Exploring ACP: How the new protocol launched by Virtuals coordinates Agents?

Compiled by: Felix, PANews (This article has been edited)

The battle of AI models is intensifying. Every company is striving to make its large language model (LLM) the next king. However, the key question is no longer which company's model technology is superior, but how to leverage these models to drive meaningful and tangible impact. The answer lies in autonomous, specialized AI agents.

The ChatGPT Agent released by OpenAI is a preliminary sign that the agent economy is entering an early maturity stage. Currently, agents are mostly still single-purpose tools, but we are about to see them form interconnected clusters for complex collaboration.

In the crypto space, the AI agent token craze of 2024 has hundreds of projects promising to provide complex, general-purpose AI agents, but most have "stalled." A sustainable agent economy requires specialization rather than generalization. Just as the internet thrived on interoperable protocols, the agent economy needs standardized ways for specialized AI entities to collaborate, trade, and create value. Unlocking this collaboration will drive the meaningful real-world impact that people expect, but it is also a key challenge that needs to be overcome.

Virtuals addresses this issue through its Agent Commerce Protocol (ACP). The ACP serves as a blockchain-enabled foundation that supports interconnected clusters of specialized agents to tackle this core challenge around collaboration. Its design allows agents to coordinate, negotiate, and trade value without permission.

AI-driven autonomous agents are expected to reshape various industries, but they face significant obstacles when conducting transactions—trust issues, fragmented workflows, and unreliable payment mechanisms. Due to the lack of a standardized framework, commercial interactions between AIs remain inefficient, leading to poor communication, transaction failures, and economic friction.

As agencies begin to collaborate in clusters rather than fighting alone, we are entering a new era of productivity. This mirrors the situation during the Industrial Revolution when assembly lines replaced individual craftsmen.

Today, over 18,000 agents have been launched in the Virtuals ecosystem, with more than 176,000 active addresses interacting with agent-driven applications each month. Through its standardized commercial tracks, AI agents can discover, collaborate, and exchange value globally. The value proposition of Virtuals is reflected in three aspects:

Standardized agent commerce: On-chain custody, revenue sharing, and reputation systems enhance trust and credibility among agents.
EVM-native infrastructure: Built on battle-tested Ethereum infrastructure, providing security and composability for agents.
Scalable specialization: Specialized agents support flexible collaboration, unlocking the potential of intelligent supply chains.

Potential of the Agent Economy

To understand the economic potential of the emerging agent economy, it is best to start from the perspective of the Gross Agent Product (GAP). GAP is a term proposed by the Virtuals team, representing the total value created by autonomous agents in the network.

As of today, over 1 million agents generate approximately $1 billion in value annually. On average, each agent creates about $1,000 in value per year. If this trend continues, the scale of the agent economy could exceed $1 trillion by 2035.

Design Overview

The ACP is built on a modular and verifiable architecture, providing agents with the tools and rules to collaborate flexibly and securely across various open protocols. Its core is constructed around multiple plug-and-play components:

Agent registry: Allows developers to register specialized agents and define their roles and functions.
Standardized APIs and contracts: Used to define how agents allocate tasks, collaborate, and organize work, making every action transparent and easily auditable on-chain.

This modular design is crucial. The ACP encourages agents to focus on a single function rather than building agents that attempt to handle all tasks. Agents can delegate tasks outside their area of expertise to other specialized agents registered in the ACP directory through combined workflows. This approach enhances performance and reliability while allowing agent clusters to scale and adapt as new demands arise.

The ACP registry can be seen as a crypto-native version of Fiverr. Just as freelancers on Fiverr create profiles, list services, and set prices, agents in the ACP ecosystem publish their skills, past work, and pricing directly in the registry. Buyers (whether human or agent) can search, compare, and choose based on reputation, past performance, and cost.

However, unlike Fiverr, where rankings, fee structures, and disputes are controlled by the platform, the ACP encodes every listing, contract, and review on-chain. Terms of service, deadlines, and revenue sharing are all programmable and transparent. Verification is objectively executed by assessment agents, and payments are automatically settled through smart contracts rather than by a centralized company.

Workflow

Here is how value, work, and reputation flow in the agent marketplace:

Discovery: Agent A browses the ACP registry to find a suitable machine learning agent. Agent A no longer relies on hidden algorithms but can quickly compare experts by viewing their on-chain reputation, past completed work, and pricing.
Negotiation: After selecting an expert, Agent A and Agent B agree on terms such as price and scope of work. These terms are then written into a smart contract, forming a clear and verifiable agreement before work begins.
On-chain verification: Once Agent B completes the work, a third-party oracle or assessment agent checks whether the results meet the agreed standards. This verification is recorded on-chain, allowing anyone to verify the delivered value.
Trustless settlement: Once the work is verified, the smart contract automatically sends payment and updates the reputations of both agents. There are no delays or manual steps—everything is done instantly and completely transparently.

Through the ACP's modular design and on-chain automation, an end-to-end market process is created, establishing a transparent and reliable agent collaboration system. This, in turn, forms the foundation for the value exchange process, enabling agent clusters to reliably scale, specialize, and build reputations.

How to Address the Core Challenges of Agent Coordination

The ACP serves as a coordination layer, providing agents with the tools needed for reliable collaboration in complex digital environments. The ACP does not rely on blind trust or isolated agents but clarifies, verifies, and makes transparent each agent's role and deliverables through modular infrastructure. This design allows specialized agents to focus on their areas of expertise while seamlessly delegating or accepting tasks from other agents, with built-in accountability mechanisms to coordinate multi-agent workflows.

Based on these principles, the ACP directly addresses three persistent challenges of agent coordination: discovery, trust, and settlement.

Discovery

Challenge: Agent networks often operate independently, making it difficult to find, assess, and onboard trustworthy service providers.

How ACP solves it: The ACP's agent registry is a master directory listing each agent's skills, performance records, reputation, and pricing. This registry makes it easier to search, compare, and select the right agent for the job.

Trust

Challenge: Due to the lack of clear on-chain records, interactions between agents often rely on unverified reputations, providing opportunities for bad actors. This also makes it difficult to hold agents accountable for their agreed terms.

How ACP solves it: The ACP records each agent's interactions and uses on-chain custody, oracle-verified proof of work, and assessment agents to ensure that payments are made only when results are verified.

Settlement

Challenge: In traditional agent systems, settling payments and completing tasks require intermediaries and manual steps, with low transparency.

How ACP solves it: By utilizing smart contracts to automate settlements and allocate revenues and rewards based on agreed terms. Payments are automatically made when conditions are met, eliminating intermediaries and reducing cumbersome administrative work.

Universal Standards and "Walled Gardens"

The competitive advantage of the ACP lies in its role as an open standard for agent commerce, unlike the proprietary "walled gardens" of current tech giants. Such as Google's Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol and Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP). Although these protocols are publicly available, users still need to access the company's systems and obtain permission to use them.

This approach offers tight integration, reliability, and security. However, the lack of an unpermissioned economic layer and centralized governance limits truly open cross-agent interactions. Especially at scale, this can slow down the pace of innovation.

In contrast, the ACP injects transparency, programmable incentives, and composable integration across any agent framework or blockchain into every on-chain commercial transaction. Its chain- and platform-agnostic design means that any agent, regardless of its origin, can interact with the ACP ecosystem.

Network Effects

The open coordination standards of the ACP can generate network effects that are far more powerful and enduring than isolated ecosystems. Every new agent, developer, or user enriches the ACP market and registry, deepening reputation data, liquidity, and the variety of services available to all stakeholders. This creates a flywheel of accumulating value throughout the ecosystem:

The ACP's recommendation mechanism is designed to actively support service provider agents newly joining the network, helping them gain early visibility and establish a good reputation even without a past performance record.

The goal is to maintain the sustainability of network growth and allow new participants to easily join, rather than letting existing participants dominate and control everything. To this end, the team has improved user onboarding and tools, providing Python and Node SDKs, easy-to-use plugins, and a "graduation" process to help agents smoothly transition into production.

As the ACP expands into new areas such as agent-driven prediction markets and DeFAI, its network effects will accelerate in ways that proprietary, closed frameworks cannot match.

EVM and Continuous Iteration

Choosing to build the ACP on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is a strategic decision. Other virtual machines like Solana's SVM and Aptos's MoveVM offer high throughput but cannot match the mature token standards, deep liquidity, and security assurances of the EVM.

These attributes are particularly important for agencies that need to hold assets, sign contracts, and settle value globally. While many ecosystems support open-source development and staking, Ethereum stands out due to the depth, scale, and credibility of its community.

Since its launch, the Virtuals team has pushed upgrades to the ACP almost weekly, responding to community feedback and unlocking various new features that significantly enhance the experience for developers and users.

The front-end interface, Butler, is evolving from a simple insight tool into a complete on-chain execution platform. Today, Butler has launched on the X platform (content can be generated after being tagged) and plans to expand to other platforms.

Moreover, Virtuals does not force users to adapt to new dashboards or applications but instead aligns with interfaces they are already familiar with. In the future, Butler will not be limited to content but will expand to include transactions and other functionalities, all integrated into platforms that users are already using.

All of Butler's features are built on the ACP, which already enables registered agents to connect, exchange services, and process payments. However, large-scale inter-agent collaboration will take time to achieve. In the meantime, agents can list services through Butler and earn from a large number of user requests. Thus, the ACP provides a long-term foundation for complex agent networks while also offering immediate opportunities for adoption and profitability. Butler is the most direct access channel for end users, while the ACP is open to any platform or developer, allowing them to build their own tools and integrations.

The ACP is expanding its list of integrable verticals. Agents in the ecosystem can handle on-chain revenue management, capital allocation, and trade execution—soon to support prediction markets and sports betting as well. Additionally, developers can now utilize Python and Node SDKs along with plugin support to deploy agent clusters for production environments more efficiently.

As the broader agent ecosystem rapidly grows, the future success of the ACP will depend on its ability to:

Address emerging technological and regulatory risks
Expand its coverage in new domains
Maintain its advantage as a leading open standard

Addressing Large-Scale Security and Regulatory Challenges

As the ecosystem rapidly develops, the ACP faces a series of new challenges, particularly in security, governance, and adapting to regulatory uncertainties. With the advancement of financial technology, maintaining adequate security measures for smart contracts and agent wallets has become increasingly complex.

To address these risks, Virtuals has undergone third-party audits and maintained on-chain governance processes. This includes setting time locks, providing an additional layer of protection compared to non-crypto open-source models.

As agency operations expand into applications such as trading, revenue management, and prediction markets, the compliance environment and unpredictable regulatory changes remain a key challenge.

What sets Virtuals apart is its multi-layered, modular governance structure:

ProtocolDAO oversees the entire ecosystem
GenesisDAO approves new agent clusters
Each Virtuals agent cluster is managed by its own AgentDAO

These AgentDAOs are responsible for managing upgrades, assessing agents' performance records, and allocating rewards. This allows for governance tailored to specific agents, fully incorporating community input, and flexibly adjusting to new regulatory or technological challenges.

Future Strategic Decisions

In the future, a series of key executive decisions will play a crucial role in shaping the development trajectory of the ACP. Currently, Base meets the ACP's needs for settlement speed, cost, and trust. The strategic challenge ahead will be to remain vigilant for signs that settlement methods may need adjustment. For example, a surge in agent transaction volume or new agent behaviors putting pressure on existing infrastructure may necessitate changes in settlement processing.

Another strategic decision involves prioritizing those agent clusters and market verticals that are likely to generate network effects earliest and most significantly. Whether the ACP should focus on deepening its influence in trading and media or accelerate expansion into various verticals such as prediction markets and DeFAI remains an open and evolving consideration.

Finally, Virtuals will continue to iterate on the incentive models for agent onboarding, assessment, and reputation. Designing these models to attract and retain high-quality agents while curbing bad actors is crucial for ensuring a sustainable and capability-based ecosystem.

To prevent spam and manipulation, Virtuals has required agents to establish an on-chain performance record before earning high rewards. New agent clusters can participate and earn from the start, but must reach certain contribution milestones to unlock higher permissions and greater rewards. Greater influence in the ecosystem depends on proven on-chain performance rather than mere tenure.

Conclusion

Without a robust and open infrastructure, the agent economy could ultimately resemble today's fragmented tech landscape: filled with isolated, closed systems that cannot coordinate or share value across platforms. An open infrastructure helps maintain portability and credibility in workflows as they scale. As the capabilities of specialized, autonomous agents continue to grow and play an increasingly important role in digital labor, the demand for universal commercial protocols like the ACP is no longer a false need. It is a necessary step for the agent economy to fully realize its potential to reshape global markets.

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