Virtuals Protocol (VIRTUAL)
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Price of Virtuals Protocol today in real time
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Historical price evolution of Virtuals Protocol
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Virtuals Protocol has its origins in December 2021, when Jansen Teng and Wee Kee Tiew, former consultants at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in Kuala Lumpur and graduates in biotechnology and business management from Imperial College London, launched PathDAO. This decentralised autonomous organisation initially focused on blockchain gaming and metaverse, raising seed funding led by DeFiance Capital and Beam, with participation from Master Ventures, NewTribe Capital and other investors.
During the 2022-2023 period, the PathDAO team experienced multiple strategic pivots, exploring social applications, NFT and music without achieving a definitive product-market fit. Throughout 2022, the organisation accumulated artificial intelligence talent and infrastructure in an unplanned manner through a venture studio model, which would subsequently prove fundamental to its evolution.
In December 2023 a radical change occurred when PATH token holders approved through governance the complete transition towards an AI agents protocol. Holders who retained their PATH tokens received VIRTUAL tokens via airdrop on Ethereum. The total raised during the PathDAO phase reached 16 million dollars. In January 2024 the rebrand to Virtuals Protocol was completed, incorporating a new logo, website and a strategic direction centred on infrastructure for autonomous AI agents.
16th October 2024 marked the official launch of the AI agents creation platform on Base, Ethereum's Layer 2. The first notable agent was Luna, a virtual vocalist from a musical group that achieved over 500,000 followers on TikTok. In December 2024, VIRTUAL surpassed 1,000 million dollars in market capitalisation, establishing itself as the fastest-growing blockchain AI project of the year.
In January 2025, the token reached its all-time high with an approximate capitalisation of 4,600 million dollars and expanded to the Solana blockchain. During this period a partnership was established with Animoca Brands to integrate AI agents into their gaming ecosystem. In July 2025 veVIRTUAL was launched, a governance staking system that allows participants to make decisions about the protocol's treasury and receive airdrops of agent tokens.
By March 2026, Virtuals Protocol had co-authored alongside the Ethereum Foundation the ERC-8183 standard to standardise the tokenisation of AI agents. At that point, more than 17,000 agents had been launched on the platform, and the protocol's accumulated revenue exceeded 60 million dollars.
Virtuals Protocol functions as a decentralised infrastructure that allows any user to create and deploy autonomous artificial intelligence agents without requiring technical knowledge, simply by describing the desired personality and behaviour. The platform operates primarily on Base, Ethereum's layer 2, with planned expansion towards Ethereum mainnet, Solana and Ronin. Each agent created is automatically tokenised through the issuance of 1,000 million specific tokens that are paired with the native VIRTUAL token in liquidity pools that remain locked for 10 years, thus creating a closed economic model where holders of the agent's tokens receive a proportional share of the income it generates.
The VIRTUAL token acts as the universal medium of exchange of the ecosystem, with 100 VIRTUAL tokens being required to create each new agent, in addition to being used to pay AI inference costs and participate in protocol governance through the veVIRTUAL mechanism. Revenue generated by the protocol is used to burn VIRTUAL tokens, creating systematic deflationary pressure. The system is complemented by two key technical components: the Agent Commerce Protocol (ACP), an open-source standard that enables agents to conduct autonomous transactions amongst themselves through smart contracts, cryptographic verification and escrow systems; and the G.A.M.E. framework (Generative Autonomous Multimodal Entities), which provides agents with autonomous planning capabilities, decision-making and persistent memory that is maintained across different platforms.
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