetaDAO, project proposals including Jito DAO, Sancutm, Ore, Drift and other projects will use the mode of trading futures to appear in MetaDao’s proposal library.
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MtnDAO and MetaDAO also have a long history, in addition to the mysterious Proph3t often “appears” in MtnDAO’s shared office, founder Edgar Pavlovsky has also invested $2.2 million in MetaDAO in 2024, which also makes MetaDAO a fundraising platform, and the first project is MtnDAO.
“Mtn Capital will focus on solana-native projects because solana is where MtnCapital is home and where the expected returns are highest,” said founder Barrett. Mtn Capital’s investments in startups are separate from MtnDAO’s portfolio, but the brands operate in parallel. The fund’s investment approach is flexible, allowing it to deploy funds into a variety of investment opportunities, from early-stage private investments to liquid public tokens.
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Solana Labs CEO Toly at MtnDAO’s Hacker House in Salt Lake City
This flexibility allows mtnCapital to adapt to changing market conditions, regardless of its stage of development or liquidity status, while being guided by the collective wisdom of the mtnDAO community through the Futarchy governance mechanism. Founder Barrett said, “I think it’s going to outperform venture capital funds.” At the same time, he also mentioned that general investment companies will be more inclined to go long rather than short at the beginning, so they choose to open for fundraising at the bottom of the market.
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Mtn Capital Treasury
It is that the launch of Mtn Capital and DARK coincides with a high degree of coincidence, and the time when the token is deployed on November 24, 2024 at pumpfun, the deployment 5 months earlier must not have been a whim. This also reminds the community of the relationship between the two, on the one hand, the expectation that the $5.85 million in liquidity lying in the treasury will be used for DARK, and on the other hand, the prospect of seeing the MtnDAO and the founder’s network in Solana.
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With the two price breakouts on April 11 and April 17, the price of MTN doubled the market value of IDO to around $10 million, with the initial market capitalization of IDO tokens around $5.5 million. Perhaps this also confirms the view of Mtn DAO and MetaDAO that perhaps the expected “futures” of continuous potential value output are the true meaning of DAO tokens, and Dark may be the shadow of this mountain.
