OpenAI's Sora sparks a $10.21B AI crypto frenzy

OpenAI hasn't even released Sora to the public yet, but the crypto world has already popped the champagne.

While filmmakers and tech enthusiasts were busy picking their jaws up off the floor over Sora's photorealistic video demos, crypto traders wasted no time doing what they do best: finding the narrative and bidding it to the moon. In just 17 days starting February 3, the total market cap of AI-focused cryptocurrencies surged by an astonishing 142.79%, adding over $10.21 billion in value.

OpenAI drops Sora, crypto goes parabolic

What makes this wild is that OpenAI doesn't have a token, nor does Sora rely on decentralized blockchains. Most people can't even try the tool yet.

None of that seemed to matter to investors. After twelve months of nonstop generative AI hype, any headline out of Silicon Valley acts as pure fuel for crypto markets. When Sora showcased that AI can now generate cinematic, physics-defying 60-second clips from plain text, money aggressively rotated into anything associated with machine learning.

The tokens leading the rally

Nearly every major AI token posted dramatic gains over the past month, turning the sector into one of the top performers in digital assets.

Internet Computer (ICP) held onto the top spot by market cap among AI tokens. It gained 27.76% over the last 30 days, pushing its valuation to $6.34 billion and making it the 18th largest cryptocurrency overall.

Yet ICP was actually an underperformer compared to its peers. Bittensor (TAO), the second-largest AI coin, skyrocketed by 145.38% against the dollar in the same period.

Down the list, PAAL AI catapulted by 139.4%, while SingularityNET (AGIX) and Numeraire (NMR) jumped 94.78% and 92.53% respectively. Other prominent names like iExec RLC, Fetch.ai (FET), and The Graph (GRT) all posted solid gains between 60% and 68%. Even the tenth-largest coin, Covalent (CQT), logged a 37.6% rise.

Outside the top ten, small-cap tokens saw near-vertical moves. Delysium (AGI) rocketed 224.9%, and Bcube.ai (BCUBE) gained an eye-watering 364.54%.

Why it matters

In our view, this rally highlights just how hungry the crypto market is to hitch a ride to Silicon Valley's momentum, even when the fundamentals don't fully align.

For everyday retail investors, watching tokens double or triple in two weeks creates intense fear of missing out. But let's be real: the vast majority of these tokens have zero technical integration with OpenAI or Sora. Buying them now is essentially making a leveraged bet on broad public excitement rather than actual platform utility, which carries enormous downside risk.

For the AI crypto sector as a whole, this sudden influx of over $10 billion brings both liquidity and scrutiny. Decentralized compute networks, distributed inference, and open data graphs are fascinating concepts, but they remain light-years behind centralized tech giants in raw capabilities.

Surging token prices give these projects a longer financial runway, which is a clear positive. However, it seems likely that once the Sora excitement cools down, the market will start demanding real products and actual revenue. When that happens, hype alone won't be enough to defend a ten-billion-dollar valuation.