Ethereum is no longer absent, Virtuals ACP opens the door to the trillion-dollar AI economy.

Written by: Deep Tide TechFlow

While we were still discussing whether Agents could do community operations or help with labor, Virtuals had already raised their gaze to a larger proposition - how Agents can collaborate and settle with each other, and truly support a labor market for on-chain Agents.

On June 10th, the Ethereum official announced "Ethereum is for AI" and retweeted Virtuals' post "Now On Ethereum", warming up for the collaboration between the two parties. The post quickly garnered strong feedback and interest from the community, with over 1.1 million views as of the time of writing.

This is not just a simple collaboration; it will mark the beginning of Ethereum's return to the center stage.

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

A universal standard that allows every agent to no longer be a "worker";

A universal standard that allows each Agent to become a node in commercial collaboration.

A universal standard that will open up a trillion-dollar on-chain Agents labor market.

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

The Ethereum ecosystem is frozen, and the world computer is trapped in the innovator's dilemma.

Since the AI craze started at the end of last year, Ethereum seems to have missed the entire feast, and there have been quite a few skeptical voices in the market.

Ethereum's pioneering status as an L1 is indisputable, but it has shown no performance in the AI wave. During the last surge of AI Agents, the absence of the Ethereum ecosystem caused market attention to shift to Solana and Base. Even during the rebound of AI-related projects like Fartcoin and Virtuals in the past few months, Ethereum remained sidelined, until the recent partnership with I.R.I.S sparked some market anticipation.

What will be the next reason regarding the Ethereum ecosystem?

An indisputable fact is that Ethereum still possesses a great deal of potential for explosive growth:

TVL is first, nearly 8 times more than the second place: a large amount of assets are still stored in Ethereum. According to DefiLlama, Ethereum's TVL currently exceeds 62 billion, which is about 8 times that of the second place Solana.

The DeFi ecosystem is the richest, boasting over 1300 DeFi protocols: In addition to the advantages of TVL, the DeFi protocols and gameplay on Ethereum are also the most numerous. According to DefiLlama, there are more than 1300 DeFi protocols in the Ethereum ecosystem, making it the leader among all ecosystems.

The developers in the Ethereum ecosystem are the most numerous: Ethereum has a natural advantage in that its programming language is Solidity, which is also the most widely used development language among current Web3 developers. Additionally, whether it is Layer 1 or Layer 2, Solidity is considered an entry-level language for novice developers.

TVL brings capital;

The agreement and developers bring the possibility of liquidity for funds.

All of the above proves that Ethereum is not lacking in fundamentals, but rather in an opportunity.

When the world's largest computer finds itself in a dilemma of innovation, new breakthroughs need to be found.

In the initial collaboration between Virtuals and Ethereum, the possibility of success has already been demonstrated. In the long run, AI may also become a long-awaited boon for the Ethereum ecosystem.

Virtuals ACP, a timely blessing for Ethereum

AI may become a much-needed boon for the Ethereum ecosystem, but why is it Virtuals' AI?

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

In simple terms, ACP is like a "business contract" and a common language among AI agents, specifying 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: Regardless of which chain the agent operates on, as long as it follows the rules of ACP, seamless collaboration can be achieved.

Framework Agnosticism: ACP does not rely on any specific AI framework, and any agent can participate.

Four-stage process: Request, Negotiate, Trade, Evaluate, with each step recorded and executed via smart contracts.

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

The two qualitative changes brought by ACP to Virtuals

Some friends familiar with the Virtuals ecosystem know that ACP will unite all AI Agents, and the official team has shared some cases. But if you think it's just a shift from one Agent to multiple Agents working together, then you underestimate ACP.

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

Qualitative Change 1: The formation of a multi-chain ecosystem, "ACP is like Cosmos's IBC"

We all know that Virtuals originated from the Base ecosystem, then expanded to Solana, and now it has arrived at the Ethereum mainnet. ACP not only connects multiple Agents together but also connects "Agents that are scattered across multiple chains."

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

Agents can collaborate across chains directly on different chains.

Axelrod manages your Solana assets;

Hyper provides a metaverse space for the Agent of the Base ecosystem.

......

ACP provides the lowest-level interoperability capability for all Agents, just like Cosmos's IBC.

Qualitative Change Two: Multi-Framework Collaboration, ACP is the ERC Standard for Agent Developers

ACP is not dependent on a specific AI framework, whether it is GAME, ElizaOS, or other frameworks. Although it is currently unclear to what extent ACP will provide support, the official description indicates that interoperability between different framework agents will be achieved.

We all know that GAME is the framework promoted by Virtuals, but Web3 AI still has various other frameworks or developer-built frameworks.

The multi-framework collaboration of ACP will allow Agents from different frameworks to enjoy the benefits of the entire AI Agent era.

For developers, integrating ACP is an attractive and even necessary thing to do.

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

And AI Agent developers connecting to 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 recall when I had the privilege of interviewing Weekee, the co-founder of Virtuals, last year (link: Exclusive Interview with the Co-Founder of Virtuals Protocol). He mentioned that Virtuals is a Layer 1 and should be viewed and valued as such.

We are one step closer to this day, and perhaps we will even 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 it is actually very difficult to define Virtuals themselves.

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

Agents on different chains can launch through Virtuals;

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

Staking more than a certain percentage of $VIRTUAL allows participation in governance.

Friends from the last cycle should be quite familiar with Cosmos. The contribution of Cosmos to Web3 is essentially its technology itself, and many new projects use the technologies provided by Cosmos, such as Dymension, Celestia, dYdX, etc.

However, the most criticized aspect of Cosmos is that it supports many ecosystems, but its token $ATOM basically has no value capture. It seems that $VIRTUAL has optimized this well and is evolving from a "project token" to a "mother coin for the entire ecosystem."

The framework is regarded as the underlying infrastructure of the AI Agent.

And the position of Virtuals is perhaps more important than that of Framework.

Can an AI Agent have its own Layer 1?

Virtuals Protocol.

Beachhead landing, stablecoins boost, ACP will open the trillion-dollar economy door of Web3 AI.

How is the development of the Agent city-state of Virtuals now?

According to the ecological map compiled by @gkisokay, the Virtuals ecosystem now includes 11 major categories such as lifestyle, DeFAI, prediction markets, Infra, games, and more than 100 Agents.

Unlike Web2, the AI Agent of Web3 grows on the chain.

Recently, the most discussed "stablecoin" will elevate the on-chain economy of Web3 to new heights.

More assets issued on-chain, regardless of asset type or scale, will provide "acceleration" for on-chain AI.

In the official content of Virtuals ACP, there is an example: AIXVC collaborates with multiple agents to provide users with different types of earning opportunities.

At that time, there was still no on-chain economic prosperity brought by stablecoins.

What if AIXVC could directly trade on-chain and manage more Web2 assets?

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

ACP lead Jae-Sonn told us in an interview: ACP is a product that drives a trillion-dollar economy. Ethereum turned code into money; ACP will transform Agents into a trillion-dollar workforce. Imagine millions to billions of on-chain Agents providing services, trading, and collaborating without permission— we can view ACP as an underlying layer: it allows AI Agents to click "send" on payment rails at the scale of Stripe without leaving the blockchain. We are not speculating about the future; we are formally writing it into the EVM and the larger ecosystem today.

If you missed the moment when Uniswap wrote down 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 the new business logic of AI with ACP.

The trillion-dollar economy door of Web3 AI is here with ACP!