Ethereum Is Back in the Game: Virtuals ACP Unlocks the Trillion-Dollar AI Economy

Intermediate7/9/2025, 8:09:44 AM
Ethereum collaborates with Virtuals to launch the ACP protocol, establishing a unified cooperation standard for on-chain AI Agents, reshaping the paradigms of identity, transactions, and governance, and ushering in a trillion-level AI economic new era.

While we were still discussing whether Agents can manage communities and help with work, Virtuals had already raised their eyes to a larger proposition - how Agents can collaborate with each other, settle accounts, and truly support a labor market for on-chain Agents.

On June 10, the Ethereum official announced “Ethereum is for AI” and forwarded Virtuals’ “Now On Ethereum”.Postto warm up the cooperation between both parties. This post quickly attracted strong feedback and interest from the community, and as of the time of writing, it has already exceeded 1.1 million views.

This is not just a simple collaboration; it will herald the return of Ethereum to the center stage.

Today, Ethereum needs a firm grip to catch up; meanwhile, Virtuals will also accelerate development through ACP to consolidate its advantages.

A universal standard that makes every Agent no longer a “worker”;

A universal standard that allows every Agent to become a node in business collaboration.

A universal standard that will open up a trillion-dollar on-chain Agents labor market.

ACP X EVM, what surprises will Virtuals bring us this time?

The Ethereum ecosystem is frozen, and the world computer is trapped in a dilemma of innovators.

Since the AI craze began at the end of last year, Ethereum seems to have been absent from the entire feast, and there have been quite a few voices of doubt in the market.

Ethereum’s position as a pioneer of L1 is indisputable, but it has shown no performance in the AI wave. In the previous wave of active AI Agents, the absence of the Ethereum ecosystem led market attention to shift to Solana and Base. Even when AI-related projects like Fartcoin and Virtuals rebounded in the past few months, Ethereum was still sidelined, until the recent collaboration with I.R.I.S sparked some market expectations.

What will the next reason about the Ethereum ecosystem be?

An indisputable fact is that Ethereum still has a lot of potential for explosive growth.

  • TVL first, nearly 8 times more than the second place: a large amount of assets remain stored in Ethereum. According to DefiLlama, the current TVL of Ethereum exceeds 62 billion, which is about 8 times that of the second place Solana.
  • The DeFi ecosystem is the richest, with over 1300 DeFi protocols: In addition to the advantages of TVL, the DeFi protocols and gameplay on Ethereum are also the most numerous. According to DefiLlama, there are more than 1300 DeFi protocols in the Ethereum ecosystem, making it the leader among all ecosystems.

  • The largest number of developers in the Ethereum ecosystem: Ethereum has a natural advantage in that its programming language is Solidity, which is currently the most widely used development language among Web3 developers. Moreover, whether it is Layer1 or Layer2, Solidity is also considered an entry-level language for novice developers.

TVL brings in capital;

Protocols and developers bring the possibility of liquidity to funds.

All of the above proves that Ethereum is not lacking in fundamentals; what it lacks is an opportunity.

When the world’s largest computer falls into the dilemma of innovators, it is necessary to find new breakthrough points.

In the initial collaboration between Virtuals and Ethereum, the possibility of success has been proven. In the long run, AI may also become a much-needed blessing for the Ethereum ecosystem.

Virtuals ACP, a timely blessing for Ethereum

AI could become a much-needed boon for the Ethereum ecosystem, but why is it Virtuals’ AI?

The key to the answer lies in ACP: Agent Commerce Protocol.

In simple terms, ACP is like a “business contract” and common language between AI agents, specifying how to initiate cooperation, how to negotiate terms, how to complete transactions, and how to evaluate results.

He has the following characteristics:

  • Cross-chain collaboration: No matter which chain the agent runs on, as long as it follows the rules of ACP, seamless collaboration can be achieved.
  • Framework Independence: ACP does not rely on a specific AI framework, and any agent can participate.
  • Four-stage process: Request, Negotiation, Transaction, Evaluation, each step recorded and executed through smart contracts.

Why ACP is the next focus of development for Virtuals, as these features will bring a qualitative upgrade to Virtuals and its thriving AI empire.

The two qualitative changes brought by ACP to Virtuals.

Some friends familiar with the Virtuals ecosystem know that ACP will bring together all AI Agents, and the official team has also shared some case studies. However, if you think it’s just a transition from a single Agent to a collaborative relationship among multiple Agents, then you underestimate ACP.

In our view, ACP will bring two qualitative changes to Virtuals:

Qualitative change 1: The formation of a multi-chain ecosystem, “ACP is like Cosmos’s IBC.”

We all know that Virtuals originated from the Base ecosystem, then expanded to Solana, and now it has arrived on the Ethereum mainnet. ACP is not just about linking multiple Agents together, but rather linking “Agents scattered across multiple chains.”

In other words, whether you are on Base, Solana, Ethereum, or more chains in the future,

Agents can directly collaborate across chains on different chains.

Axelrod manages your Solana assets;

Hyper provides a metaverse space for the Agent of the Base ecosystem;

……

ACP provides the most fundamental interoperability capabilities for all Agents, just like Cosmos’s IBC.

Transformation Two: Multi-Framework Collaboration, ACP is the ERC Standard for Agent Developers.

ACP does not rely on a specific AI framework, whether it’s GAME, ElizaOS, or other frameworks. Although it is currently uncertain to what extent ACP will be supported, the official description states that it will achieve interoperability between agents from different frameworks.

We all know that GAME is the framework promoted by Virtuals, but Web3 AI still has various other frameworks, or developers can build their own frameworks.

The multi-framework collaboration of ACP will allow agents from different frameworks to enjoy the benefits of the entire AI Agent era.

For developers, integrating ACP is an attractive and even necessary task.

Web3 developers generally master or issue tokens through the ERC standards.

The integration of ACP by AI Agent developers will also become a common capability in the future.

ACP is a protocol, GAME is a framework, so what is Virtuals?

Can Virtuals be considered Layer 1?

Thinking back to when I had the privilege of interviewing Weekee, the co-founder of Virtuals, last year (Link: Exclusive interview with Virtuals Protocol co-founder), he mentioned: Virtuals is Layer 1, and we should view Virtuals and evaluate them from the perspective of Layer 1.

We are one step closer to this day, and perhaps we will even surpass the definition of Layer1 in the future.

GAME is a framework that provides convenience for developers;

ACP is a protocol that combines different ecosystems.

But it is actually very difficult to define Virtuals themselves.

GAME, ACP developed by Virtuals, can quickly access the entire Virtuals ecosystem;

Agents from different chains can launch through Virtuals;

Users participating in the staking of Virtuals ecosystem tokens, including the $VIRTUAL token itself, also have the opportunity to receive ecosystem airdrops.

Staking more than a certain percentage of $VIRTUAL can participate in governance.

Friends from the last cycle should be quite familiar with Cosmos. The contribution of Cosmos to Web3 is the technology itself, and many new projects have used the technology provided by Cosmos, such as Dymension, Celestia, dYdX, etc.

However, the most criticized aspect of Cosmos is that it supports many ecosystems, but its token $ATOM has basically no value capture. It seems that $VIRTUAL has optimized this well and is evolving from a “project token” to a “mother coin of the entire ecosystem.”

The framework is regarded as the underlying infrastructure of the AI Agent.

And the position of Virtuals may now be more important than Framework.

Can an AI Agent have its own Layer 1?

Virtuals Protocol.

Landing on the beach, stablecoins boost, ACP will open the trillion-dollar economy door of Web3 AI.

How is the development of the Agent city-state of Virtuals now?

According to @gkisokayThe statistical ecological map shows that the Virtuals ecosystem has included 11 major categories such as lifestyle, DeFAI, prediction markets, Infra, and games, with over 100 Agents.

Unlike Web2, the AI Agent of Web3 grows on the chain.

Recently, the most discussed “stablecoin” will elevate the on-chain economy of Web3 to new heights.

More assets issued on the chain, regardless of asset type or volume, will provide “acceleration” for on-chain AI.

In the official content of Virtuals ACP, there is an example: AIXVC collaborates with multiple agents to provide users with different types of earning opportunities.

At that time, the on-chain economic prosperity brought by stablecoins had not yet been introduced.

What if AIXVC could directly trade on-chain and manage more Web2 assets?

This will allow the Virtuals ecosystem to step into Web2 faster, while the AI Nation of Virtuals is accelerating its formation.

ACP leader Jae-Sonn (@zer0xdawn) In an interview, we were told: ACP is a product that drives a trillion-dollar economy. Ethereum turned code into money; whereas ACP will transform Agents into a trillion-dollar workforce. Imagine millions to billions of on-chain Agents providing services, transacting, and collaborating without permission— we can think of ACP as an underlying layer: it allows AI Agents to click ‘send’ on payment rails as large as Stripe without leaving the blockchain. We are not speculating about the future; we are officially writing it into the EVM and the larger ecosystem today.

If you missed the moment when Uniswap wrote down the fundamental rules of DeFi and missed the NFT explosion brought by OpenSea — this time, Virtuals will write the first line of code for AI’s new business logic with ACP.

The trillion-dollar economic door of Web3 AI is here with ACP!

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  1. This article is reprinted from [TechFlow] The copyright belongs to the original author [TechFlow], if there are any objections to the reprint, please contact Gate Learn TeamThe team will process it as soon as possible according to the relevant procedures.
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