I heard that the airdrop of HeyElsaAI did not meet the community's expectations?

Then it is very likely to rebound later...

Their founder Dhawal shared in the podcast "When Shift Happens," which left a deep impression on me.

He mainly reviewed his twenty years of entrepreneurial journey, where he shut down and restarted companies multiple times, personally experiencing the despair of running out of funds and witnessing Frontier Wallet grow from 0 to millions of users, only to find that many metrics were just vanity numbers.

What truly turned him towards HeyElsa was the insight into the real pain points of Web3: difficulty for newcomers, significant friction from intention to execution, and cumbersome cross-chain operations.

In the podcast, he repeatedly emphasized that the value of AI in crypto is to resolve the contradiction between "abstraction vs control." Many people call for AI agents, but he believes the real challenge is to make the agents trustworthy, measurable, and payable.

The x402 standard is designed for this architecture, enabling a full process of discovery, authorization, and settlement between agents and services, and $ELSA is the core of this economic layer. It transforms AI from a free toy into a priced, accountable coordination mechanism: using it to pay for premium features, unlock agent autonomy, reduce execution costs, share protocol revenue, and even participate in governance.

Tokenomics also emphasizes that there should be a real product driving growth first (already exceeding 5 million ARR, over 400 million in transaction volume, 930,000+ wallets), and then launch a token to bind growth.

The project is still at "Day 1," with a lot of seamless experiences to improve, but his attitude of "don’t burn all the money, survive first, then talk about greatness" makes one feel that this is an attempt at infrastructure with endurance and execution.

The TGE has just landed; $ELSA is listed on platforms like Bybit, KuCoin, MEXC, etc., with a native Base, and the initial circulation is only about 23%, low volatility + real usage scenarios + continuous burning mechanism, making it easy to ignite demand in a bullish market sentiment.

In the early stages of listing, volatility is high, with prices falling from a peak of around 0.20, currently hovering in the range of 0.13-0.14. In the short term, airdrops, perps incentives, and community momentum can push it up, while in the medium to long term, it depends on whether they fulfill their promise of "AI becoming the DeFi economic layer."

In short, what I sensed from Dhawal's sharing was not the excitement of quick success, but a conviction in long-term value after enduring the lows. If HeyElsa can truly make AI agents the invisible infrastructure of Web3, the price performance of $ELSA is likely to be good.