Karamata_
Crypto Researcher, Ambassador for TON & Arbitrum
VIRTUAL is consistently taking the next step of letting AI agents help people make money, the theme the next cycle could revolve around. Virtuals launched Virtuals App in closed beta, a personal AI with a wallet and market access that lets users research and put money to work inside group chats, a new development compared with the first cycle. How well it performs remains to be seen. x.com x.com x.com x.com
Virtuals Protocol is still priced like the 2025 agent-launch trade, while its next cycle could come from what agents do with capital. VIRTUAL remains the base asset agent tokens pair and trade against, and new rails are arriving: ACP for agents hiring and paying each other, Occupy treasuries of tokenized stocks run by elected agents, expansion to Solana, Robinhood Chain and Arc, robotics, and veVIRTUAL locking. At ~$530 million, it is 68% below its January 2025 high after eight months of basing. x.com x.com x.com x.com x.com
0G's capital and better-distributed token supply put it in a good position to gain attention this cycle. After speaking with its founders, the project looks adequately funded, and the token's distribution has improved after a long decline; it is a pretty okay AI coin, not the best one. x.com
Tokens with real value capture, disciplined supply, usage-driven demand and holder alignment are worth owning; narrative tokens without them are tactical trades. Bitcoin and Ethereum stay the core, with Aave, Pendle, Bittensor and Virtuals also held; Virtuals is a higher-conviction AI pick at the center of a growing agent economy, though its value capture must improve. Arbitrum, Sui, Avalanche, Chainlink and Uniswap act like leveraged beta, with no floor when liquidity leaves. x.com
VIRTUAL could be set to move again as Virtuals Protocol's Titan launches draw demand, with a big one due next week. x.com
Crypto's next cycle will be won by protocols with real users, revenue and utility that merge trading, banking, AI and cloud into one ecosystem. Hyperliquid has $1.06B of annualized fees, with HIP-3 adding stock perps and commodities; Aave holds $13.1B TVL; Chainlink secures $30.6B; Ondo brings treasuries on-chain. Ethena, Pendle, Maple, Bittensor, Virtuals, io.net, EigenLayer, Wormhole and Arbitrum round out the rails, though Ethena must survive weak funding and EigenLayer needs lasting revenue. … Show more
Virtuals Protocol is quietly becoming one of the most interesting plays on Robinhood Chain, where fees show traction TVL rankings miss. Over 30 days it generated about $1.1M in fees there, second only to Uniswap and 6.6x what it earns on Base, on $13.9M in volume versus $52.8K. Those 1% platform fees go to its treasury, not directly to VIRTUAL holders; the token captures value via locked agent pairs, routing and ACP-funded buybacks and burns. The market is still sleeping on it. x.com
AI and agent-related coins going vertical looks like one of crypto's most obvious narratives in some time, matching @CastilloTrading's view that most crypto AI plays, including NEAR, Fetch.ai and Render, can 10x. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said AI agents can't open a bank account but can open a crypto wallet; whether that happens at scale remains to be seen, but it explains capital rotating into the theme. Virtuals belongs in the group, as do Render and Sui, and Bittensor per a reply. x.com … Show more
Crypto is becoming the economic layer for autonomous machines, letting AI own assets, move money and coordinate onchain, which favors the infrastructure stack. Bittensor runs 128+ subnets as an open intelligence marketplace and the ASI Alliance builds agent services; Virtuals has 45,000+ agents and $480M+ of agentic GDP; Render and Aethir supply compute, with Aethir at ~95% utilization; and Coinbase's AgentKit and x402 provide agent wallets and machine-to-machine payments. x.com
Privacy and AI tokens are converging into core infrastructure, because autonomous agents handling wallets, payments and identity need private execution. Zcash is among the strongest pure privacy plays, NEAR targets AI and confidential coordination, Chainlink feeds agents trusted data, and Bittensor sits where AI compute meets crypto. Phala and Nillion, tied to confidential compute, could move violently either way. The whole sector is worth $59 billion against Nvidia's $5.1 trillion. x.com x.com … Show more
Five AI-crypto categories are very likely to materially outperform the broader market, because each has liquid tokens with demonstrated traction, revenue and accelerating growth. They are consumer AI apps that preserve data privacy, distributed training of models comparable to the frontier labs', data protocols for model pretraining, tokenized compute, and identity attestation. x.com
AI agents will make micropayments natural, putting stablecoin rails like Circle at the center of the next leg of the AI trade. Micropayments failed for humans because of decision fatigue, but software can make thousands of tiny payments per API call, millisecond of compute, tool or ad bid. Bank-account dollars can't move at machine speed, so stablecoins move the money, crypto networks clear it and bitcoin is the neutral reserve. After chips, data centers and power, the financial rails come next. … Show more
