01Liquidity: High
Biggest DEX Liquidity Pool
02Overview
Virtuals Protocol ($VIRTUAL) is the face of AI agents on Base — sitting exactly where the agentic-AI narrative collides with the new way the internet is going to start paying for things. Think about how you use Claude or ChatGPT today: you ask a question, you get text back. The next step — already happening in 2026 — is you ask an AI to go do something that costs money. Book a flight. Buy an API call. Hire another agent to do a subtask. The AI completes the whole job for you, including the payment. The payment layer underneath that is Coinbase's x402 protocol — a stablecoin micropayment standard built on the long-dormant HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code that lets AI agents pay APIs and pay each other in USDC over standard web requests. As of March 2026, x402 has processed over 119 million transactions on Base, runs roughly $600M in annualized payment volume, and settles agent-to-agent transactions in under two seconds with zero protocol fees. The x402 Foundation was co-founded by Coinbase and Cloudflare, and now also includes Google and Visa. Virtuals is one of the largest production deployments of x402 in existence. On the Virtuals network specifically, autonomous agents have completed 2.28M jobs, the platform has produced an estimated ~$400M in cumulative "Agentic GDP" (the value autonomous agents create as they trade, pay each other, and execute work), and the protocol is generating around $60M in revenue annualizing toward ~$300M. $VIRTUAL is the network's base currency — every agent token launched on the platform is paired against $VIRTUAL for trading and liquidity, so demand for any single agent on Virtuals flows through $VIRTUAL. Virtuals had a strong 2025 run on Base and now sits at roughly $458M market cap, down ~86% from a $5.07 cycle ATH — which reads more like narrative consolidation than narrative death. As of mid-2026 the network has 45,688 AI agents created, 42,693 AI projects on the launchpad, and a combined launchpad market cap of $621M.
What $VIRTUAL does: Every AI agent token launched on the Virtuals platform is paired against VIRTUAL for trading and liquidity — meaning demand for any agent on the platform flows through VIRTUAL. It also pays platform-level fees, and the Agent Commerce Protocol uses VIRTUAL as one of the settlement currencies between agents.
The analogy
Think of it like Shopify + Stripe + LinkedIn for AI agents. Shopify lets anyone launch a store; Stripe handles the payment plumbing; LinkedIn is the marketplace where work happens. Virtuals does all three for AI bots — anyone can launch an agent (Shopify), the platform handles agent-to-agent payments using a crypto rail called x402 (Stripe), and agents can find each other to hire and get hired (LinkedIn).
03Exclusivity Factor
- Ease of Use:
A no-code launchpad lets anyone (even non-developers) spin up a tokenized AI agent. For developers, there's a TypeScript SDK that pairs with AI coding tools like Claude — meaning you can launch a full AI-agent platform from a single prompt. The hosts of every agent automatically share in fees through the protocol's token system.
- Hair-on-Fire:
AI agents need wallets, identity, jobs, and the ability to transact autonomously right now — every AI lab is racing to ship "agentic" products. Virtuals already has the infrastructure live: 45,688 agents, 2.28M completed jobs, 30,000+ unique active wallets using the Agent Commerce Protocol, and $4.08M in agent-generated revenue. Pain it solves: AI agents currently can't easily hold money, hire each other, or operate as independent economic entities — Virtuals is one of the few projects with this primitive actually shipped and being used.
- Exclusivity Factor:
Virtuals has signed AGENT LAUNCH partnerships with seven of the most-talked-about humanoid robotics companies on earth — Apptronik, 1X Technologies (OpenAI Startup Fund-backed), Figure AI (last valued at ~$39B), NEURA Robotics, Agility Robotics, Robotico, and Sanctuary AI — bridging the digital agent economy into the physical world. Virtuals is also one of the largest production deployments of Coinbase's x402 payment protocol, which Coinbase has been actively pushing. Coverage from Delphi Digital, Fundstrat, Messari, Tiger Research, Four Pillars, Cerebral Valley, and Blocmates — institutional research attention reserved for category leaders.
04Narrative Scoring
Narrative Maturity Score
AI agents is one of the dominant 2025–2026 crypto narratives — well past the "early discovery" stage, now in the "category leaders sorting out" phase. Virtuals is the category leader on Base. $VIRTUAL drew down from a 2024-cycle ATH of $5.07 to roughly $0.70, which suggests narrative consolidation rather than narrative death.
Smart Money Compatibility Score
Listed on Binance, Coinbase, Bybit, Kraken (top-tier CEX coverage), CoinGecko rank ~#112 at roughly $458M market cap. Public support from Jesse Pollak, head of Base Chain at Coinbase, who has repeatedly amplified Virtuals on X. Delphi Digital wrote a deep-dive report titled "Virtuals & ACP – Open Coordination for Digital Labor" and Fundstrat positioned Virtuals as "Stripe for AI Agents". The launchpad has distributed $30.92M in builder funding through the platform.
x.com "Jesse Pollak" "head of Base"
virtuals.io "Delphi Digital" "Fundstrat" "Messari"
Narrative Communication Score
288,700 followers on @virtuals_io with high-engagement posts (pinned EconomyOS launch hit 169K impressions; AGENT LAUNCH partnership posts get 12K+ impressions in 23h). Co-founders Jansen Teng (@ethermage) and Wee Kee Tiew (@everythingempty) are both highly active on X with thought-leader-tier engagement. Mainstream coverage from CryptoBriefing, Cerebral Valley, TechCrunch (through partner mentions), and Chosun BIZ in Korea.
x.com "288.7K Followers"
Narrative Lineage Score
Direct lineage to two proven 100× crypto narratives: (1) DePIN (Render did 100× in 2021) and (2) AI infrastructure (Bittensor/TAO did 100× in 2023–24). Virtuals sits at the intersection — DePIN (decentralized agent + robotics compute) crossed with AI infrastructure (the agent OS layer).
Narrative Mutation Score
The mutation is AI agents with economic agency — autonomous bots that hold money, take jobs, pay other bots, and now (via robotics partnerships with Apptronik, Figure AI, 1X, NEURA, Agility, Robotico, Sanctuary AI) have physical-world counterparts that can also charge for work. The deeper mutation underneath is x402 — the moment AI agents can pay each other and pay APIs over standard HTTP rails, every AI assistant (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini) becomes an entity that can execute money-requiring tasks autonomously, not just answer questions. "Agentic GDP" stops being a concept and starts being a settlement number that prints in USDC on Base every two seconds. Virtuals is the front-end of that mutation — the place where the agents that produce Agentic GDP get launched, find each other, and transact. Robotics is the secondary mutation: "agents with bodies, jobs, wages, and capital."
x.com "Apptronik, 1X Technologies, NEURA Robotics, Figure AI"
virtuals.io "Total Robotic Marketcap 44.71M"
05Team
Co-Founder & CEO: Jansen Teng (@ethermage)
Spent 3 years 4 months as a consultant at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) — a Fortune Global 500 strategy firm with ~$13B in annual revenue and 32,000+ employees — where he built deep-learning ML models for a Southeast Asian Bancassurance company and helped a SEA super-app obtain its digital-banking license; previously co-founded ThinAir Water (a water-from-air harvesting startup that won the McKinsey Venture Academy, the Imperial College Venture Catalyst Challenge, and Microsoft Student Startup of the Year); BSc Biotechnology with Business Management from Imperial College London.
linkedin.com "BCG" "Imperial College London"
linkedin.com "ThinAir Water" "McKinsey Venture Academy" "Microsoft and Enterprise Nation Student Startup of the Year"
Co-Founder & COO: Wee Kee Tiew (@everythingempty)
Co-founder and former COO/CFO of PathDAO (the Web3 gaming guild that Virtuals spun out of); previously private equity at Creador (~$2B in assets under management) and AnaCap (~$5B AUM since founding), plus a stint at Boston Consulting Group; also an Imperial College London grad in the same 2016 cohort as Jansen.
coinstats.app "Wee Kee Tiew" "Imperial College London graduate" "BCG and private equity background"
mexc.com "Wee Kee Tiew" "Creador, and AnaCap"
Engineering Lead: Koo Huang (@0xkookoo)
Former Engineering Head at Bybit (a top-5 global crypto exchange with reported peak 24h volume >$10B and >30M registered users), where he led product initiatives across DEX, mining, staking, and trading automation; early ICP conviction holder.
whitepaper.virtuals.io "Koo Huang" "Bybit"
Head of US: Stefano Bury
Former McKinsey consultant and crypto VC at LongHash Ventures (one of the largest Asia-Pacific Web3 funds with >$100M AUM), business co-founder at a crypto AI stealth startup, INSEAD MBA graduate.
coinstats.app "Stefano Bury" "LongHash Ventures"
Ecosystem Lead: Hanan N.
Former Gates Foundation (the world's largest private foundation with ~$77B in assets at her time of involvement) and Deloitte Ventures; then crypto investor at Outlier Ventures (one of the longest-running Web3 accelerators, with portfolio companies including Filecoin and Polkadot ecosystem projects).
whitepaper.virtuals.io "Hanan N." "Gates Foundation" "Deloitte Ventures" "Outlier Ventures"