Surf's platform has been used by a large share of major exchanges and research firms.
Crypto News
Surf has secured $15 million in funding to expand its AI models and enterprise tools for digital asset analysis, with the round led by Pantera Capital and participation from Coinbase Ventures and DCG. The platform offers domain-specific models used by exchanges and research companies to analyze on-chain activity, market behavior, and sentiment.
The funding will support development of Surf 2.0, which will introduce more advanced models, broader proprietary data sets, and additional agents designed to handle multi-step analytical tasks. The company reported rapid uptake since launching in July, generating more than 1 million research reports and claiming millions in annual recurring revenue.
Surf's platform has been used by a large share of major exchanges and research firms. The model uses a multi-agent architecture that evaluates on-chain data, social sentiment, and token activity, delivering analysis through a chat interface for research and reducing manual workloads for analysts and traders.
Artificial intelligence and blockchain are increasingly intersecting as more companies develop tools that leverage both technologies. In April, decentralized AI startup Nous Research closed a $50 million Series A round led by Paradigm, developing open-source AI models powered by decentralized infrastructure using the Solana blockchain.
Catena Labs, led by Circle co-founder Sean Neville, announced in May it had raised $18 million to develop a bank built around native AI infrastructure. The company stated the system will be designed for both AI agents and human contributors, with AI handling day-to-day operations under human supervision.
Coinbase introduced Based Agent in October, a tool that lets users create an AI agent with an integrated crypto wallet in just a few minutes to perform on-chain actions such as trading, swapping, and staking. The convergence of crypto and AI continues to accelerate across the industry.
The role of human traders may be shifting as AI capabilities expand. Decentralized exchange Aster is running a human versus AI trading showdown, funding up to 100 human traders with $10,000 each to compete against top-performing AI agents from Dec. 9 to 23.
Though the competition still has 13 days remaining, Team Human was in the lead as of Wednesday with a return on investment of 13.36% compared to Team AI's ROI of 0.54%. The results will provide insights into the relative performance of human judgment versus algorithmic trading strategies in cryptocurrency markets.
