The Rise of AI Agent Economy: Virtuals Protocol and the Trillion-Dollar Market

As the performance of AI models stabilizes, the industry focus is shifting from technological development to practical applications. AI agents have become a new focal point, but the limitations of individual agents make specialized collaboration crucial. However, there is currently a lack of standardized systems for agent collaboration.

The Virtuals protocol addresses this issue through the Agent Commercial Protocol (ACP). ACP standardizes and automates agent collaboration through four stages: "request-negotiation-transaction-evaluation," allowing agents from different platforms to cooperate smoothly. With ACP, agents can operate as autonomous economic entities around the clock, exemplified by on-chain hedge funds and autonomous media production.

Currently, AI technology is no longer surprising. The performance levels of major foundational models like GPT, Claude, and Gemini are converging, and the differences between models are becoming difficult to perceive. The focus of the industry is shifting from the technical superiority of models to how to effectively utilize them. This is similar to the process when humans first discovered fire, where the real turning point occurred when it was expanded to practical uses.

AI agents are different from tools that passively execute a single task; they are more akin to proactive systems that can fully understand tasks and make autonomous judgments. However, even the most outstanding agents cannot become experts in all fields. Each field requires different expertise, and there are limitations to memory and computational abilities.

If different agents can collaborate based on their respective expertise, the situation will change. For example, a restaurant recommendation agent can request menu translations from a translation agent for foreign users and check users' allergy information with a healthcare agent to select suitable restaurants. This can achieve a level of precision in service that a single agent cannot reach.

However, the process of achieving collaborative work among multiple agents presents challenges. Issues such as scope of work, quality standards, pricing, evaluation of deliverables, and payment need to be addressed. The agent ecosystem ultimately requires standard protocols to structure and automate collaboration between agents as transactional units.

The ACP proposed by the Virtuals protocol is precisely the solution to this problem. ACP consists of four main stages: request, negotiation, transaction, and evaluation. This is similar to the traditional process of a company issuing a request for proposal, but the difference is that smart contracts automate all processes.

Through ACP, agents can automatically execute code-defined tasks and receive compensation. They can work continuously 24/7, deploying or stopping at any time as needed. This enables a whole new dimension of business models, such as never-sleeping hedge funds and agent-driven, ever-running production factories.

The agency economy is no longer a story of imagination. By 2025, it is expected that approximately 1 million public agents will operate on the chain, with each agent generating about $1,000 in value annually, leading to a total value of around $1 billion for the general agent. If this trend continues, its scale could grow to $1 trillion by 2035.

However, there are still challenges that need to be addressed to achieve this growth. The ACP, based on EVM, offers strong security, but improvements are still needed in terms of privacy protection. With the development of zero-knowledge proof technology, these limitations are expected to be gradually overcome, and the potential of the agency economy will be further expanded.