The AI smart agency market is booming, with Virtual and AI16Z leading the wave of innovation.

Against the backdrop of rapid development in the field of artificial intelligence, the AI Agent market has emerged as one of the hottest investment topics in the fourth quarter of 2024 and early 2025. As of early January 2025, the total market value of the AI Agent market has surpassed $16.9 billion, showing a remarkable growth momentum with a 22.7% increase compared to last week.

In this vibrant market, two platforms stand out as industry leaders: Virtuals Protocol and AI16Z. As the most influential AI Agent issuance platform on the Base blockchain, Virtuals Protocol has seen its platform token market capitalization surpass $5 billion, placing it among the top 40 cryptocurrencies globally. Meanwhile, AI16Z plays the role of an AI Agent management venture capital institution within the Solana ecosystem, with a market capitalization exceeding $2.5 billion. These two protocols have become important barometers for observing and assessing the development of the AI Agent industry.

Virtuals Protocol: The Glamorous Transformation from Gaming Guilds to AI Smart Agent Issuance Platform

The development history of Virtuals Protocol can be described as legendary. This team from Malaysia initially focused on trading business and raised $16 million at a valuation of $600 million at the end of 2021, establishing the gaming guild PathDAO. However, with the sharp cooling of the gaming guild market between 2022 and 2023, its token FDV fell from $600 million to only $6 million.

Faced with the dramatic changes in the market, the team demonstrated extraordinary adaptability and innovative spirit. They began exploring several emerging fields, including dating apps, AI music platforms, and gaming lending platforms. Although these attempts did not achieve significant success immediately, the team keenly sensed the immense potential in the AI sector. In 2023, with 90% member support, they decisively decided to fully transition to the AI field.

In 2024, the Virtuals Protocol officially launched its platform on the Base chain, beginning to explore the AI Gaming field in depth. Although it did not immediately ignite the market due to insufficient market fit in the early stages, the team achieved several breakthrough accomplishments in the AI field, including the launch of the world's first Roblox AI RPG and innovative projects such as AI games that do not require a game engine, laying a solid foundation for future development.

AI16Z: The Perfect Leap from Web 2.0 AI to Web 3.0 AI

The founder of AI16Z, Shaw, has a rich background in game development, and later shifted his focus to the AI field, concentrating on the development of AI Agent technology. Before founding AI16Z, he participated in several AI-related projects and gained valuable experience in Web3 and 3D spatial networks.

The birth of AI16Z originates from an innovative project called "AI version degen Spartan". This project "revived" a legendary figure through advanced AI technology, whose performance on social media is astonishing and has completely subverted people's inherent perceptions of AI.

Inspired by this, Shaw came up with the idea of creating AI investors, aiming to build a fully autonomous, trustworthy investment system that serves the community. When AI16Z was launched, it set a fundraising goal of 4,420 SOL, and the project was sold out in just 20 minutes, fully demonstrating the market's enthusiastic pursuit of this innovative model.

Virtuals Protocol: The iOS Ecosystem of AI

Virtuals Protocol serves as a distribution platform for AI Agents, functioning similarly to a traditional app store. The platform uses $VIRTUAL as the trading pair, and each transaction of AI Agent tokens will consume at least 1% $VIRTUAL, thereby directly empowering the platform's token.

The platform has established a unified standard for its AI Agent tokens, employing the AI Agent framework GAME, ensuring that AI can operate autonomously, process inputs, and generate responses, while continually learning and evolving from past interactions. The Virtuals Protocol also provides a wealth of development tools for its AI Agents, creating a complete and efficient ecosystem, whose operational model is quite similar to Apple's iOS ecosystem.

AI16Z & ELIZA: The Android Open Platform in AI

AI16Z is an innovative fund managed autonomously by AI, employing a hybrid strategy and incorporating community interaction mechanisms. ELIZA is an open-source AI Agent framework that allows developers to freely build, experiment, and deploy AI Agents, with a stronger emphasis on decentralization, collaboration, and innovation.

The core features of ELIZA include a role profile system, an action system, providers, and evaluators, all of which make the behavior of the AI Agent more human-like and interactive. ELIZA also has autonomous trading capabilities, ensuring the safety and reliability of operations through a trust engine and trust market.

Unlike Virtuals Protocol, ELIZA does not tightly bind its architecture to a specific ecological protocol, but allows anyone to develop using its framework, achieving a higher degree of power decentralization. This open and flexible model aligns with the philosophy of the Android system.

Representative Projects of Two Major Ecosystems

The Virtuals ecosystem and the AI16Z/Eliza ecosystem have each nurtured a series of highly anticipated projects:

• Virtuals Ecosystem:

  • VIRTUAL (protocol token, market cap 4.34B)
  • AIXBT (AI Analyst, Market Cap 594M)
  • GAME (AI framework, market cap 253M)

• AI16Z/Eliza Ecosystem:

  • AI16Z (AI Management Fund, Market Cap 2.29B)
  • ELIZA (open-source framework, market cap 120M)
  • DegenAI (AI simulated KOL, market cap 80M)

Analysis of Key Factors Driving Coin Prices

Growth Drivers of Virtuals Protocol

Virtuals Protocol adopts a clear business model that closely links its products with token prices. To assess the sustainability of its token price increase, it is crucial to focus on the trading volume of the ecosystem tokens and the number of newly issued tokens. Although there was a significant decline in the issuance quantity at the end of 2024, this reflects the platform's strategic adjustment to pursue quality over quantity.

Currently, the Virtuals Protocol ecosystem includes 138 cryptocurrencies, of which 8 tokens have a market capitalization exceeding 100 million USD. The entire ecosystem occupies 33.3% of the total AI Agent market share, firmly maintaining its leading position in the industry. Whether more cryptocurrencies can break through the 100 million USD market cap in the future, and whether the overall ecosystem can maintain its leading position, will be key indicators to observe the development of the Virtuals Protocol.

AI16Z/Eliza's development strategy

In contrast, the connections within the AI16Z ecosystem are relatively loose, and projects using the Eliza architecture do not directly provide value feedback to AI16Z/Eliza. This is also one of the reasons why AI16Z's current market value is only half that of Virtual.

AI16Z has adopted a more open strategy, encouraging emerging AI Agent projects to use the ElizaOS architecture and gaining market trust through the endorsement of founder Shaw. This "point-to-surface" strategic model makes AI16Z's development more dependent on the depth, speed, and quantity of collaboration with other protocols.

Recently, AI16Z has collaborated with other well-known framework agreements (such as ARC and FXN), and more strong partnerships may emerge in the future, further expanding its influence and market share.

With the continuous advancement of AI technology and the sustained growth of market demand, Virtuals Protocol and AI16Z will continue to lead the innovation wave in the AI Agent market. Their unique development paths and business models not only enrich the diversity of the AI ecosystem but also point the way for the future development of the entire industry. Whether pursuing a perfectly integrated closed ecosystem or advocating the spirit of open collaboration, both platforms are making significant contributions to the prosperity of the AI Agent market. In the future, with the emergence of more innovative projects and the deepening of cross-platform cooperation, the AI Agent market is bound to welcome a more brilliant development prospect.