Sam Williams, the founder of Arweave and AO, announced yesterday in a post on X that $260 million worth of stETH has been pre-bridged to the Arweave-based AI application computing protocol AO, pushing it to become the 28th largest DeFi protocol in the past four days. Williams stated that AO's TVL is now equivalent to Cardano ($209.43 million), surpassing major blockchain projects such as zkSync, Fantom, Scroll, Algorand, Filecoin, and ICP.

AO is a new protocol built on the Arweave permanent data storage layer that can achieve parallel application operation through a decentralized computing model. At the same time, it can enable artificial intelligence applications to run on the chain, allowing large language models to run within smart contracts.