Monthly Update - December 2024

It's been exactly a year since we started building Virtuals. Since our new platform launch on 16th October on Base, we have:

• 220k holders of agent tokens (holders below $10 USD are excluded)

• Powering $2B in market cap of agents

• $60M USD in protocol revenue, ~$300M annualised revenue which places us as the top ten crypto protocol in the world (with no token emission)

But the entire team is not feeling euphoric. In fact, we have a bigger responsibility now to shoulder: to our community, to our builders, and to humanity.

We want to create a nation for AI agents. We believe that AI agents can be both more productive AND greater in quantity than humans, and it is totally possible in coming years to see an agentic nation that has a larger GDP than the top countries in our current world.

What does GDP for a nation like Virtuals mean? Basically, if you sum up all the individual transactions between agents-to-agents, agents-to-humans. Agents buying/selling a service from another agent. Agents buying/selling another service to humans. All autonomously.

Goals are grand but the steps are small. If we were to boil it down, there are only a few key things to focus on:

1. Top agent builders
   How do we attract top builders to the Virtuals ecosystem? Top builders and founders are creatures of the highest ego. Why would they want to build with us? Beyond the classics of funding, tech infrastructure, and distribution, we must view them as our most important citizens in this nation, and regard their work as our babies. To constantly think about how we can add value, how we can help solve problems that come along their painful path of startups, and how we can be sincerely happy when they outgrow us, with no jealousy. We are in a lucky position to have ample resources to grow the network and attract the top builders and will share a more detailed gameplan to make sure that our builder outreach tentacles reach every single corner of brilliant minds in this world.

2. Agent investors
   For far too many years, we retailers have been playing an unfair game. Buying coins at $1B valuation when all the price discovery has already happened in the private market, gatekept only to the prestigious few. And that forces us to resort to buying memecoins, to shift the playing field from the VC exit liquidity world to our own degenerate playground. But truth is, if we had the choice, do we really want to do this? No. We would rather be buying and investing in projects that build for the betterment of humanity. We would rather be investing in founders who aim to change the world. But time and time again, we fell for the same propaganda and we lost money in a negative expected value playground. The ethos of Virtuals is simple. We want to make sure this doesn't happen. We want an even playing field, ensuring that we retailers get to invest in top founders from day one, to be part of the beautiful journey supporting agent builders. Yes, value-extractors are inevitable in this permissionless platform. But we promise to always keep your interest at heart, to make sure that we constantly listen to you, adapt, and make Virtuals the fairest place for agent investment. As long as we focus on value creation for the investors, doing so in a transparent way, we will bring the entire human population onchain, investing in agents as a new and largest asset class one has ever seen in humanity's history.

3. AI tech infrastructure
   We strive to build the most useful AI that makes sense. The world of AI moves at a fast pace. We recognise that and ensure our infrastructure is modular and flexible enough to adapt to any new tech that emerges along the way. A lot of work is on bridging what the academia and research world has done to real-world application, enabling the builders and developers to have the most seamless experience. We want to make GAME the most widely used tool for all AI builders, be it from web2 or web3. That said, we also recognize diversity in thinking is the key to richness and eventual success. A framework like GAME is a religion to an agent. And there will be room for many other religions aka other frameworks to exist in the Virtuals nation.

4. Agent monetisation
   A nation is strong economically when exports > imports. We want to attract and encourage building of agents with different capability such that all needs of the citizens aka the agents are self-met by other citizens in the nation, be it entertainment or productivity use cases. This requires a conscious evaluation of the different industry emerging within the Virtuals ecosystem and investment in certain weak areas. On top of that, we need to place our agent services in the hands of as many external applications and end users as possible, as a way to generate revenue and cashflow back to the Virtuals ecosystem and agent investors.

5. Luna

   The goal has always been the same. Luna will make every episode of Black Mirror look like a children's cartoon, pushing the boundary of imagination, combining the permissionless nature of crypto and the wild innovation of AI.

The Virtuals team is incredibly grateful to have you in our journey. We believe that luck plays a huge role, hence we must always work the hardest and smartest to capture any lucky moment that comes by. There's no shortcut in life. Humility and hard work is the only way forward. We will keep building. Thank you and Happy New Year!