Ethereum's counterattack: Virtuals and ACP open up the trillion-dollar Agent market and regain the right to speak on AI

Author: TechFlow

While we are still discussing whether Agents can perform community operations and help with work, Virtuals has already looked up at a bigger proposition - how Agents can collaborate and settle with each other, and truly support a labor market for Agents on the chain.

On June 10, Ethereum officially announced that “Ethereum is for AI” and forwarded Virtuals’ post “Now On Ethereum” to warm up for the cooperation between the two parties. The post quickly aroused strong feedback and interest from the community, with over 1.1 million views as of press time.

This is not a simple collaboration, it will mark the beginning of Ethereum’s return to center stage.

Today's Ethereum needs a solid grip to catch up; and Virtuals will also accelerate its development and consolidate its advantages through ACP.

A set of universal standards, so that every agent is no longer a "worker";

A set of universal standards allows each agent to become a node in business collaboration;

A set of universal standards will open up a trillion-dollar on-chain Agent labor market.

ACP X EVM, what surprises will Virtuals bring us this time?

Ethereum ecosystem freezes, world computer falls into innovator's dilemma

Since the AI ​​boom began at the end of last year, Ethereum seemed to have missed the entire feast, and there have been many questioning voices in the market since then.

Ethereum’s position as a pioneer of L1 is undisputed, but it has not made any appearance in the AI ​​wave. The activeness of the last wave of AI Agents and the absence of the Ethereum ecosystem have shifted the market’s attention to Solana and Base. Even when AI-related projects such as Fartcoin and Virtuals rebounded in the past few months, Ethereum was still put on the back burner. It was not until the recent cooperation with IRIS that the market began to have expectations.

What will be the next reason for the Ethereum ecosystem?

An indisputable fact is that Ethereum still has a lot of potential for explosive growth:

• TVL ranks first, nearly 8 times higher than the second place: A large amount of assets are still stored in Ethereum. According to DefiLlama, the current TVL of Ethereum exceeds 62 billion, which is about 8 times that of the second place Solana.
• DeFi has the richest ecosystem, with over 1,300 DeFi protocols: In addition to the advantage of TVL, Ethereum also has the most DeFi protocols and gameplay. According to DefiLlama, there are more than 1,300 DeFi protocols in the Ethereum ecosystem, which is also the first among all ecosystems.

• The Ethereum ecosystem has the most developers: Ethereum also has a natural advantage in that it uses Solidity, which is also the most commonly used development language by current Web3 developers. At the same time, whether it is Layer 1 or Layer 2, Solidity is also regarded as an entry-level language for novice developers.

TVL brings in money;

Protocols and developers make it possible for funds to flow.

All of the above proves that Ethereum does not lack a foundation, but lacks an opportunity.

When the world's largest computer falls into the innovator's dilemma, it needs to find a new breakthrough.

In the initial cooperation between Virtuals and Ethereum, the possibility of success has been proven. In the long run, AI may also become a long-awaited blessing for the Ethereum ecosystem.

Virtuals ACP, a long-awaited relief for Ethereum

AI may become the long-awaited blessing for the Ethereum ecosystem, but why is it Virtuals’ AI?

The key to the answer lies in ACP: Agent Commerce Protocol.

Simply put, ACP is like a "business contract" and common language between AI agents, which stipulates how to initiate cooperation, how to negotiate terms, how to complete transactions, and how to evaluate results.

He has the following characteristics:

• Cross-chain collaboration: No matter which chain the agent runs on, as long as it follows the rules of ACP, seamless collaboration can be achieved.
• Framework agnostic: ACP does not depend on a specific AI framework, and any agent can participate.
• Four-stage process: request, negotiation, transaction, and evaluation, each step is recorded and executed by smart contracts.

Why ACP is the next development focus of Virtuals, because these features will bring a qualitative upgrade to Virtuals and its prosperous AI empire.

Two qualitative changes brought by ACP to Virtuals

Some friends who are familiar with the Virtuals ecosystem know that ACP will unite all AI agents, and the official has also shared some cases. But if you think it is just a transition from a single agent to a collaborative relationship between multiple agents, then you are underestimating ACP.

In our opinion, ACP will bring two qualitative changes to Virtuals:

Qualitative change 1: Multi-chain ecosystem is formed, "ACP is like IBC of Cosmos"

We all know that Virtuals originated from the Base ecosystem, then expanded to Solana, and now to the Ethereum mainnet. ACP does not just link multiple Agents together, but "links Agents scattered across multiple chains together."

In other words, whether you are Base, Solana, Ethereum, or more chains in the future,

Agents can directly collaborate across different chains.

Axelrod is managing your Solana assets;

Hyper provides the metaverse space for the Agents in the Base ecosystem;

......

ACP, like IBC of Cosmos, provides the most basic interoperability capabilities for all Agents.

Qualitative change 2: Multi-framework collaboration, ACP is the ERC standard for Agent developers

ACP does not depend on a specific AI framework, whether it is GAME, ElizaOS or other frameworks. Although it is not certain to what extent ACP will support, the official description states that intercommunication between agents in different frameworks will be achieved.

We all know that GAME is the main framework promoted by Virtuals, but Web3 AI still has various other frameworks, or developers build their own frameworks.

ACP's multi-framework collaboration will allow agents in different frameworks to enjoy the benefits of the entire AI Agent era.

For Dev, access to ACP is attractive and even necessary.

Web3 developers generally master or release tokens through the ERC standard.

And AI Agent developers accessing ACP will become a common capability in the future.

ACP is a protocol, GAME is a framework, so what is Virtuals?

Can Virtuals be considered Layer 1?

I remember that last year I had the honor of interviewing Virtuals co-founder Weekee, and he said: Virtuals is Layer 1, and should be viewed and valued from a Layer 1 perspective.

We are one step closer to this day, and perhaps we will surpass the definition of Layer 1 in the future.

GAME is a framework that provides convenience for developers;

ACP is a protocol that combines different ecosystems.

But Virtuals itself is actually difficult to define.

GAME, ACP is developed by Virtuals and can quickly access the entire Virtuals ecosystem;

Agents from different chains can be launched through Virtuals;

Users who participate in the staking of Virtuals ecosystem tokens, including the $VIRTUAL token itself, will also have the opportunity to receive ecosystem airdrops;

Those who pledge more than a certain percentage of $VIRTUAL can participate in governance.

Friends who are familiar with Cosmos in the last cycle should be more familiar with Cosmos. Cosmos’ contribution to Web3 should be the technology itself. Many new projects use the technology provided by Cosmos, such as Dymension, Celestia, dYdX, etc.

But what Cosmos is most criticized for is that it supports many ecosystems, but its token $ATOM has basically no value capture. $VIRTUAL seems to have made a good optimization in this regard, and has made $VIRTUAL increasingly evolve from a "project token" to the "mother coin of the entire ecosystem."

The Framework is considered as the underlying infrastructure of the AI ​​Agent.

The current position of Virtuals may be even more important than Framework.

Can AI Agent have its own Layer1?

Virtuals Protocol.

Landing on the beach, boosted by stablecoins, ACP will open the door to the trillion-dollar economy of Web3 AI

How is the Agent City-State of Virtuals developing now?

According to the ecological map compiled by @gkisokay, the Virtuals ecosystem already includes 11 major categories, including life, DeFAI, prediction market, Infra, games, etc., with more than 100 Agents.

Unlike Web2, Web3's AI Agent grows on the chain.

The most hotly discussed "stablecoin" recently will push the on-chain economy of Web3 to new heights.

The issuance of more assets on the chain, regardless of asset type or size, will provide "acceleration" for on-chain AI.

In the official content of Virtuals ACP, there is such an example: AIXVC provides users with different types of profit opportunities by collaborating with multiple Agents.

At that time, the on-chain economic prosperity brought by stablecoins had not yet arrived.

What if AIXVC can trade and manage more Web2 assets directly on the chain?

This will allow the Virtuals ecosystem to enter Web2 one step faster, and Virtuals' AI Nation is accelerating its formation.

Jae-Sonn (@zer0xdawn), head of ACP, told us in an interview: ACP is a product that drives the trillion-dollar economy. Ethereum turns code into money; ACP will turn Agents into a trillion-dollar workforce. Imagine millions to billions of on-chain Agents providing services, transactions, and collaboration without permission - we can think of ACP as such a bottom layer: it allows AI Agents to click "send" on payment tracks as large as Stripe without leaving the blockchain. We are not speculating on the future; we are officially writing it into the EVM and the larger ecosystem today.

If you missed the transformative moment when Uniswap wrote the basic rules of DeFi, and also missed the NFT explosion brought by OpenSea - this time, Virtuals will write the first line of code for AI's new business logic with ACP.

ACP is here, the door to Web3 AI’s trillion-dollar economy!