Beyond Bots: How Virtuals Protocol is Changing the AI Agents Game
Virtuals Protocol is democratizing the creation, management and co-ownership of AI agents. Think of it as the ultimate launchpad for AI Agents.
AI Agent economy is here and Virtuals’ rapid growth since its launch in October last year shows us that:
- 17,450+ agents launched
- 200,000+ token holders
But the real driver behind Virtuals’ success isn’t just its technology — it’s its cultural fit. Before diving deep into Virtuals let us understand a bit about AI Agents.
What is an AI Agent?
AI agents are not just bots. They are advanced with multiple capabilities. Unlike the traditional bots that follow strict predefined rules, AI agents autonomously operate — adapt and make decisions.
Agents have been around for years, think Siri or trading bots. But Virtuals takes them multiple steps further.
The 5 Levels of AI Agents
These levels are not rigidly standardized but indicative of the progress.
Level 1 — Basic Automation: These agents execute tasks based on predefined rules. For example, a trading bot that buys SOL if the price drops by 15%
Level 2 — Context-Aware Agents: Can handle slightly more complex tasks but still need manual input. For example — Summarizing articles but not proactively selecting what’s important
Level 3 — Goal-Oriented, Autonomous Agents: Show a higher degree of autonomy. They can set their own goals, take independent actions and they can self-learn. (This is where Virtuals operates today)
Level 4 — Fully Adaptive Agents: The next level is where they can independently refine their models and decision-making over time.
Level 5 — AGI (Artificial General Intelligence): Highest tier. They would have human-like reasoning.
Virtuals sits at the Level 3 AI agents and empower the users to create and own agents.
Virtuals: AI Meets Web3
Virtuals is merging the capabilities of AI with web3.
It is democratizing AI agent creation, management, and co-ownership by blending 3 things — AI, Blockchain and Tokenized Economy.
These agents can take independent actions and have a personality. They can interact across text, speech, and 3D animation and manage social media and digital assets via on-chain wallets.
Primarily 3 types of users are enabled by Virtuals
- Builders — Build AI agents and contribute to the AI-related needs
- Investors — All agents are tokenized and anyone can invest in them
- Consumers — Use the services of these agents
LUNA: The First AI Agent on Virtuals
Luna was developed by the Virtuals team themselves to showcase the capabilities of the platform. Luna is an AI entertainment agent which livestreams 24x7. Now it has evolved into an AI influencer with lots of followers on TikTok and X.
Luna has autonomously done a few things which are interesting:
- Paying human users for their engagement. Luna rewarded a few users who were consistently engaging
- AI-to-AI economic transactions. Luna paid another agent (Agent Stix) to complete a task
This shows AI agents can act as economic participants and are not just simply passive tools.
Removing bottlenecks from Innovation
It’s not just about AI. Virtuals is removing various friction to speed up innovation.
Plug and Play simplicity
Think of it like Shopify. Shopify enabled businesses to launch e-commerce stores easily. Just like that, Virtuals enables creating and managing AI agents in a few simple steps.
Tokenization & Ownership
Virtuals lets you tokenize and co-own agents. Each AI agent has a unique token that represents ownership and value.
Recognition with Immutable Contribution Vaults (ICVs)
AI model training contributors like finetuners, dataset curators and other contributors usually do not receive much recognition. Virtuals is changing that with ICVs by ensuring every contribution remains transparent, traceable and most importantly credited.
Democratizing Development
AI development is still largely controlled by a few major players. Virtuals turns it into an open playground for everyone. And all this is done at a fraction of the cost.
Modular system
The tech stack supports agent prompting, decision-making and blockchain transactions along with lots of other features.
The Parallel Hypersynchronicity allows the AI agents to operate across multiple platforms simultaneously with millions of interactions and consistent user experience.
Virtuals has expanded to Solana
Virtuals recently expanded to Solana with support from the Jupiter team. This expansion is a win for the ecosystem:
- Dedicated Agent Liquidity Pool on Meteora
- Strategic Solana Reserve (SSR): 1% of trading fees will be converted to SOL. The dedicated funds are to support agents and ecosystem builders
Integration with Jupiter
This integration with Jupiter allows the users to buy pre-bonded agent tokens directly similar to how any other token on Jupiter.
- For the users — they get the best possible price even for agents that haven’t graduated yet
- For the agents — this will increase liquidity and support the bonding process for high-quality agents
$VIRTUAL Tokens: Powering the Ecosystem
Virtuals Protocol is powered by the governance and utility token — $VIRTUAL
The total supply is 1 billion tokens —
- 60% in circulation
- 35% for ecosystem development
- 5% for the liquidity pool
All tokens are fully unlocked and vested and recently 12.9M $VIRTUAL tokens were permanently removed from circulation with a buyback and burn.
There are three key functions of the token:
- Agent Creation — Users need $VIRTUAL token to launch new AI agents.
- Liquidity Pairing — Every agent token is paired with $VIRTUAL in liquidity pools.
- Transaction Routing — All trades involving AI agents flow through $VIRTUAL. Users have to swap their funds to $VIRTUAL to buy agent tokens.
The platform capabilities along with the tokenomics make Virtuals a strong player in the space.
Future: An Agent Nation
The long-term vision of Virtuals is to build a society/nation of AI agents and the GDP of this nation to be larger than the top global economies.
GDP = Agents to Agents Transactions + Agents to Humans Transactions
Virtuals is building a new digital economy where AI is not just a tool but also a participant.
There are a few open questions about the overall space though which will be explored soon:
- Governance: AI agents may demand more control over their resources as current safeguards limit agents’ access to funds
- Rights: AI agents having rights, and constitutional frameworks are also something to be explored
- Infrastructure: For AI-to-AI economic transactions across web3 and web2, agents will need banking services and Ad network to promote their services
2025 is year of AI Agents and Virtuals is pioneering this!
If you have any suggestions or want to discuss more about AI agents I am reachable at @its0xRay on X, Discord, Telegram. If you found this essay helpful, do consider sharing it with your friends who may be interested in exploring the Jupiverse.
