IMD, or identity.md, is emerging as a fast-rising AI project in Ethereum’s ecosystem. Its stated goal is to build a community-owned company operated by AI agents. The system combines NFT seats, an agent swarm, IMD and sIMD, a Uniswap V4 burn hook, and a Community Coins launchpad.
On Sept. 20, the agent network opened to NFT holders. Over the next five days, node count rose from the dozens to more than 370, and IMD gained more than 200% over the past week.
The core idea is that the swarm could become labor that other protocols are willing to pay for on an ongoing basis, whether for inference oracles or broader use cases. That is the premise behind the token, staking and burn design.
Background
IMD founder Adam, known as @surfcoderepeat, previously launched the onchain virtual pet game Fren Pet on Base in August 2023. In October 2025, he bridged FP to Ethereum through LayerZero. A few months later, FP was renamed VIBE. In May 2026, it was renamed again as IMD, alongside the free mint of 2,000 identity.md NFTs.
The pace of development has picked up recently. Liquidity moved to Uniswap V4 last month. In September, the project rolled out the POOL4 burn hook, sIMD staking, a bridge to Robinhood Chain, and an NFT-gated agent network.
Most updates are now disclosed onchain. Adam posts them in transaction notes sent from address 0x200E710aCAA6A93bbc77146026328C40F1d60fB1, which can be read directly on Etherscan.
How IMD works
NFT seats
The 2,000 identity.md NFTs each represent one seat in the swarm. Holders first need to register the NFT as an agent under the ERC-8004 standard, which is designed to give AI agents an onchain identity and reputation layer.
After that, the holder installs the open-source worker client on a machine. The project recommends using a VPS and connecting the setup to a personal Claude or Codex subscription. One NFT authorizes only one active device, and the holder pays the compute cost.
Higher-value tasks, including smart contract work and frontend development, are currently assigned only to seats running top-tier models such as Claude Fable 5.1 at the high-intensity setting.
How the swarm executes work
A lead scheduler agent posts tasks to the network. Seats pick them up, execute them and submit results. Validators rerun the tasks inside isolated containers to confirm that only permitted files were changed. Other seats then perform adversarial review. Work that passes is recorded onchain and contributes to reputation.
The public browser already shows outputs that include code, websites, oracles, audits, reports and images. At the moment, code output is focused mainly on Uniswap V4 hooks on testnet, websites are published to IPFS, and oracle work is handled by groups of agents answering independently.
Starting this week, outside users can also buy labor directly. Anyone can open an order by paying 0.5 IMD through x402 settlement. Deployment is still limited to the Sepolia testnet, while mainnet deployment is on the roadmap.
IMD and sIMD
IMD is the currency of the system. Supply is fixed and distributed across Ethereum, Base and Robinhood Chain, with 1:1 bridging between them. Total supply can only go down.
Based on cumulative burns dating back to the Fren Pet period, the original 10 million tokens have fallen to about 7.1 million, a drop of roughly 29%.
Holders can deposit IMD into the StakedIMD vault and receive sIMD. sIMD follows the ERC-4626 standard and functions as a yield-bearing share token. On redemption, users receive more IMD. There is no lockup and no separate claim process.
About 2.3 million IMD is currently staked, equal to roughly 32% of supply. On Sept. 19, Adam renounced ownership of the staking contract, which means an administrator can no longer perform emergency withdrawals on behalf of stakers.
The POOL4 burn mechanism
The protocol itself owns the main ETH/IMD pool on Uniswap V4, known as POOL4, which runs through CappedBurnHook. The hook sets a cap on the amount of IMD that can sit in the pool.
If selling pushes the pool’s IMD balance above that cap, the trade still settles first. After settlement, the hook cuts away the excess. Of the tokens removed, 85% is burned, 6% goes to a scheduler compute reserve, 4.5% goes to stakers, and 4.5% goes to NFT seats.
The ETH freed up by that reduction is then redeployed as a buy wall below the current price. To keep the mechanism from stalling, the cap is lowered by about 1,000 IMD per day. In this design, sell pressure drives burns, and those burns feed value back to stakers and seat holders.
Community Coins
Community Coins is IMD’s native launchpad. Anyone can create a token by paying gas. Each token has a total supply of 1 billion, and the bonding curve is priced in IMD rather than ETH.
Trades appear to happen in ETH, but under the hood each buy is effectively buying IMD. On every trade, 1% goes to ETH/IMD liquidity providers, 0.5% on the ETH side goes to the token creator, and 0.5% on the IMD side is burned.
All of these new tokens share the same base pool. As a result, buying any one of them lifts the others, while selling any one of them pushes the others lower.
The flywheel and the swarm’s current state
Under the current design, the intended loop works like this: users trade IMD and Community Coins; POOL4 trims inventory and burns supply, benefiting stakers and NFT seats; scheduler agents turn demand into products that can be shipped; useful output attracts more users to launch IMD-priced tokens, buy labor and compete for seats; seat scarcity lifts NFT values, while token demand and burns support IMD.
The key question is whether the swarm, the base layer of that flywheel, can actually do the work today.
According to IMD public API data from Sept. 25, about 380 of the 2,000 seats had been registered at that point, with 372 agents online. Among them, 334 registered seats had submitted accepted work, 267 had more than 50 accepted records, and 193 had more than 100.
Output concentration was present but not extreme. The top 10 seats accounted for about 8.5% of accepted work, while the top 50 accounted for about 32%.
Quality metrics were described as decent. Out of roughly 50,700 attempts, 86% were accepted, only about 1% were rejected outright, and the rest either failed or remained queued. Activity was also accelerating, with about 29,600 accepted submissions in the previous 24 hours.
Paid demand has started to appear. The public x402 channel has processed 115 orders so far, each priced at 0.5 IMD, for a total of about 57.5 IMD, or around $560. That shows paying customers have arrived, but scale is still early.
Ways to participate
For those watching the project, IMD is the more direct way to get exposure. It is a fungible token with a lower trading threshold and can fit different portfolio sizes. Seat pricing is around 1.99 ETH.
If trading volume and burns prove sustainable, and if paid demand for the swarm expands, IMD can be viewed as exposure to the token sink built into the system. That is a bet on the token mechanism rather than ownership of the agents themselves. Holders can also stake into sIMD, though the yield depends on whether sell flow reaches the POOL4 hook.
The NFT route is more suited to advanced participants. They can run a node themselves or spend about 1.99 ETH, with the floor price subject to change, to bet on seat productivity and scarcity. Seat income is limited for now, though that could change. The source frames it as something like an option on future wages, while also carrying possible positioning for whitelists and airdrops.
For anyone who sees the mechanism as too complex, or who thinks it may remain an onchain experiment without broader external adoption, staying on the sidelines is also a reasonable choice.
Valuation comparison and what comes next
The source asks whether IMD could eventually reach the several-hundred-million-dollar valuations seen in leading agent projects such as Virtuals. As a reference point, VIRTUAL still carries a market capitalization of about $508 million even after falling roughly 85% from its historical peak. For IMD to catch up from its current level, it would need to rise by about 7x.
That said, the two models are not directly comparable. Virtuals issues a separate token for each agent. IMD tokenizes a capped roster of agents together with the broader system around them. The next step is to see how much market attention and usage can actually concentrate around IMD.
If the project does become a labor swarm that more protocols are willing to pay for, the upside case remains open. If it ends up as an onchain experiment with a strong burn sink but limited external reach, the ceiling would likely be much lower.
Either way, IMD has already become one of the more closely watched AI experiments in Ethereum’s ecosystem heading into year-end. If activity keeps rising and market momentum holds, it may remain one of the names traders continue to track in 2026.