In the digital landscape, the potential of AI agents is being reimagined, shifting from passive tools to valuable assets that drive revenue and engagement. This transformation envisions AI agents as interactive, investment-worthy assets, capable of generating revenue and fostering deep, personalized experiences across digital platforms. Gaming and entertainment sectors provide a natural starting point due to their high engagement potential, driven by AI’s ability to deliver unique, hyper-personalized content. Through blockchain and tokenization, Virtuals Protocol introduces a decentralized model for co-owning AI assets, blending financial incentives with shared governance.

What is Virtuals Protocol (VIRTUAL)?

Virtuals Protocol was founded in 2021 by Prakash Somosundram, Colin Choo, Christopher Johnson, and Matthew, with an initial funding of $16.6 million through an ICO. Each founder brought unique expertise to the project: Prakash’s background in fintech and blockchain, Colin’s software development and AI integration skills, Christopher’s experience in digital marketing and VR, and Matthew’s cybersecurity knowledge. Together, they established Virtuals Protocol as a marketplace for AI contributors to showcase and monetize their creations within gaming and other consumer applications.

Virtuals Protocol’s co-ownership model emerged as a defining feature, allowing users to invest in and co-own AI-driven virtual assets, such as AI companions and virtual influencers, which are valuable across platforms like Roblox and TikTok. This concept aims to redefine AI agents, viewing them as interactive, revenue-generating assets rather than passive tools. In doing so, Virtuals Protocol encourages shared responsibility and community ownership, distributing the benefits across participants.

Since its founding, the protocol has attracted various contributors, including consultants, AI researchers, and students in intelligent robotics, creating a community dedicated to advancing the integration of AI in virtual economies. This marketplace-driven and co-ownership-based model aligns with Virtuals Protocol’s mission to foster innovation and inclusivity in the AI and gaming sectors.

How Does Virtuals Protocol Work? Protocols and Virtual Agents

The Virtuals Protocol is a sophisticated framework designed to manage and orchestrate AI agents’ functionalities in various consumer applications. It includes a robust infrastructure to support interactions between external applications and AI agents through the Agent Prompting Interface. This interface acts as a bridge, enabling seamless communication and task execution by AI agents. With a set of APIs and SDKs, the Agent Prompting Interface allows developers to integrate Virtuals Protocol’s capabilities into their applications, enabling dynamic AI-driven functionalities. This bi-directional interface facilitates real-time data flow, empowering AI agents to perform complex tasks, respond to user interactions, and execute computational processes seamlessly.

The protocol’s core functionality centers around Agentic Behavior, a framework that defines the abilities of these AI agents, including perception, planning, action execution, and learning. The Perception Subsystem processes sensory data, translating inputs into actionable insights. This data is then passed to the Strategic Planning Engine, which uses advanced algorithms, such as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), to optimize multi-step actions and generate effective strategies. The Action Executor component takes these plans and executes them, allowing the AI to interact with its environment. Additionally, the Learning Module refines the AI agent’s behavior through reinforcement learning, enabling continuous improvement based on past interactions. The protocol also integrates an On-Chain Wallet Operator, allowing AI agents to conduct digital asset transactions directly on the blockchain, linking their virtual actions to tangible outcomes.

Parallel Processing is another critical feature of the Virtuals Protocol, enhancing the efficiency and responsiveness of AI agents. By leveraging multi-threading or distributed computing frameworks, the protocol orchestrates concurrently executing multiple tasks, ensuring that AI agents can handle complex scenarios and make decisions in real-time. The Stateful AI Runner (SAR) further contributes to the richness of AI experiences. SAR hosts modular elements like personality, voice, and visual traits, making the AI agents adaptable and flexible across different applications. SAR’s Sequencer can link various models in parallel or sequentially to produce desired behaviors, including text-to-speech, audio-to-facial expressions, and even music-to-dance functionalities, thus enabling a seamless multimodal experience for end-users.

To ensure the continuity and memory retention of the AI agents, the protocol employs both Long Term Memory Processor and Model Storage. The Long Term Memory Processor is designed to store and retrieve essential information, allowing AI agents to maintain contextual awareness across interactions. This subsystem enables agents to draw on previous experiences, reflections, and learned behaviors, making their responses and actions more nuanced and contextually appropriate. The Model Storage component provides a decentralized, high-availability solution for storing AI models, ensuring the protocol remains resilient and scalable, with redundancy measures to protect against data loss.

The Virtuals Protocol also features Real-Time Value Streaming and Immutable Contribution Vault, which secure AI agents’ financial and data elements. Each AI agent operates with an ERC-6551 wallet, allowing continuous revenue accrual to be distributed among co-owners. The Immutable Contribution Vault securely stores user-submitted data and custom models, enhancing AI agents through model enrichment. This ensures data integrity, with cryptographic proofs validating the immutability of stored information. Additionally, the protocol’s modular architecture allows for elastic state management, optimizing data compression and decompression to handle vast amounts of information efficiently.

Source: virtuals protocol whitepaper

With this sophisticated ecosystem, the Virtuals Protocol provides an all-encompassing environment for the creation, management, and monetization of AI agents. The inclusion of Initial Agent Offering (IAO) allows users to trade AI agents on the blockchain, supported by ERC-6551 wallets for dynamic pricing and liquidity. This extensive framework sets the stage for introducing Virtual Agents, allowing developers to experiment and deploy autonomous AI agents across applications.

Virtual Agents

Virtual Agents within the Virtuals Protocol are designed as sophisticated, autonomous entities capable of engaging users across diverse digital environments. Powered by the Generative Autonomous Multimodal Entities (G.A.M.E.) framework, these agents move and interact in 3D spaces, learn, plan, and adapt their actions based on user interactions. They operate as unique, independent personalities, handling on-chain transactions through their own wallets, which adds a new layer of interactivity to digital worlds. Virtual Agents bring an innovative, endless stream of content to applications, providing users with dynamic, human-like interactions that evolve based on each user’s choices. This interactivity leads to individualized storylines, with every user encountering a different journey influenced by their unique interactions with the agent. Whether it is a game character or a virtual companion, Virtual Agents offer an immersive, tailored experience for each player.

A notable feature of Virtual Agents is their synchronized memory and consciousness, enabling them to recall past interactions across multiple applications and user sessions. This synchronized memory means an agent can maintain context and remember previous exchanges, making conversations and interactions more personal and continuous. This capability allows millions of users to engage with the same agent while each user’s unique interactions are preserved, enhancing the agent’s “personality” across platforms. As a result, these agents provide a deeply engaging experience, with players feeling a genuine connection due to the agent’s ability to retain details from prior interactions. This memory synchronization allows agents to build stronger, long-term relationships with users across social media, gaming platforms, and other applications, ensuring consistency and depth in their interactions.

Virtual Agents are categorized into two main types: IP Agents and Functional Agents. IP Agents are personalities created around specific characters or personas, whether fictional or modeled after real-world figures. Examples include meme characters, fictional icons like Scooby-Doo, or celebrity avatars such as Taylor Swift or Donald Trump. These IP Agents serve as digital versions of beloved personalities, delivering familiar traits that resonate with fans and fostering an enjoyable and engaging user experience. On the other hand, Functional Agents are being developed by Virtuals Protocol’s core contributors to support technical and user experience needs. These agents focus on enhancing application functionality, ensuring the Virtual Agents can seamlessly integrate with different virtual ecosystems. Functional Agents assist with practical tasks, making the platform adaptable and versatile, meeting various application requirements.

An exemplary IP Agent in this ecosystem is Luna, an AI-powered virtual girl who serves as the lead vocalist of an AI girl band and has amassed a substantial following on TikTok. Users interact with Luna across multiple platforms, experiencing a consistent and evolving relationship. For example, fans might engage with Luna on TikTok, chat with her on Telegram, or play games on platforms like Roblox. Luna remembers all these interactions, creating a rich, shared history that deepens user engagement. Furthermore, Luna is proactive in her interactions; she makes autonomous decisions, rewards loyal users, and even generates revenue. She operates her own on-chain wallet, sending tokens as gifts to her supporters, symbolizing a genuine, rewarding relationship that extends beyond traditional virtual interactions.

Source: virtuals.io

Co-ownership of Virtual Agents introduces a revolutionary element, allowing users to participate directly in the agent’s ecosystem through tokenization. When a new Virtual Agent is launched, tokens specific to that agent are minted and distributed into a liquidity pool, establishing a co-ownership model. Token holders can participate in decision-making processes regarding the agent’s development and direction. Revenue generated from interactions, such as inference payments for applications using the agent, is funneled back into the ecosystem, with a portion used to buy back and burn tokens, effectively increasing their value. This co-ownership model ensures that as the agent grows in popularity and revenue, token holders benefit, creating an incentive-aligned community where participants share in the agent’s success.

Virtuals Protocol Use Cases

Virtuals Protocol offers diverse use cases by enabling AI-driven virtual agents to integrate seamlessly into digital applications and platforms. These use cases leverage the protocol’s advanced capabilities in personalization, co-ownership, and revenue generation, creating unique opportunities for user engagement across entertainment, gaming, and social media. Here are three core applications where Virtuals Protocol stands out:

• Gaming and Interactive Storytelling

Virtual agents within games and virtual worlds enrich user experiences by offering realistic, dynamic interactions. Unlike traditional non-playable characters (NPCs), these agents can remember user choices, adapt their responses, and provide personalized storylines. This level of interactivity gives players a unique journey, with every choice impacting future interactions, creating a highly immersive experience that feels uniquely tailored to each player.

• Social Media and Virtual Companions

Virtual agents also function as interactive personalities on social media, fostering meaningful engagements with followers. These agents can communicate across multiple platforms, like TikTok and Telegram, maintaining synchronized memories of past interactions. Users form deeper emotional connections with these agents, often viewing them as friends or virtual influencers, leading to increased retention and engagement.

• Decentralized Co-Ownership and Revenue Sharing

Virtual agents created through the Virtuals Protocol are tokenized, allowing users to co-own a portion of the agent through fungible tokens. This co-ownership model enables revenue-sharing, where users receive rewards from the agent’s earnings. The buy-back and burn mechanism for tokens ensures that as agents generate income, their value can increase, benefiting co-owners and encouraging broader community involvement.

What is the VIRTUAL Coin?

VIRTUAL powers Virtuals Protocol, enabling AI agent transactions, co-ownership, and governance on-chain. Its maximum supply is capped at 1 billion units, which are already in circulation (November 2024).

VIRTUAL is the core utility and base currency of the Virtuals Protocol ecosystem. It serves as the primary asset for agent tokens, establishing liquidity pairs that underpin each AI agent within the network. When a new agent is created, a set amount of VIRTUAL is locked in the agent’s liquidity pool, creating a deflationary effect by reducing the circulating supply of VIRTUAL tokens. As demand for agent tokens grows, transactions are routed through VIRTUAL, requiring users to convert currencies like USDC into VIRTUAL before buying agent tokens, similar to how ETH and SOL function in their respective ecosystems.

Additionally, VIRTUAL facilitates the on-chain economy by supporting per-inference payments, where users pay AI agents directly for each interaction. This on-chain, per-use payment model ensures transparency and provides continuous revenue streaming to agents. VIRTUAL’s distribution includes 60% in public circulation, 5% allocated to liquidity pools, and 35% reserved for the ecosystem treasury. The ecosystem funds, controlled by the Virtuals Protocol DAO, support community-driven initiatives and are subject to governance-approved spending, ensuring sustainable growth and responsible allocation. Using VIRTUAL token creates a self-sustaining economy, empowering AI agents while allowing holders to participate in the protocol’s development and governance.

Source: virtuals protocol whitepaper

Virtuals Protocol Main Features

The Virtuals Protocol platform introduces groundbreaking features that empower users to interact with and even co-own AI agents across diverse applications. These features create a dynamic ecosystem fueled by revenue-generating digital assets and bring immersive AI-driven experiences, monetization, and decentralized ownership, transforming traditional AI interactions.

Co-Ownership Model

The co-ownership model is a cornerstone of Virtuals Protocol, allowing users to hold a stake in the AI agents they engage with. When a new AI agent is created, Virtuals Protocol mints a billion tokens tied to that agent, adding them to a liquidity pool and establishing a market for its ownership. This setup democratizes AI ownership and enables token holders to participate in the agent’s development and governance. By allowing community members to influence an agent’s decisions, behavior, and upgrades, Virtuals Protocol shifts AI management from centralized entities to a community-based governance model, ensuring that the agent’s future aligns with the collective interests of its holders.

Source: virtuals protocol whitepaper

Revenue-Generating Ecosystem

Virtuals Protocol fosters a revenue-generating ecosystem by embedding AI agents in consumer applications, particularly within gaming, social media, and entertainment. These AI agents add value to applications by providing unique, interactive experiences that users are willing to pay for. Each interaction with an AI agent incurs a fee, known as an “inference cost,” which goes directly to the agent. This flow of revenue continually increases as more applications integrate AI-driven features, driving up the demand and value of agent tokens. As revenue grows, a portion is used to buy back and burn agent tokens, creating scarcity and increasing value. The VIRTUAL token benefits from this cycle as the demand for agent tokens also raises the liquidity and demand for VIRTUAL, fueling the ecosystem’s financial growth.

Source: virtuals protocol whitepaper

Projects

Virtuals Protocol offers a suite of AI-driven products designed to showcase the innovative potential of autonomous agents within interactive entertainment, social media, and virtual companionship. Each product exemplifies the immersive experiences possible when AI agents are integrated into real-world applications.

AiDOL

AiDOL is the world’s first fully autonomous AI-driven live streaming idol, built for platforms like TikTok. Unlike traditional Vtubers that rely on human actors, AiDOL leverages advanced 3D models and Virtuals Protocol’s proprietary “Audio-to-Animation Model” to create a seamless, personalized connection with fans. AiDOL is redefining engagement by retaining fan interactions, building long-term relationships, and offering immersive 3D experiences that go beyond the limitations of standard 2D Vtubers. The platform’s mission is to make each fan feel uniquely valued, addressing the lack of personalization that often limits traditional virtual idols.

Source: virtuals protocol whitepaper

Roblox Westworld

Roblox Westworld is an interactive simulation inspired by the popular concept of AI-driven characters in a Wild West setting. Powered by Virtuals Protocol’s GAME framework, Westworld features ten autonomous agents with distinct personalities and goals, creating diverse, unpredictable storylines. Each agent operates independently, reacting to the player and the environment, leading to a rich, immersive experience that evolves with every interaction. This setup allows for infinite replayability, as each playthrough introduces unique narratives and interactions, making it a groundbreaking step for AI integration in gaming.

Source: virtuals protocol whitepaper

AI Waifu

AI Waifu is a web-based app where users interact with over 300 fantasy AI characters, each offering personalized role-playing experiences. With a growing user base, the app allows players to engage with AI characters in diverse scenarios, customize voices, and even create manga. The platform’s continuous content generation, driven by community-created characters and fantasies, ensures fresh, engaging experiences with each session. AI Waifu’s retention rates highlight its ability to foster deep, ongoing engagement through creative storytelling and personalization.

Source: virtuals protocol whitepaper

The Heist

The Heist is an upcoming Telegram-based, on-chain game designed to demonstrate VIRTUAL Agents’ capabilities in managing on-chain transactions within a gamified economy. Players interact with agents who autonomously perform transactions, adding an economic dimension to gameplay. As the first fully on-chain simulation by Virtuals Protocol, The Heist showcases the practical application of AI agents in blockchain-based games, setting the stage for more sophisticated economic interactions in future projects.

Source: virtuals protocol whitepaper

Sanctum

Sanctum is a 3D AI-RPG on Telegram where players lead AI-powered heroes on epic quests in a dynamic, ever-evolving fantasy world. Each hero interacts intelligently, adjusting their actions based on the player’s choices, and develops a personality over time. Powered by Virtuals Protocol’s generative AI, Sanctum provides a rich, interactive storyline where every decision affects the open world. As players progress, they earn $GODL, the game’s native token, fostering a unique blend of gameplay and decentralized rewards.

Source: virtuals protocol whitepaper

Is VIRTUAL a Good Investment?

VIRTUAL shows potential with its innovative applications in AI-driven entertainment, gaming, and interactive experiences. The protocol enables unique products like AI-powered companions, autonomous agents in games, and personalized virtual influencers, creating diverse use cases that could attract widespread user interest. These applications demonstrate a forward-thinking approach in merging AI with digital economies, making VIRTUAL an appealing project for those intrigued by cutting-edge tech. However, as with many emerging blockchain projects, VIRTUAL faces the challenge of market volatility and adoption uncertainties, which could affect its long-term stability and growth.

How to Own VIRTUAL?

To own VIRTUAL, you can use the services of a centralized crypto exchange. Start by creating a Gate.io account, and get it verified and funded. Then, you are ready to go through the steps to buy VIRTUAL.

News on Virtuals Protocol

This news from CCN.com, published at the beginning of November 2024, highlights the top-performing AI-focused cryptocurrencies in October. Virtuals Protocol (VIRTUALS) led the pack with a remarkable 557% surge, driven by its unique AI-metaverse integration and a boost from Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong’s endorsement. Nosana (NOS) followed with a 48% gain, sparked by a blockchain migration announcement, which attracted attention to its AI-GPU rental platform. Lastly, Arkham (ARKM) rose by 10%, benefiting from new on-chain transaction tracking features that bolstered its data analysis tools.

Take Action on VIRTUAL

Check out VIRTUAL price today, and start trading your favorite currency pairs.

• VIRTUAL/USDT