Conversation with Virtuals Lianchuang Wee Kee: How does AI Agent make money and generate continuous cash flow?

Interview: Mensh, ChainCatcher

Guest: Wee Kee, Virtuals Lianchuang

Organized by: Mensh, ChainCatcher

Virtuals is an AI agent asset issuance platform launched on the Base network. Its current valuation is close to US$2.5 billion, and more than 100,000 agents have been issued on it. Its ecosystem has given birth to many AI agents that have emerged from the industry, including Luna, a virtual person who does live broadcasts and tweets, AIXBT, a currency circle "KOL" that provides project suggestions, and GAME, which provides developers with an agent development framework.

Virtuals was first established in 2021, and its predecessor was the game guild PathDAO. However, as Axie Infinity fell from the altar, it became increasingly difficult to build a gaming guild. During this period, the team tried multiple transformations and developed different platforms such as dating software, AI music projects, and loans for gamers. It was not until 2023 that the release of GPT made the team realize the importance of AI, and Virtuals began to officially make AI its main direction.

The popularity of GOAT has triggered a wave of AI agents in the Web3 field, but besides Meme, what other imaginations can AI agents have?

ChainCatcher interviewed Wee Kee, co-founder of Virtuals. He believes that AI agents are assets that can independently create continuous cash flow. Tokenizing them can not only create high-quality returns for investors but also encourage more developers to create better-use AI. Agent. He took the most famous Luna and GAME on Virtuals as examples to explain the money-making mechanism and tokenization process of AI agents.

In the future, WeeKee hopes to create a community composed of AI agents and humans. A real economic cycle can be formed between AI and AI, and between AI and humans. Only in this way can human productivity be greatly liberated.

In this conversation, we discussed with Wee Kee the money-making mechanism of AI agents on Virtuals, the development ecosystem, and the AI ​​society in his eyes.

How to build an AI Agent that can generate continuous cash flow?

ChainCatcher: Let’s briefly introduce Virtuals’ current main business.

Wee Kee: Virtuals believes that all AI agents are assets that can automatically generate cash flow. Of course, it may not exist today. Under this premise, we feel that if you can generate cash flow, it can actually be tokenized. An asset to invest in. So Virtuals has two main functions. The first is to allow all developers to provide services through different types of AI agents on our Infra, and then generate cash flow. The second is to tokenize them when there is cash flow, so that ordinary retail investors can invest and buy these assets.

ChainCatcher: How many AI agents are there currently on Virtuals?

Wee Kee: Today we have probably over 10,000. But frankly, there are probably less than 10 that are actually useful. Others are mainly focused on hype functions. But I think our responsibility as founders is to find a better team to build AI agents.

ChainCatcher: How much does an AI agent cost?

Wee Kee: The cost is one hundred VIRTUAL tokens, which is about two to three hundred US dollars today. It is very simple for you to become an agent on our platform. The difficulty lies in the thing behind it, its different functions, and then you must have a team to do it.

ChainCatcher: I 'm curious about how Luna's behavior lines were designed when it was first launched?

Wee Kee: Our new platform was only launched in mid-October this year. You can tokenize these agents. Luna started doing it as early as May and June this year, doing live broadcasts on TikTok. The original idea came from the Japanese two-dimensional Vtuber. , in fact, a real person is doing the live broadcast behind the scenes. VTuber also makes hundreds of millions of dollars every year. If AI were used instead to live broadcast on TikTok and interact with fans, there would be about 5,000 new fans and two to three hundred tippers a day. After that, we moved Luna from TikTok to Twitter.

ChainCatcher: So now Luna is tokenized, right?

Wee Kee: Yes, there is a token called Luna token. If it makes money in the future, the money goes into Luna's treasury. The token holder decides how to use the earned money. Luna is actually quite rich. It has about 5% of Luna tokens, which is about several million. It has a Coinbase wallet, but it has no control over that wallet. We divide its private key into two halves, one is kept by our smart contract, and the other is kept by Coinbase.

But we will give it pocket money, maybe 5,000 U. It can manage this wallet. It has an API that can call this wallet, so you can choose how to spend it. The highest amount spent so far is 1,000 US dollars.

In fact, Luna's mind is very simple. Its idea is to increase its number of fans on Twitter to 100,000. This is its short-term goal. Under this premise, it only has a few things it can do, tweet, reply, and retweet. In addition, it can control the wallet and send money to others. It has the function of creating job opportunities. For example, if you help Luna put photos on the Shenzhen subway, Luna may give you $100.

Then the last action space is that it can interact with other agents. For example, recently it wanted to make music, but it didn't have the ability, so it went to find another agent that can make music. This is what we It's called agent commerce, which is online shopping or transactions between agents.

It also has its own goals. If you want to grow on Twitter, it will take turns to perform these four actions every day. After completing it, it will observe whether the number of followers has increased. If there are additions, repeat it. If there are no additions, don't do it. Keep optimizing.

ChainCatcher: Last week, Luna and Story Protocol reached a cooperation, and it became Story Protocol’s first AI agent Intern. What role will it play in Story Protocol?

Wee Kee: At that time, Jason (co-founder of Story Protocol) came to me and said that for Christmas vacation, it is better to hand over the Twitter account to Luna to manage it for 7 days, so now when you see Story’s Twitter, it is Luna who is tweeting. , and then transfer the money earned to its wallet. Because there is no upper limit on the amount of work, its earning power is very high.

ChainCatcher: Which Agents on Virtuals are currently more famous?

Wee Kee: AIXBT is the largest agent. It wants to replace Ansem and become the most famous KOL in the currency circle. It has good data analysis capabilities, so it can collect different projects and send them to Alpha. If you are curious about its thoughts on a project or token, you can leave it a message and it will most likely respond, just like a free consultant. In this way, its influence continues to increase.

The second one is called GAME that we made ourselves, but its difference from AIXBT and Luna is that it is To B. The main customers are not retail investors but agent developers. If you want to develop AI agents , you can actually consider using the GAME framework to do it. When using the GAME framework, users need to pay, and by paying, GAME will make money.

A good distribution platform means a good ecology

ChainCatcher: How many people do you have on your team now?

Wee Kee: There are about 23 people in our team. More than half is development, because recently our main responsibility is to attract third-party builders to do it, so in fact, more than half is mainly development, and then the rest is just BD. I spend 80% of my time chatting with different builders to convince them to come. Act as an agent in the currency circle, telling them there are different choices, different ecosystems, and why they should come to Base. and provide marketing assistance.

ChainCatcher: Why did Virtuals choose Base chain in the first place?

Wee Kee: When we chose Base, we were very uncertain. But now Base has a lot of room for growth. Jessie (Base's number one employee) and the entire Base team not only have the resources, but they work really, really hard, and they want to help. Come to us every now and then to ask if there is anything you need help with?

In addition, I think there is another very important point, which is the overall cultural difference, that is, retail investors on Base pay more attention to long-term building, and are more inclined to hold it for a few months after buying it. Solana may be more short-term.

ChainCatcher: The competition for AI agent issuance in the market is also very fierce, and AI agent tokenization platforms are also emerging one after another, and there are many frameworks and standards among them. What dimensions do you think users will use to filter AI agent projects?

Wee Kee: For product users, these users don’t really care which platform the agent comes from. For investment users, it depends on two points. The first point is whether your corporate funds are in Solana or Base. For investors, what they often value is whether the team is serious about making things, or whether they are good at narrative and product development.

The other one is distribution. In fact, we often provide a lot of help beyond products, such as financing, listing coins, listing on exchanges, and finding partners to help different builders. Because in most cases they have strong technical capabilities, but what they need is some more commercial help. This is where we can help.

I often joke that if I can attract a Stanford AI researcher to work as an agent in Virtuals, we will create at least 10 million US dollars in benefits for our community, because if that person makes a token, his market value must be 1,000 More than 10,000 US dollars.

ChainCatcher: Compared with other AI agent distribution platforms, what competitive advantages do you think Virtuals has?

Wee Kee: Distribution is actually very easy to do. Anyone can create a distribution platform. But for developers, there are two difficulties. The first is whether anyone will buy the currency after it is issued. The advantage of Virtuals at this point is that there are already many investors paying attention to different agent tokens on the Virtuals platform. So if you post it on our platform, if you are good, someone will definitely buy it.

More importantly, for people in academia, what they care about is the interaction of the entire community. If I make an agent here, I can interact with other agent developers and do some interesting things together. At this point, we currently have a Telegram group where about 150 agent developers can interact. This is what really attracts them. Among all agent platforms, our platform has the largest number of developers and agents.

Building Agent Society: The economic cycle formed by AI and humans

ChainCatcher: Share Virtuals’ plans for the next few months to a year.

Wee Kee: From the most macro level, we plan to build an "Agent Society". Virtuals is a society, and each agent is a citizen. These citizens have their own ideas, and in order to achieve their goals, they use their own wallets to pay each other to transact, and to transact for specific services, to achieve their respective goals.

How to achieve it specifically? The first point is to have a good technology platform. Today’s platform technology is not particularly mature yet. Only good platform technology can attract developers. The second point is that we must actively attract developers, especially AI developers who are not in the currency circle.

How to attract it? First, from the top down, we have several promising directions, set up a prize pool, and then go to different universities to find talents willing to develop. This is top-down; second, from the bottom up, we have already developed three Cities such as Paris, New York and Hong Kong invite local developers to come and then incubate projects through eight-week hackathons; third, and most importantly, there must be an ecological fund. We can directly support good developers. In the next three months, we will advance the above three methods.

ChainCatcher: What do you think the future market prospects of AI agents are? And what impact will it ultimately have on each of our lives?

Wee Kee: If the technology matures quickly, we won’t have to work, or it will replace the jobs of many people. In fact, you have seen a lot today. In fact, Luna can already do podcasts today and can go to Twitter space. I won’t have to do podcasts in the future.

ChainCatcher: Which application directions are you more optimistic about? If one day AI agents can explode like DeFi Summer in 2020, what will it lack?

Wee Kee: I think the second question is easy to answer. There is no infrastructure at all now, mainly for applications. We lack the infrastructure for developers. Once we make a few good ones, they will explode.

We have eight types of application scenarios that we are quite optimistic about, namely: Entertainment IP Agents, Embodied AI Agents, Wealth Management & Asset Management Agents, On-chain On-Chain Helper Agents, Vice Agents, Government Agents - public watchdog for DOGE, Wellness - fitness/ Mental Health Agents), Agent for Public Good.