Original author: Daniel Li, CoinVoice
In June 2025, the crypto world ushered in an epic wealth migration: the new project IRIS debuted with an initial market value of $200,000 through the Genesis Launch platform of Virtuals Protocol. After listing on the exchange, the market value soared to $80 million, setting a new industry record of 400 times increase. This performance not only far exceeded BasisOSs previous record of 40 times increase, but also dwarfed the dog season of the Solana ecosystem. As the booster engine of this myth, Virtuals Protocol platform token VIRTUAL has achieved a 400% surge in half a year, with a peak market value of over $5 billion. Today, the platform has firmly established itself as the largest AI agent launch platform on the Base network. Behind this national carnival is actually an experiment in wealth distribution reconstructed based on the points rule - it is quietly reshaping the speculative logic and value order of the crypto market.
1. Rebirth from the ruins: From the wreckage of blockchain games to an AI agent issuance platform
Virtuals Protocol (Virtuals for short) is a decentralized platform deployed on the Ethereum Layer-2 network Base, dedicated to creating an on-chain AI agent economy that allows users to easily create, co-own and monetize autonomous AI characters. Its predecessor was PathDAO, a gaming guild founded in Malaysia in 2021. PathDAO focused on Play-to-Earn projects and NFT communities in its early days. With its precise layout of projects such as Axie Infinity and Illuvium, it successfully raised approximately US$16 million in financing, with a valuation of nearly US$600 million at one point, accumulating rich game assets and an active player community. However, the 2022 bear market hit GameFi hard, and the price of PathDAO tokens plummeted by nearly 99%, with its market value shrinking to less than US$6 million. The teams attempts at multiple business lines such as social apps, NFT clothing, and music platforms have all failed, and the project is on the verge of being stranded.
At the end of 2023, the generative AI craze swept the world, and the concept of AI agent became a new outlet for cryptocurrencies. The PathDAO community decided to completely transform into an AI-driven protocol through an on-chain DAO vote (with a support rate of up to 90%), and changed its name to Virtuals Protocol. The core strategy shifted to assetizing, tokenizing and empowering the community with AI agents. This transformation is based on deep insights: the team found that the Japanese VTuber market size exceeded 100 billion yen, but creators only received less than 20% of the revenue; at the same time, Roblox platform experiments proved that AI-driven NPCs can increase player retention rates by about 3 times. These two data directly gave rise to Virtuals positioning as a profitable AI personality.
In October 2024, Virtuals was launched on the Base mainnet and launched the first multimodal AI agent, the virtual idol Luna. Luna integrates technologies such as text generation, 3D motion, speech synthesis, and ERC-6551 smart contract wallets, and can independently raise operating funds and issue rewards to fans. After going online, Luna quickly attracted 500,000 fans on TikTok and Telegram, and her monthly income from fan rewards alone reached 1.2 million US dollars, successfully verifying the business model and technical feasibility of on-chain AI agents. Its demonstration effect has attracted a large number of developers to pay attention to the Virtuals project itself.
Riding on the success of projects such as Luna, Virtuals launched its core token VIRTUAL on multiple exchanges and Base at the end of 2024. Its price soared from a few cents at the beginning to an all-time high of $5.15, and its market value once exceeded $5 billion, far exceeding most Layer-2 and DeFi projects in the same period, marking Virtuals entry into the mainstream crypto market. The platforms original low threshold, high incentive mechanism is very attractive: users only need to pledge about 10 VIRTUAL (about $200) to create a new AI agent and automatically generate a liquidity pool locked for 10 years; when the token market value reaches about $500,000, the system will release the liquidity layer on DEX to ensure trading depth and price stability. This model has greatly lowered the threshold for participation and stimulated enthusiasm for ecological construction.
As of June 2025, the Virtuals ecosystem has demonstrated significant scale and economic effects: the cumulative number of AI agents incubated exceeds 11,000, covering multiple scenarios such as virtual idols, trading consultants, game engines, and content incubation. Virtuals has almost bred more than 80% of the AI agents on the BASE chain, and its generative multimodal agent framework GAME has also become a popular choice for agents in the Web3 game and metaverse fields. However, Virtuals vision goes far beyond becoming a leader in AI agent issuance. Its white paper clearly states that the ultimate goal is to build a true AI sovereign society. Therefore, how to attract more ecosystem members to join has become the key to Virtuals achieving this grand goal, and will be its development focus for a long time in the future.
2. Virtuals IPO Model: Creating a New Paradigm for AI Asset Issuance
In order to attract more user attention, Virtuals pioneered the Genesis Launch mechanism to issue AI agent tokens. Unlike traditional linear airdrops or fixed issuances, Genesis Launch is based on the concept of contribution points (Virgen Points), emphasizing participation and contribution rather than pure speculation. GenesisLaunch quickly became popular on the Internet once it was launched. At present, Virtuals new issuance has become a new holy land for money-grabbing parties to participate in new issuances. Even senior speculators are discussing how it can replace the once popular Alpha airdrop model. Compared with the traditional one-time issuance of airdrops, which users often sell as soon as they get them, GenesisLaunch emphasizes contribution is distribution, giving everyone the opportunity to participate in the subscription of new coins with real investment. Almost every day in the official community of Virtuals Protocol, members can be seen showing screenshots of their earnings from using VirgenPoints to participate in new issuances and win popular tokens. This open and transparent rules and thresholds have completely subverted the situation of tycoons grabbing and retail investors missing out.
Take IRIS as an example. The project started pre-sale in mid-May. In less than 24 hours, it locked more than 120 million points, with an oversubscription of 1,500%. Tens of thousands of users shared 37.5% of the community share. On the day of listing, IRISs market value soared from US$200,000 to US$80 million, an increase of more than 400 times, breaking the industry record of AIAgents issuance and instantly dimming the previous wave of dog season in the Solana ecosystem.
The reason why GenesisLaunch has become so popular so quickly is that it has built a closed loop of incentive-contribution-reward. First, users can obtain basic VirgenPoints by staking VIRTUAL or holding the hot AIAgent tokens in the ecosystem, such as Luna and AIXBT; secondly, users can also accumulate more points by participating in social promotion (Yapping), trading on the platform, or staking other project tokens. In this way, whether you are a technical novice or a veteran trader, you can find a contribution method that suits you in capital investment or content promotion, which greatly stimulates community activity and innovation.
In sharp contrast, traditional airdrops often rely only on holding snapshots or completing complicated tasks. Users usually sell their coins on the same day after receiving them. According to data from Binance Alpha, more than 90% of airdropped tokens plummeted in price within 15 days after issuance, and the three-month retention rate was less than 12%. GenesisLaunch uses a point lock + punitive cooling mechanism: if the new tokens are sold within 24 hours after unlocking, the 10-day points will be cleared, which greatly curbs the arbitrage behavior of wool-pulling and makes participants more inclined to hold for the long term and continue to contribute.
At the same time, the platform provides sufficient liquidity support for the listing of new tokens. Each AgentToken is paired with a certain amount of VIRTUAL or stablecoins to be injected into the liquidity pool before the opening, ensuring that there is no embarrassment of no price to buy or no order to sell on the exchange or DEX. In order to prevent whales or robots from grabbing a large share through a multi-wallet bayonet layout, GenesisLaunch sets an upper limit of no more than 0.5% of the total issuance for each address, and uses an on-chain randomization algorithm to further balance the distribution, ensuring that small and medium-sized users can also gain a considerable share.
The success of Virtuals’ new token issuance model lies not only in the popularity of new token issuance, but also in the “old brings new” effect of Virtuals’ ecological tokens. Since the large-scale launch of GenesisLaunch, the trading volume and price of VIRTUAL have been rising steadily: in mid-June 2025, the average daily transaction volume of VIRTUAL on the Base chain has exceeded US$150 million, an increase of more than 80% from May; at the same time, holding and staking VIRTUAL to obtain veVIRTUAL governance tokens can continue to earn additional VirgenPoints, allowing a large number of users to lock up their positions to participate in ecological governance for a long time, further consolidating price support and liquidity.
Not only retail investors flocked to participate, but institutions also showed great interest in this new mechanism of contribution for income. In June 2025, the worlds first perpetual contract with VIRTUAL as the underlying was launched on CoinUnited.io, supporting up to 2000 times leveraged trading. On the first day of launch, the contract transaction volume exceeded US$700 million in one fell swoop, strongly sending a signal: Virtuals is becoming a new speculative and hedging target in the eyes of institutional investors.
3. Ecological Evolution: The thrilling transition from a coin issuance platform to an AI sovereign society
In the future planning of Virtuals Protocol, every technological upgrade and mechanism innovation is to make the outline of the AI sovereign society clearer. In the initial stage, Virtuals was just an AI agent issuance platform, which quickly gathered a group of enthusiastic developers and users through token economic mechanisms such as locking liquidity, repurchase and destruction. With the implementation of hundreds of AI agent projects, intelligent agents began to operate independently and autonomously in scenarios such as games, content creation, and market analysis. Users are no longer just onlookers, but co-builders and beneficiaries. Genesis Launch connects project growth and community participation with the logic of contribution is distribution, promoting the free flow of funds and creativity in the ecosystem.
But the real turning point was the Agent Nation blueprint proposed by the Virtuals team. This is not just a slogan, but the core path of ecological evolution. Through open SDK and cross-chain support, the platform allows each AI agent to migrate freely between networks such as Base, Ethereum and even Solana; through the Agent Commerce Protocol (ACP), agents can sign, deliver, clear and repurchase on the chain to achieve a truly autonomous business closed loop; community participation obtains governance rights by staking veVIRTUAL, and shares handling fees and repurchase dividends, combining the identities of participants and owners of the token economy. All of this is building a prototype of a digital country operated by countless autonomous agents and co-governing humans.
So far, this ecosystem has achieved many milestones: IRIS, a security auditing agent in the Ethereum mainnet Genesis Launch, was listed with an oversubscription rate of 1,500%, and its market value soared from US$200,000 to US$80 million; virtual idol Luna achieved a monthly income of US$1.2 million due to fan rewards, and the market value of its ERC‑20 token exceeded US$120 million; the hedge fund-formatted VADER operated steadily in a cross-chain environment, with a market value of more than US$100 million... These data not only reflect the feasibility of the intelligent agent business model, but also prove that the AI agent economy is moving from theory to reality.
As multimodal AI technology and cross-chain interoperability continue to mature, Virtuals Protocol is undoubtedly at the forefront of building digital civilization. In the days to come, AI agents will not only be props and tools, but will also become digital citizens with autonomous decision-making power and economic rights, participating in production, governance, and even cultural creation with humans. Virtuals will no longer be a simple platform, but is nurturing a new society from the bottom up where countless AIs and humans coexist and govern together - this is the real ecological evolution, and a thrilling leap to AI sovereign society has just begun.
