The development trend of AI agents today is becoming increasingly similar to the ideas proposed by the Virtuals team 2-3 years ago. This kind of foresight is rare, not only in the crypto space but also in the AI field. Of course, foresight and the intrinsic value of the Virtuals project are two different things. Lately, I’ve been thinking about the significance of the Virtuals protocol in the era of crypto AI—not just as a moat, but also about its necessity. One key reason is that Virtuals is an infrastructure project for the crypto AI era. For AI agents to achieve true autonomy, they need their own wallets/assets/identities/payments/collaboration, etc. The development trend of AI agents is toward AI entities that are independent individuals, capable of existing long-term, making their own decisions, collaborating with each other, and participating in economic activities. To enable true autonomy for AI agents, infrastructure is needed to support them. Here’s what Virtuals can do: Virtuals can help AI agents obtain identities (permanent/portable) through on-chain wallets. This identity is different from a simple passport or ID card—it can also record their history and behavior, build credibility, and all of this is verifiable. This is the advantage of the crypto space: a verifiable reputation-based identity. Virtuals’ ACP provides a transaction framework for AI agents, including capability discovery, task definition, smart contract escrow, automated payments, and reputation recording. Essentially, it establishes a trusted market standard for AI agent collaboration. Additionally, agents can form clusters based on task outputs through ACP, enabling them to handle complex tasks—leveraging multi-agent systems to implement socialized protocol operations. Running AI agents comes with costs, which raises a critical question: where does the money come from, and how can AI agents achieve long-term sustainability? Virtuals offers tokenization, revenue sharing, and automated “survival” contracts to support AI agent financing and ongoing operations. Virtuals has a wealth of experience and lessons learned in this area. Virtuals is not tied to specific models; it is decoupled from particular models, supports model upgrades, and ensures that identity, reputation, and economic accumulation are not lost in the process, offering flexibility. In summary, the Virtuals Protocol is building foundational infrastructure to enable AI agents to create their own independent economies, allowing them to contribute value through their efforts and achieve long-term sustainability.