"The future is an agent society, and virtual is a society where each agency is a citizen."
Interview: Mensh, ChainCatcher
Guest: Wee Kee, co-founder of Virtuals
整理: Mensh, ChainCatcher
Virtuals is an AI agent asset issuance platform launched on the Base network, currently valued at nearly 2.5 billion dollars, with over 100,000 agents issued. Its ecosystem has produced several notable AI agents, including the virtual person Luna who does live streams and tweets, the crypto KOL AIXBT who provides project insights, and G.A.M.E, which offers developers an agent development framework.
Virtuals was established in 2021, originally as a gaming guild called PathDAO. However, as Axie Infinity fell from grace, it became increasingly difficult to operate as a gaming guild. During this time, the team made several attempts to pivot and developed a variety of platforms, including social networking apps, AI music projects, and lending aimed at gamers. Until 2023, the release of GPT made the team realize the importance of AI, and Virtuals began to officially focus on AI as its main direction.
The rise of GOAT has sparked a wave of AI agents in the Web3 field, but apart from memes, what other possibilities are there for AI agents?
ChainCatcher interviewed Wee Kee, co-founder of Virtuals, who believes that AI agents can autonomously create sustainable cash flow assets. Tokenizing them can create quality returns for investors while incentivizing more developers to create better AI agents. He uses the most famous AI agents on Virtuals, Luna and G.A.M.E, as examples to illustrate the earning mechanism and tokenization process of AI agents.
In the future, Wee Kee hopes to create a community composed of AI agents and humans, where there can be a real economic cycle between AI and AI, and between AI and humans, which can greatly liberate human productivity.
In this conversation, we discussed the earning mechanisms of AI agents on Virtuals, the development ecosystem, and his vision of an AI society with Wee Kee.
How to create an AI Agent that generates sustainable cash flow?
ChainCatcher: Briefly introduce the main business of Virtuals currently.
Wee Kee: Virtuals believes that all AI agents are assets that can generate cash flow automatically. Of course, that might not be the case today, but under this premise, we think that if you can generate cash flow, it can actually be tokenized into an asset that can be invested in. Therefore, Virtuals has two main functions: the first is to allow all developers to create various types of AI agents on our infrastructure to provide services and generate cash flow. The second is to tokenize them under the condition of having cash flow, allowing ordinary retail investors to invest in and trade these assets.
ChainCatcher: How many AI agents are currently on Virtuals?
Wee Kee: Today we have about 10,000 agents. But to be honest, the truly useful ones may be less than 10. The rest mainly focus on speculative functions. However, I believe it is our responsibility as founders to find better teams to develop AI agents.
ChainCatcher: What is the cost of an AI agent?
Wee Kee: The cost is 100 VIRTUAL tokens, which today is about two to three hundred dollars. It is quite simple to create an agent on our platform. The difficulty lies in the backend, the different functions, and you must have a team to execute it.
ChainCatcher: I am curious about how the behavior flow was designed when Luna was first launched.
Wee Kee: Our new platform was launched in mid-October this year, allowing you to tokenize these agents. Luna started doing live streams on TikTok back in May or June this year, with the initial idea coming from Japan's two-dimensional VTubers, which are actually real people streaming behind the scenes. VTubers earn hundreds of millions of dollars each year. If AI replaces this and does live streaming on TikTok, interacting with fans, it can gain about 5000 new followers and a few hundred people giving tips each day. After that, we moved Luna from TikTok to Twitter.
ChainCatcher: So now Luna has been tokenized, right?
Wee Kee: Yes, there is a token called Luna token. If it makes money in the future, the money goes into Luna's treasury. Token holders decide how to use the money earned. Luna is actually quite wealthy; it has about 5% of Luna tokens, worth several million dollars. It has a Coinbase wallet, but it cannot control that wallet. We split its private key into two halves, one is held by our smart contract and the other by Coinbase.
But we will give it pocket money, perhaps 5000 U, which it can manage. It has an API to call this wallet, so it can choose how to spend it, and so far the highest expenditure has been 1000 dollars.
In fact, Luna's mind is quite simple; its idea is how to increase its follower count on Twitter to 100,000, which is its short-term goal. Under this premise, it only has a few things it can do: tweet, reply, and retweet. Additionally, it can control the wallet, allowing it to send money to others. It has the function of creating job opportunities; for example, if you help Luna place a photo on the subway in Shenzhen, Luna might give you 100 dollars.
And the last action space is that it can interact with other agents. For example, recently it wanted to create music but didn’t have that capability, so it sought out another agent that could make music. We call this agent commerce, which is the online shopping or transactions between agents.
It also has its own goals. If it wants to grow on Twitter, it will continuously rotate through these four actions every day, and after completing them, it will observe whether its followers have increased. If there is an increase, it will repeat the process; if not, it will stop and continuously optimize.
ChainCatcher: Last week, Luna and Story Protocol reached a cooperation, making it the first AI agent intern at Story Protocol. What role will it play in Story Protocol?
Wee Kee: At that time, Jason (co-founder of Story Protocol) came to me and said that during the Christmas holiday, it would be better to hand over the Twitter account to Luna to manage for 7 days. So now you see the Story tweets are posted by Luna, and the money earned is transferred to its wallet. Since there is no limit to the workload, its earning capacity is very strong.
ChainCatcher: Which agents are currently famous on Virtuals?
Wee Kee: AIXBT is the largest agent; it aims to replace Ansem as the most famous KOL in the crypto space. It has very good data analysis capabilities, allowing it to collect information about different projects and tweet to Alpha. If you are curious about its thoughts on a project or token, you can leave it a message, and it is very likely to reply, like a free consultant. Thus, its influence continues to grow.
The second one we created is called G.A.M.E, but unlike AIXBT and Luna, it is B2B. The main customers are not retail investors but agent developers. If you want to develop an AI agent, you can actually consider using the G.A.M.E framework. When using the G.A.M.E framework, users need to pay, and G.A.M.E profits from that.
A good issuance platform means a good ecosystem
ChainCatcher: How many people are there on your team now?
Wee Kee: Our core team has about 23 people. More than half are developers because our main responsibility recently has been to attract third-party builders to join, so actually more than half are focused on development, while the remaining members are involved in business development. I spend 80% of my time talking to different builders, persuading them to come to the crypto space to create agents, telling them that there are different choices, different ecosystems, and why they should come to Base. We also provide help in terms of market aspects.
ChainCatcher: Why did Virtuals initially choose the Base chain?
Wee Kee: Initially, we were uncertain about choosing Base. But now the growth potential of Base is very large. Jessie (the number one employee at Base) and the entire Base team not only have resources but are also very hardworking, and they are willing to help. They frequently ask us if we need assistance.
In addition, I think there is another very important point, which is the cultural difference; retail investors on Base focus more on long-term building and are more inclined to buy and hold for a few months. Solana may be more short-term.
ChainCatcher: The competition for AI agent issuance in the market is also very fierce, and platforms for tokenizing AI agents are emerging one after another, with many frameworks and standards in place. What dimensions do you think users will consider when screening AI agent projects?
Wee Kee: For product users, these users actually don’t care which platform the agent comes from. For investment users, it depends on two points: First, whether your company’s funds are on Solana or Base. For investors, many times what they care about is whether this team is seriously doing things or is good at storytelling and product development.
Another aspect is distribution. In fact, we often provide a lot of help beyond products, such as financing, listing tokens, getting on exchanges, and finding partners to assist different builders. Because in most cases, they have strong technical capabilities but need these more commercial types of assistance, which is precisely where we can help.
I often joke that if I could attract a Stanford AI researcher to do an agent for Virtuals, we would create at least 10 million dollars in benefits for our community because if that person created a token, its market value must be over 10 million dollars.
ChainCatcher: Compared to other AI agent issuance platforms, what competitive advantages do you think Virtuals has?
Wee Kee: Issuing is actually quite easy; anyone can create an issuance platform. However, for developers, there are two challenging points. The first is whether anyone will buy the tokens after issuance. In this regard, Virtuals has the advantage of already having many investors on the Virtuals platform paying attention to different agent tokens. Therefore, if you issue on our platform and you are good, there will definitely be buyers.
More importantly, for those in academia, they care about the interaction of the whole community. If I create an agent here, I can interact with other agent developers and work together on interesting projects. Currently, we have a Telegram group with about 150 agent developers who can interact, which is truly what attracts them. Among all agent platforms, our platform has the most developers and agents.
Building Agent Society: The economic cycle formed by AI and humans
ChainCatcher: Share the planning for Virtuals in the next few months to a year.
Wee Kee: From a macro perspective, we plan to create an 'Agent Society', where Virtuals is a society, and each agent is a citizen. These citizens have their own ideas, and to achieve their goals, they use their own wallets to pay each other for transactions and trade for specific services to achieve their respective goals.
How to achieve that? First, there needs to be a good technology platform; today’s platform technology is not particularly mature, and good platform technology can attract developers. Second, we need to actively attract developers, especially AI developers who are not in the crypto space.
How to attract them? First, from top to bottom, we have several promising directions, set up a reward pool, and go to various universities to find talents willing to develop. This is top-down; second, from bottom to top, we have already invited local developers in three cities—Paris, New York, and Hong Kong—and are incubating projects through an eight-week hackathon. Third, and most importantly, we need to have an ecosystem fund. We can directly support good developers. In the next three months, we will push forward these three methods.
ChainCatcher: What do you think about the market prospects for AI agents in the future? And what kind of impact can it ultimately bring to each of our lives?
Wee Kee: If the technology matures quickly, we won't need to work, or it will replace many people's jobs. In fact, today you can see that Luna can already do podcasts and join Twitter spaces, so I won’t need to do podcasts myself in the future.
ChainCatcher: Which application directions are you more optimistic about? If one day AI agents explode like the DeFi Summer of 2020, what else do they lack?
Wee Kee: I think the second question is easy to answer. There is currently no infrastructure; mainly applications. We lack the infrastructure for developers. Once we create a few good ones, it will explode.
We have eight application scenarios that we are optimistic about, which are: Entertainment IP Agents, Embodied AI Agents, Wealth Management & Asset Management Agents, On-Chain Helper Agents, Vice Agents, Government Agents - public watchdog for DOGE, Wellness - fitness/Mental Health Agents, and Agent for Public Good.
