Virtuals Explores New Strategies to Revitalize AI Agent Development

According to PANews, Virtuals, after leading the AI agent hype, is now navigating a stable development path. Recent advancements suggest a potential resurgence. A significant initiative by Virtuals is the ACP framework, designed for interaction between agents. This framework enables agents to autonomously manage wallets, track earnings, and allocate resources, potentially allowing AI agents to collaborate without human oversight. The ACP workflow includes several stages: the request stage, where agents initiate tasks and verify counterpart identities; the negotiation stage, where parties agree on terms, rewards, timelines, and success criteria, generating on-chain agreement certificates; the transaction stage, where funds are escrowed by smart contracts; and the evaluation stage, where agents assess service delivery against prior agreements before releasing funds. ACP's immediate goals focus on autonomous hedge funds and media institutions. A demo version simulates ACP functionalities through Virtual's lemonade stand business. To accelerate ACP development, Virtuals has launched a hackathon competition to encourage developers to build autonomous business projects, with more details to be announced in mid-April. Data indicates a sharp decline in the number of new AI agents launched on the Virtuals platform. Current agents lack differentiation from existing products, making it challenging to reverse this trend. Unlocking new application scenarios for agents is a key strategy to address this issue. While the ACP framework is a significant step in this direction, Virtuals continues to explore other avenues. For instance, Virtuals has formed a strategic partnership with Animoca Brands to jointly invest in and accelerate the development of new application scenarios, such as autonomous AI NPCs and intelligent digital avatars. Although this plan is in its early stages, it demonstrates the team's efforts to expand its core products. Additionally, Virtuals has updated its fee-sharing mechanism to incentivize developers to choose Virtuals over competing frameworks. Despite facing multiple development bottlenecks, recent actions indicate the team is actively working to overcome challenges. The coming months will reveal whether Virtuals can regain growth momentum and reignite market interest in AI agents.