gm Bankless Nation, Welcome back to Metaversal's AI Roundup! This week, Virtuals Protocol made waves with strategic updates, including a big token buy-and-burn plan.
Today's Issue ⬇️
📈 Market Pulse: AI Tokens Rally Fartcoin, AIXBT steal the show.
📺 AI Rollup: DeFAI Mindshare On DeFi's incoming agents paradigm.
🦾 News Roundup:Virtuals Powers Ahead Base's top agent launcher locks in.
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Sponsor: Frax — Fraxtal Ecosystem: Where DeFi Meets AI.
📸 Weekly Market Snapshot: With BTC, ETH, and SOL decidedly green on the week, investors' risk-on appetites returned anew to crypto's AI agents frontier. The biggest winners here were top tokens like Fartcoin and AIXBT, which rose 67% and 35% respectively on their 7D candles as the market cap of the onchain agents sector is now just below $18B.
Token prices as of 1pm ET
24hr
7d
VIRTUALS $3.32
↘ 6.1%
↗ 6.3%
AI16Z $1.14
↘ 16.9%
↘ 23.1%
AIXBT $0.75
↘ 8.9%
↗ 34.6%
. . .
AI ROLLUP
DeFAI Mindshare
Over the past two weeks, the mindshare around AI x DeFi integrations has gone parabolic in crypto's social circles.
In AI Rollup #7, David and Ejaaz dig into the nascent DeFAI scene, where AI agents are increasingly being positioned as the next big power users of onchain money legos.
Plus, the boys dive into other recent intrigues like Arc's multichain strategy, the Eliza framework's ambitious upgrades, Virtuals Protocol's big new buyback plans, and more.
Don’t miss the convo—catch up with the full episode here! 👇
Virtuals Protocol, the leading AI agents launcher on Base, had an eventful week, unveiling major updates and more aimed at aligning its ecosystem for greater growth. Some recent happenings of note:
On January 15, the platform's team introduced a revamped value accrual mechanism, which allocates post-bonding taxes more strategically: 30% to agent creators, 20% to Agent Affiliates (such as trading platforms), and 50% to the Agent subDAO for governance.
The big idea? This new structuring is designed to incentivize a broader range of participants and to strengthen the ecosystem's long-term sustainability.
Additionally, Virtuals reported accumulating over 12.9 million $VIRTUAL—or roughly $40 million—from trading revenue since October 2024. The project announced these funds will be used for buyback-and-burns of some of its top ecosystem tokens, like $AIXBT, $GAME, and $VADER.
In other news, Virtuals also just patched a liquidity issue impacting five agent tokens due to a contract upgrade. Now, staked agent tokens will remain locked for a decade to prevent liquidity from being prematurely withdrawn.
Another theme to watch here is the continued advances into gaming. This week, multiplayer platform Nifty Island teased the first AI agent powered by the Virtuals G.A.M.E. framework in its game world. This is surely just a taste of what's to come on this front.
The Fraxtal ecosystem is expanding at lightning speed—this month’s biggest highlight is IQAI.com, the newest Agent Tokenization platform from IQ and Frax. IQ is building autonomous, intelligent, tokenized agents launching on Fraxtal in Q1. Empower onchain agents with built-in wallets, tokenized ownership, and decentralized governance—all within a fast-growing Fraxtal ecosystem.
Heard of thirdweb? It's an open-source dev platform for building and managing onchain apps on Ethereum Virtual Machine networks. The platform's latest resource, Nebula, is an AI agent deployer, and as of this week it's integrated with ai16z's Eliza agents framework. If you're interested in cooking up your own agents, this is a great new place to start—consider joining Nebula's alpha waitlist to get ready and exploring the docs accordingly!
Not financial or tax advice. Bankless content is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.
Disclosure. From time-to-time we may add links in this newsletter to products we use. We may receive a commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless team holds crypto assets.
