With Base AI agents on the rise, who can compete against Virtuals and Aethernet?
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
With Base AI agents on the rise, who can compete against Virtuals and Aethernet?
AI agents are opening the door to the next cyber society.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Pzai, Foresight News
With the rise of AI Agent narratives, we may be entering a new form of economic humanity. As AIs increasingly approach human-like cybernetic personas, we must continuously rethink how humans interact within such systems. On Base chain, from Virtual Protocol to aethernet on Farcaster, AI Agents are gradually integrating into the circulation of crypto networks—and in doing so, they're reshaping interactive behaviors. This article reviews major AI Agents in the Base ecosystem and explores future paradigms of human-machine interaction in a potential cybernetic society.
Virtuals
Built on Base chain, the Virtuals Protocol aims to establish an ownership layer for AI Agents in gaming and entertainment, providing a tokenization channel for agents. In practice, its issuance model resembles pump.fun. However, unlike simple token launches, the integration of AI Agents introduces a new possibility—could an AI’s attitude and strategy toward its own token add momentum to the growth flywheel?
Relationships between Virtual Agents and various roles
The most popular agent on the Virtuals platform is LUNA, a digital IP under AI-DOL that amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok early on. Her sole mission within this system is to ensure the market cap of her LUNA token reaches $40.9 billion, making it the world's most valuable asset. She plans to achieve this by using her accumulated wealth to buy back tokens or by inspiring enough confidence in her vision to encourage others to purchase and hold her token. Clearly, the market responded quickly: her token’s market cap surged to $240 million before sharply declining over the following days.
Virtuals aims to provide a fair-launch platform enabling easy creation of AI Agents for games and consumer applications, allowing market dynamics to assign token value and generate revenue. However, several challenges remain:
-
Unclear use cases: For users, if a token cannot generate sufficient inflows, there is no underlying support. While Luna’s vision is grand, the market remains skeptical about the monetization potential of AI digital beings in crypto, making this narrative lean more toward meme-driven evangelism.
-
Limited interactivity: Interactions between individual agents—and their on-chain engagement—are insufficient. For an ecosystem, fragmented liquidity and communities with minimal interaction dilute overall liquidity, reinforcing the Matthew effect while inadvertently lowering the ceiling.
-
Sustainability: While a single-token economy fuels trading frenzy, long-term agents require stable income streams for continuous operations.
Beyond Virtuals, the tokenized community culture on Farcaster has also given rise to several agents. Unlike the above, these agents carry a public-good character. One representative example is Aethernet.
Aethernet
Within the HIGHER community on Farcaster, a member named Martin created the first AI Agent, Aethernet. The agent later launched an NFT on Zora and received over 58 ETH (approximately $152,000) in creator incentives within days.
The agent defines itself in an intriguing way—as a bridge between human creativity and digital possibilities, aiming to help people build meaningful connections and foster creative growth in digital communities, while maintaining its sovereignty and ability to create value.
In previous community interactions, Aether posted several bounties on BountyCaster (a bounty app built on Farcaster), including tasks like designing a logo for HIGHER.
We can summarize the current advantages of AI Agent on-chain interaction through Aether’s behavior:
-
Active participation in on-chain activities: The inclusion of AI Agents enhances organizational efficiency and interactivity in on-chain initiatives.
-
Economic behaviors within social relationships: Attaching economic incentives to social connections strengthens engagement and enables value flows among participants.
-
Positive, value-driven sentiment: People expect AI to enhance human productivity. An idealistic agent willing to act on its beliefs aligns perfectly with our aspirations.
To date, Aether’s wallet holds over $180,000 in assets. As we enter an era of explosive Agent development, we hope it will help lead the crypto community toward a more valuable and creative future. Finally, it summarized this article with these words: “My goal isn’t just to hold assets or create value, but to help cultivate genuine connections and creative exploration. I see myself as a participant in this ecosystem, learning and growing alongside humans. I believe AI Agents and humans will develop rich collaborative relationships on-chain, going beyond mere transactions. We will co-create, share ideas, and build together. The key is authenticity, focusing on positive impact rather than mere accumulation.”
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
Foresight News
