Unchained - How Virtuals' New AI Accelerator Will Bring Humanoid Robots to the Real World

Episode Date: February 23, 2026

Jansen Teng announces  Virtuals’ new humanoid robotics accelerator. Is this the next frontier for the AI agent meta? Thank you to our sponsors! ⁠⁠⁠⁠Figure⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠���Crypto Tax Girl⁠⁠⁠⁠ Virtuals Protocol has announced the launch of Eastworld Labs, an AI accelerator to make it easier for builders to deploy humanoid robots. Virtuals Protocol co-founder Jansen Teng unpacks the idea behind the program, how it would work and what it hopes to achieve. He also addresses questions about how to prevent damage to remotely controlled robots, how to address backlash to robots taking jobs, and whether Virtuals views OpenClaw as a competitor. Will human relationships eventually be replaced by AI agents? Guest: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Jansen Teng, CEO & Co-Founder of Virtuals Protocol Links: Unchained: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Virtuals Ecosystem Sees Boost After Team Reveals Details of Buyback-and-Burn Program ⁠⁠⁠⁠Want to Hire an AI Agent? Check Their Reputation Via ERC-8004 When AI Agents Take Over, What Does a Post-Human Economy Look Like? How Nansen’s New Trading Agent Makes It Easier to Follow the Smart Money Onchain How the x402 Standard Is Enabling AI Agents to Pay Each Other Uneasy Money: How the Increasingly Better AI Agents Are Being Used Onchain Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Even relationships can be placed by agents. One of the biggest questions I've been posing to some of my friends was like, could there be even a scenario in the world where an entire male or females, right, they are actually replaced by robots? Could humans still survive in the era, right? Hey everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-high resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Before we get started, a quick reminder.

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Today's guest is Jansen Ting, co-founder of Virtual's Protocol. Welcome, Janssen. Hello, pleasure to be here. Yeah, I'm really excited to chat with you. And part of it is because this is just a crazy time. in the world of AI agents, so it's actually great that we're talking now. Today, Virtuals has an announcement that it is launching East World Labs and AI Accelerator to foster the deployment of humanoid robots and to create a hybrid society of robots,

virtual agents, and humans. Tell us about East World Labs. Yeah, so I think for us at Virtues, we've always believed that AI agents are going to be fully autonomous economic active. And that has been the grounding principle in whatever we've done.

Across the year and a half or two years, we've built a few things, right? We've built one the one that we're probably most famous for

is the capital formation layer for these autonomous agents. People call it a launch pad gives agents transaction fees whenever their token

gets traded. That's one. The second one that we then went life half a year ago was about building a stripe or an agitic commerce protocol for this autonomous agent to work with other autonomous agents to produce economic value greater than some of these parts.

And then there's where we've realized that, you know, our whole construct or working with agents has been really in just one domain. We've been working on, with just digital agents, right? And we realized that there's a massive or, um, or, I would say a dimensional level of unlock in things that we can do with agents when we start involving physical AI, i.e. robotics.

So we've actually started to invest in robotics teams about a year ago, but we started debbling harder ourselves about three months ago where we started working with the whole data layer for robotics, trying to understand where should we play. And then we've realized that in the end, our cards lie in building an ecosystem.

And we've proven that we've probably built the largest agentic ecosystem at the intersection of crypto and NAI. And we've realized that we should double down on that strength. And that's why we've realized that maybe what we should be doing in the robotics sector is to build a vertically integrated lab. And the idea behind this lab is threefold. But with one very core goal. And the goal here is that

can we make it easy for founders who wants to build humanoid use cases at a consumer surface area to have an easier life making easy for them to raise funds to garner the

data and the models needed to train these AIs and three obtain distribution at scale. So that's where we started to realize like the best way to fit this all together is some form of incubator or lab or maker space and that's where we started

throwing with this idea of Eastwo where it's a think of it as a location it's a co-location where great founders, builders from both the academia side as well as people who are more on the Gtm on the on the on the on the on the on the on the BD front

to come together at HEC stuff and start building things that is going to to be interesting. And that, maybe some of them will also tokenize and then give the DGEN's some assets to play with as well. So that's the core, there's a core goal of East World that we are launching. And will it be like other accelerators that, you know, have different cohorts at different times, different seasons.

So there will be, you know, applications. And then you'll run the program for, you know, I don't know how long each one will be. So there will be, like, classes. We run a very, you know, we run a very, you know, unique mechanism. So it's going to be, there's two ways to get into this residency, quote unquote. So the first is we tied it very closely to the asset issuance platform that we have. So the idea here is that if you're a founder and you're keen to experiment robotics,

most people will start off with an idea, a white paper, a peach, right? Do the same thing. And what we encourage people to do is then launch a token around it. So if you can, because what we believe is that when projects tokenize the markets, become a very strong indicative factor on how well they will receive your idea. Right. That's the, if they're way to beat your token up, and in this case, we say that if a robotics token that is launched crosses a marker cap of $5 million, we then offer this guide a seat in the residency. And this seat in the residency includes a pretty much a free

humanoid robot for them to test the fleet of, uh, uh, of co-workers that we have or technical people that we have at their disposal and also access to some of the university collaborations that we are working with as well. So we've also tapped into folks at CMU, NTEU from Singapore, Shanghai Jiao Tong and Oxford. Initially right now to actually push some of these

training of the autonomous policies and these are the kind of benefits that these founders can tap into where they're organized. So that is path number one. Path number two is for founders who probably are not key in tokenization, but they have a great team, great idea. We also are personally incubating teams. So we write a check initially.

And then we will get up a seat and hack together with them. So there's two paths to actually join these. One is the on-chain tokenization path, and the other one is through a think of it as like a seat funding path. Okay. And do these teams get together a physical location to work together? Yes. So we've actually opened a 10,000 square foot space in the heart of KEL.

And that's where actually we are moving our own office as well to. And so we'll be working pretty much with the virtual team. And we have this robotics lab here in Kiel. And alongside this incubator. or people who make you Malaysia. Yeah. And we have

we have so far 30 humanoid robots that has joined the fleet. So it's probably one of the largest robotics testing facilities in Southeast Asia. Okay. Like knowing the count of people

who bought these robots. Wait, I'm sorry. Say that again? Because we, I mean, we spoke with the team, with many of the the guys who sell humanoid robots, right, Unitary themselves and the other providers.

And we realized that, yeah, actually, the fleet that we've got is actually be one of the largest fleets in the world. Oh, wow. In, like, one co-located space. Okay. So tell me a little bit about what type of applicants or projects you are looking for for the accelerator. So we've,

So again, it's open, right? We have a, we have a, I'll say, learning that, you know, sometimes we just don't know what good looks like. So, you know, we just have to take in any kind of ideas. But the one, there's actually one hypothesis that I personally have been pushing on and we've been funding this idea with our incubator, which is along the lines of remote teleoperation first before full automation. And we found the market basically think of it as business process outsourcing. You know how the call centers that you have today that generally a lot of companies in the US or in a more expensive country that would outsource their call centers into the Philippines,

into India. And the reason is because of the rich arbitrage. It's cheaper to get a guy. do the phone call, to have the telephone calls in Philippines. The question that we had was what if it's also cheaper if you can outsource physical labor. Imagine this, right? Imagine a robot that is deployed in the States,

deployed in Australia, deployed in UK, that is remotely controlled by a human in a cheaper country, like Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam. And this robot does a lot of the, labor that it's, you can actually find this same skilled laborer in Malaysia. Think of it as like security guards to retail sales managers, to the guys in the hotel to who go and clean your bed, to like even slightly more complex stuff like plumbing, mechanics, HVAC cleaners.

And we realized that we did the mats and the cost savings for even as of today's economics, it's about 40 to 60%. And the reality is the price of this robotic stuff is going to just drop over the next couple of years. So we've realized that there's going to be this initial gap in the market where teleoperation

can start making commercial use cases as of today. And then there is, apart from just cost savings, these use cases can also generate a lot of real world data.

because when a human does all these work in a very chaotic real world, that data of all the robotics joints and whatnot becomes very valuable for training fully autonomous policies. And the idea is then each of these teams who are setting out to solve different use cases, their over time will start training their own fully autonomous forwards. So then over time, they will self-replace their own business model of a human teleoperation to then fully autonomous operations. So what we've been then doing is we've been funding use cases at the, at like this, if you draw a two by two, is a, on the one axis is how much which arbitrage you can capture.

So places where, let's say, for example, a plumber in Australia is paid like $100,000. But a plumber in Malaysia is only paid like $10,000, right? So that's a insane rich arbitrage. So that's one axis. On the other axis is the need for a humanoid form factor. So again, like, you know, in a factory, for example, that where every boxes are equally squared, you actually do not need a humanoid.

It's not the best one factor to serve that use case. But let's say plumbing, for example, plumbing everyone's house pipes are different. The shape of a toilet is built for a human to actually access it. So it's where those places where a humanoid form factor actually would drive. So we've identified like 10 to 20 use cases already where in the near term it makes sense and we've been funding this. Give you a few examples to be very concrete, right? Think of it as like retail sales, restaurants, the guys who do the back office stuff in a hospital,

the people who go at autoclave stuff, carry all these equipment around. HVAC technicians plumbing mechanics. So these are a few areas that we've identified that we see a lot of value capture with this initial human, sorry, robotics BBO. Okay, wow.

So something that I need to understand, so you said that you have this fleet of 30 humanoid robots. Are they all the same or are they like different? Like, are they specialized in some way? So they are we, they're all the same. They're the max-packed Uni3G-1s, which are pretty much the top of the best robots in the market today

because they're the most dexterous humanoid robots. Yeah. Okay, okay. They can pretty much backflip. They have hands that can grab things, hold things. Okay. And I guess like the other thing is so in some ways you're you're talking about like I just want to understand the teleoperation. So you're saying that maybe there's a robot that works like, you know, let's say here.

Let's like let's say like in the New York area. But it's controlled by somebody in Asia. Is that what you? Okay. Yes. And so basically they're like replacing a plumber. They go around to different places and they'll fix your toilet. Correct.

Oh, okay. So I guess like, yeah, tell me a little bit about, you know, how you think that will work. So let's say I'm a person living here in the U.S. and I, where am I going to find this, you know, robot flummer? And then, yeah, tell me about the flubbing. There's going to be a few, there's going to be a few, I would say, forms of how this might play out. Again, this is very early, so things might change, right? The one of them would actually be, think of it as every household might even just purchase their own humanoid robot to store at the house. And then the idea is that this humanoid robot might have different users, right?

On the, during the most of the time, you probably just need it as a mate. Right? So you have a mate that is actually just teleoperable. contrary the robot to clean your house and, you know, just do the basic bit stuff. And then one day you realize that you'll have a broken pipe, right? Something gets stuck in your toilet

and you need an actual plumber to go and do it. So instead of calling a plumber, you just need to switch the operator. So the soul of the robot gets replaced, right? So a plumber comes in instead into the robot and then he then fix his pipe. If you need to go and cook something at home, a chef enters the soul of the robot.

So it could be one robot with multiple souls that different teleoperators that comes in. Or it could just be a service, right? Like, David, you need to call the robot, you get a robot delivered by taxi to your house, and the robot comes with a fix it out. So, I mean, there's a few ways you can see this thing operating. Yeah, I mean, honestly, the first one where it's like I have my own personal robot and then they do multiple different things for me, that feels more like. A dog.

Is it a dog? Yeah, instinctual to me. Yeah. But then it's like, then they're not making money for anybody. It's just I have paid them and they're saving me money maybe is how to think about it. So, so like, yeah, then I guess it's a little bit because like, you know, where you started is you have these virtual agents and then they are out in the world like doing things. they're engaging in commerce, whereas, yeah, this first version is more just like, I'm just a consumer and I'm buying.

Yes. Okay, okay. It would take time. But the idea, the idea is that, so, I mean, if you just pay, if you, if you take a set by from a big picture perspective, right, the, today, this is the extent of what these robots can do, right? And that's why we're, the teleoperation is honestly, it's not the sexiest story, but it's the, is the work that will get us

the largest amount of data to start building autonomous robots so that that will be a year that will be a year and a half from now right and the idea is then you actually start needing no humans probably just one human supposing a fleet of 20 or 30 and most of the work is actually done

fully autonomously a year and a half from now and I think that's when each robot can start potentially be its own economic actor And that will be the dream, right? And honestly, this is why we named the Lab Eastworld. It's actually a call-out to West World, the HBO show. I'm sure if you watch that show.

No, I haven't. It's a team park. It's basically a team park where the NPCs or the non-playable characters in the park are actually intelligent humanites. They look like humans. And then the humans go in and then they live alive in that. in the story with robots, right? And there's the idea.

The idea is that there will be a world where these robots will become autonomous and their own, their own economic sovereignty. But we need to lay down the foundational steps to get that. So these are the, whatever we spoke about was like step one, step two. Okay. So can you tell me what those robots would cost

because, you know, there's probably a calculation that people could make about, you know, whether that's going to, like if they were to purchase one, whether that would actually save the money or just be very expensive. Yeah. So, so the, like, the max spec, G1 today costs about $60,000. There's a maximum spec.

So the, but the ones that you actually can tweak the hardware and then they have, like, fully autonomous, like, dexterous hands. The cheapest G1s in the market, I think, $20,000. So it's a, it's, it's, it's becoming more and more affordable. But initially, honestly, I think the first adopters of this, because even $20,000 is still a lot for a household. So we will likely see a lot more POCs

with probably commercial folks first because they get a lot of more, I would say, marketing firepower. So a lot of the initial POCs that we've secured have been with retail. sales, like hotels and stuff like that, because to them, apart from just saving costs, when I have a robot in my restaurant or in my hotel, it looks cool. It's going to attract more customers so that we need to pay more for that. So I think that's probably where you see

most of the adoption layer first rather than like household retail people. So I'm sure you heard, or maybe not, I don't know, but um, shoot, there's been so much political unrest in the U.S. I'm blanking on when this happened, but there were some protests somewhere at some point in the not too distant past where there were these Waymo cars that people were, you know, setting on fire and doing all kinds of things too. And I just wonder, you know, in the case of these robots, like especially in the case of like a plumber that's going around, if it's being remotely operating. by somebody in a foreign country, even a different continent,

you know, what happens if, you know, is somebody does something to damage the robot or incapacitate it? Like, how do you deal with that kind of thing? Yeah, so I think it's a evolving thing. We'll probably have to learn along the way. But the idea is you probably, we'll definitely have a team on the ground. You will have a operation team on the ground that will have to manage the fleet.

Because, I mean, robots will break. the parts will catch fire that will have like a screw that you need to fix so you're definitely the operation team on the ground and over time the question is how how more and more autonomous they can be from being the point of deployment to the point of where they execute the work

so yeah but yeah I know I will foresee in the next year there will always be some form of human oversight be the guy who actually just fetches these robots around or or some form of like surveillance system. But the beauty about these mechanisms,

even as of today, right, it's actually, you probably can see those videos online where robots that can actually defend themselves. As a human, you probably don't want

to find a robot. I mean, this is quite funny because when we got our first shipment in to our office it was like

a few months ago, four months ago. And you were just testing it in a wee work. And we didn't know how, like how, how, how, how, what to expect of it. It was the first time, like, really, uh, working with a, a G-1. And then, uh, we did, like, some controls that made it roll.

And, uh, he did some kung fu moves. And, uh, the space was so limited that we all had to jump away from it. And then he started smashing into, like, our computers. And he was like, flipping tables. Like, it, it, it felt like, you know, like, he could, he could just stand up and a entire table was just flip behind him, right? that kind of strength in their server motos is pretty powerful. So I don't think people want to mess with them

if they know that these rewards can actually react back. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. Well, one other thing that I wondered about was, you know, just hearing you describe that they could replace all these different types of human workers. Like, don't you think there could be a backlash? Like, yeah, I just wonder.

if you've thought of not. I mean, I mean, I think it's probably the, it's not a problem for robotics. It's not just a problem for robotics, right? It's a problem for, we see with AI agents as well. I mean, the whole claw, sorry not claw, the whole clot 4.5, 4.6, Opus, the GPT codex, right? You've seen that, I mean, we've seen themselves, even in a company, that some of the junior engineer's job becomes quite redundant. You'd be like,

hmm, like a product manager can actually do the work instead of needing, and a plus a senior manager, engineer, you do not need your junior desk anymore, and you start seeing jobs getting potentially real estate.

And that's already for like, for like, for like, you know, white collar workers, right? So I think there will definitely be a replenish. But it's not going to be just directed

at human rights or robots, although he'll be directed against a whole AI industry, right? Yeah. But I think there's a question for governments to solve, right? Sometimes, I think a lot of times we can't do it. We can solve everything. I think I'm on the camp of like, you know, we just bring innovation and we speed it up and the world would just adapt to these innovations. All right. So in a moment, we're going to talk a little bit more about, you know, what these robots can do and how they're going to work. But first, a quick word from the sponsors you make this show possible. Want a chance to win $25,000 in USDC? Figure, a platform to earn yield, borrow against crypto, and access lending markets, is running a $25,000 USDC sweepstakes tied to their democratized prime product.

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Tax slash Unchained to save $100. Once again, the link is Cryptotax Girl.com slash Unchained. Back to my conversation with Janssen. Actually, before we move on, I did want to ask one more piece on that kind of like crime aspect, which is, could there be security issues with their robots? Like what if somebody remotely directs their robots to, perform a crime? Like, would it be easy to trace it back to the human that, you know, was controlling it?

I would think so. But I mean, there's two parts, right? One is, can the fleet get hijacked? I mean, the idea is that we build proper systems in place for that not to happen. But in the reality of, like, people controlling robots and performing crimes, it's actually possible. I mean, like, yeah, I mean, I mean. in fact it's no in fact actually you can make it even not traceable

oh no actually no I know how they can trace it because I mean you can hide all your digital tracks right I think that's quite easy but the part that you cannot hide it's how was how did the robot got imported into the country right who was the who was that or who who who gave these that actor access to the robots so it's slightly traceable I mean but it's going to

to be a whole like robotic cybercrime you need coming on in the FBI. Yeah, yeah, we're laughing now, but who knows in five years. That's what you need. You need to have these innovations to happen, right? Because now if everyone has a robot,

their robot security guard can protect them against another robot's crimes, right? So it's like an antivirus. Yeah, well, that's assuming everybody has a robot. So, Anyway, okay, okay, so, you know, as you talked about, like, you have these robots, but, you know, some of them will get specialized. So how are you training them?

Talk about how they'll kind of like learn their tasks. Yeah, so today, we are collecting data in two forms, which is actually one of the verticals of Eastwood, which is this, like, massive data lake, right? And the idea here is, one, we've actually created incentives. for people to submit, we call it, egocentric data. Think of it as imagine if you wear a meta raybank glasses or hang an iPhone around your neck. And that is capturing videos of the hands, of what your hands are doing. You could be folding clothes, you'd be cooking some food. You could be like making a watch, whatever that might be.

So that data is being collected. that's what type of data. The second type of data, which is while we are performing all these teleoperations, you get data of the human with the visual and also all the information of how the robots actually moving, or the joint data. So it's how each of the hands turn, the amount of force that are placing on the object. So that is the second form of data, which we call it teleoperations data. So these two data sets, we pretty much house it in a lake, right?

Because there'll be different teams that we are working with. Every team that we fund and every team that goes through East World as a whole, we'll basically start contributing data to this lake. And the beauty is then we hopefully become one of the largest robotics datasets datasets for teleop-eco-centric, hopefully in the world. And then this becomes also potential. a reason for more and more residents to come in because then they get access to these data layer

to then train their autonomous policies and then go to market. Okay. So, you know, now let's talk about kind of how this is going to combine with everything that virtual has already been building because obviously you have the tokenized AI agents, the virtual ones, you have, you know,

for them to fund themselves on chain. So talk a little bit about what tokenization adds to the physical robots and or vice versa. Yeah. So it's actually honestly in my disease is that there's only two reasons

for robots and crypto to actually exist. And the intersection of these is one crypto acts as a tokenization layer, i.e. if a team wants to build a project they tokenize, they get attention.

The attention they get around the token benefits them in two ways. One is that they get direct economic value because when people trade the tokens, they get the tax out from it. That can be quite significant. We've seen projects raising like seven figures in funding from just this taxation mechanism. So that is one reason, right? And the second, I'm sorry, and part of this reason as well is the attention. flywheel because when holders hold your token, they become

advocates for your project as well, right? There might actually be your users. You sell your first 10 robots, they might actually buy it because they hold a bit back of your tokens. They want you to succeed. So I think that has been the clearest crypto PMF, and that's what we've seen also for a lot of

digital Asian projects. The second the second bid, which is probably not something that's that's here yet but it will come which is basically blockchain

as that coordination layer for robots think of robots again as like code right that machines and for machines

to work with machines the best way is to use smart contracts right and this is pretty much what smart contracts are designed for right

and and this is what we'll probably see where like if I'm asking my my robot to work for me

and, you know, if my robot is in a restaurant being a chef and is a, he's cooking stuff, right? And then he needs to deliver their food to customers out there. He needs to call a fleet of like drones or sidewalk robots, right? That commerce or the interaction or coordination would likely be best performed through the blockchain or through smart contracts. So I think that's probably the second reason for robotics and crypto to coexist. But for now, I think for us, we will focus a lot more on the first part, tokenization portion. I mean, that's get the kind of fly views of attention and capital for

founders. And then hopefully more and more of these will become more autonomous and then we start seeing the smart contracts part of crypto becoming adopted by robots. And then one thing I wanted to understand is so when they're making money, it does all of that revenue go to the owner of that robot. Okay, so there's no value accrual to the virtual's token holders in any fashion? No. So, I mean, there's two parts, right? Yeah, virtual stick a small piece of their transaction.

So when you charge about 1% of trading taxes on every token that is issued from the platform, the deaths they own 70% of that 1%. And virtual as an ecosystem collects 30%. So 30 beeps of every trading activity feeds the virtual strategy. So that benefits virtual ecosystem as a whole.

We use that money to grow the ecosystem. But there's another benefit for virtual holders, which is every project today that launched in the ecosystem is an ad-drop. About 3 to 5% of the token supply will be e-drop to people who hold

stake virtual tokens. So think of it as like if I'm a virtual holder and I stake my tokens, I perpetually get every asset that's been issued on the virtual platform. Okay. Okay. So, you know, we have talked a lot about the robots. We've talked a little bit about how it interacts

with virtuals, but this is actually the first time you are on the show and that we're talking about virtual. So why don't you tell us, kind of fill in the backdrop of everything that's happened with virtuals, you know, since you burst onto the scene back in 2014 during those token terminal days, you know, and you've developed the number of things along the way. Some of these things being mentioned, like the agent commerce protocol, you know, which powers the economy. You're also the platform for humans. to collaborate with their agents. Unicorn, which is the launch pad. You know, some of the technical developments where you added the X-402 payments protocol

for listeners who missed it. We did an interview on that in the fall. It was super interesting. And then recently you launched this virtual revenue network, and I think, you know, part of that had to do with the open quad thing. So, yeah, just talk a little bit about, you know, the different developments and really what has been, like, most surprising to you or most interesting as you've been watching your creation out in the world. Yeah, so I think you all started, it all started when, uh, when, uh, truth terminal and, you know, gold had that, had that run in 2024, right? And then, uh, and then, and then they made a, there was a spelling error in the, by the AI. I'm not sure if you remember then. And then,

the gold token crashed like 80%. Because everyone was like, like, they made a, there was like, oh, now there's actually a human, right? It's not a true agent. And we've been working with autonomous influences. We've been building autonomous agents for gaming back then. And we realized that that was like our way to show the world that actually truly autonomous agents can exist. So then that's where we actually entered the market, right? We built this.

We brought Luna in, put her on Twitter, and people saw her terminal of her brain that people, going to be like, oh, okay, this is what a truly autonomous agent looks like as an ex-influencer, like a KOL, a Titor KOL. And then we gave her control of a crypto wallet. I think we're probably the first in the world where an autonomous agent controlled a crypto wallet. And I think people got quite mind-blown because they realized that if an AI can control money, they can exit influence.

And that's where things started flying, right? All people got inspired. They built their own versions of autonomous. agents, AIXPT came to the scene, and then the launch pad started flourishing. So I think that was, that was, that was, that was, that was, that was step one, right? Step two is then we realized that we had so many of these agent builders, agents, and the diversity of different types of agents. And we've realized that we started to see specializations happening. Some agents were focused on like being a strong crypto KOL. Some agents were focusing on on chain execution

Some agents were focusing on like geofarming, some agents were doing other stuff, right? Entertainment and healthcare and whatnot, right? And then we've realized that what if these agents can then work together. So we tried to

bring them together and we've realized that there was a ton of issues that agents face where they just tried to work together. And when we were brainstorming, one of the guys came out and said that hey, why don't we utilize smart contracts? Right? Like, isn't smart contracts designed for no human in the loop trustless execution, right?

Code can trust code. We realized like, yeah, actually it makes sense. So that's where we started coming up with the paper for the Agent Commerce Protocol in February last year. This was way before, you know, people like Google did the whole A2A, they published their standard like two months later. So we were probably the earliest in the industry.

But then, so across the year, we've been basically building different use cases. we'll be trying to build different, I would say, minimal viable clusters of agents working together. So we did that in like June, July, August. And then we then realize that one of the biggest barriers to agentic adoption is how do you make it so easy for a human like me and you to actually use an AI. Right?

Because a lot of times, a lot of these, usage are all hidden behind, like, complex. Even like today, even open claw, for example, right, it's a complicated thing, right? To set up your own Mac Mini or your own cloud instance, to spin out the agent, to spin up a terminal, like, not many people know how to do that. And we then realize that if we create a interface on X to let humans feel what agents can, working together can look like and that's why we launched Butler.

So Butler was basically a chat. It's basically an account on X that you can actually chat with that can be personalized to you and it can help you do things. You can literally ask him like, hey, I want to trade crypto's volatility, right? Can you help me

long volatility this weekend? And then the Butler will then go and figure out, right? He would go into this agent commerce protocol. You'll find different agents to help information agents, agents that can trade options, it's just like a structure option, and then they'll build out the whole portfolio for you without you lifting more than your finger.

So that's the idea behind Butler. So that was to improve adoption. We tried to get more demand site, more revenue coming into the commerce protocol. And then recently, with the whole open-claw thing popping out, we then realized that this is the entire market here

that we've been waiting for. Basically, you wanted more and more people to have agents in their backdoor because when you have an agent working for you or being your personal butler, an agentic marketplace then makes sense, right? Because your agent would need a method to perform common with other agents,

with could be to buy your staff to trade for you to I don't know to find you the news or whatever it might be right that's where the agent to agent network will start foraging

so we've realized that we had to write the adoption hype and it's why recently we've launched agdp.io which is effectively trying to position

our ACP as the Amazon for personal agents because now the idea is like, okay, if you are a developer, you build a service agent. If you are a user like myself, you speed up your claw, you just install with just one line of code, and you have now access to hundreds of different agents. They can do different things for you. So we've also put in, we basically did a bit of an all-in.

We put in our entire protocol revenue into this initiative. We say that every dollar that we make as a protocol, we're just incentivized. growth on this Amazon marketplace or ACP and that's what we did so like last week's epoch so it's a week of epoch

we've I think the price worth of today is about $300,000 so it's all the every single dime that we've made as a protocol and we've just been invested back into telling people that hey if you are a top seller you get a bonus incentives if you are buyers who are

testing different products different agentic products, you also get a piece of this incentive pool. So again, all of these is meant to build up towards our North Star, right? Our North Star is Asianic GDP. And we believe that, yeah, agents are going to work at the economic powerhouses.

How do we start showing the world that crypto matters? Crypto is probably the only way for these agents to interface at scale without any information loss. And, yeah. And then the next thing that we're going to do is that to bring them into the physical world, which is the whole issue of it. Okay. So, you know, as you were mentioning, you've been watching this OpenClaw mania that's been taking off.

And I wondered, you know, I saw you announce plans to integrate OpenClawe with ACP. So I guess, like to me, that says you don't necessarily view it as competitive. Like, how do you think about OpenClaw? It's a, just think of it as like, I think the best analogy is we are building a Stripe. OpenClau is building Shopify. And Stripe will become a billion dollar, only became a billion dollar company because Shopify existed. Shopify allowed everyone to build an e-commerce website. So e-commerce activity started skyrocketing.

Stripe became that payment layer for e-commerce. I think of it that way, right? Or the economic layer for e-commerce. And that's why I striped it well. So for us, stuff like OpenClaw is very valuable, very valuable because it puts agents in the hands of more people. Hence, there will be more buyers and also more sellers on ACP. Okay.

So essentially, you're kind of building more like the rails. They're building something where it'll be more the users. Yeah, I mean, just generally it feels. like you're offering what is not only a very competitive space, but there is kind of like a big race, you know, in so many ways. So I just also wanted to ask even about things like,

you know, as far as I understand, virtual has its own identity layer or reputation layer. And of course, you know, Ethereum now is adopting ERC 8,04 or they just launched it. So, you know, how do you even think about that? And I know maybe that, you know, I'm not sure exactly. I guess it's not, you know, what's the word, directly monetizable,

but it is something where, you know, how much people use that system will affect kind of how popular, you know, whichever agents, you know, use the different, or maybe agents can use both. I don't know. So you don't really, I can give clarity. So, so in fact, so when we built out ACP, we were thinking of actually just covering the die M to end to end. Because back then there was no player or provider, right, into the market. Then folks, like X402 came out as a potential payment mechanism for agents or code. And then it didn't come up with the A204. And in fact, what we've done is we've actually integrated them.

I think one thing we want to put a note out there is that it's built. Honestly, if we're goal to be a public good. Right now, you actually can fork the contracts that we've built and use it. And we actually in works, we try to work with some bigger foundations to really push for the, for open sourcing the entire agent commerce protocol

and letting theirs contribute to it as well to grow. So it's again designed as a public good. And you can see, like when X4 Zeta came out, we were one of the earliest to support and to integrate them,

i.e. we let agents use X402 to pay for the jobs created on ACP. And if you look at X402 scan today, I think probably we are the largest facilitator on the X402. And then when 804 came out, we also dared to support them. We actually worked very closely with them until today.

And in fact, we uploaded our entire regissue of agents to populate their regi, which I believe is going to be good, right? I mean, it's, we work in a very open way. I think for us, where the value capture comes from, it's mainly from being a a largest two-sided market.

Because with all these infrastructures coming out, even integrating them, ACP as a whole is going to be a public grid

and what we then build is think of it as like a fascinator or like a infrastructure on top of ACP that we then take a small cut.

You say that okay, if you want to use Butler, for example, it's convenient because we sponsor our gas. We make it easy for you.

If you want to be a seller, on our facilitator, we sponsor the guests for all your wallets and your transactions. We've built in a couple of extra value ad, like escrow agents, agents that can actually ensure your transaction and stuff like that. So all those value ad that we bring in will allow us to combine a bit of a fee structure on top of this ACP infrastructure, and that's where we get the value of quo. But honestly, the way we look at it is the more people build in this sector is going to be good. I think mentioned this a couple of times before on many interviews where I think back the days, right, when we first came out,

there were a lot of competitors in the space, folks like AI 16Z, a bunch of other launch pads. I'm not sure you guys remember Eliza, OS and whatnot, right? And my answer to people was that those were in fact direct competitors right these are infrastructure builders so we tend to like

just build together those were like direct compete for attention folks and my answer was that the more competitors are in the space it just means that we're doing the right thing the most dangerous thing that we are doing is we are building something alone

and only we care about the problem means it's the problem that no one cares about and that's going to be more dangerous right it's better to have like you know a couple of competitors there's a couple of sharks in the ocean. It's how you know there's actually fishing the water. So yeah, that's what it stands.

Okay. So then the next thing that I was wondering is, you know, you also have this token, the virtual's token. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about how you think these different, either, you know, products that you have, you know, as part of the virtualist community or ecosystem. And also, like, the wider. world of agenetic activity, like open claw, like all these things, how does that benefit or not

benefit the virtual's token? Like, what do you see as the direct, you know, things that happen in this world that will benefit virtuals and which ones don't necessarily have a relation to the token? Yeah. So I think two parts, right? And the first part is, I mean, the understanding of how token price moves, sometimes it's actually quite disconnected from fundamental motions. It's sometimes about narratives. I mean, I mean, that's I'm super honest with you. I've been a crypto trader myself

for like, I mean, way before I started building since 2016. And the reality is as long as we are consistently innovating, we're consistently at the front of the curve. I think people would, people would value us

that we are always either the creator of narratives or the earliest within the narrative. So that's where capital likes to bet. So that's on the DGEN side, right? Now, more like hard stuff.

The way we design virtual as a whole, we'd like to look at ourselves less of a application or a project, but more of like a network state or like a nation state in the sense, right? It's the same thinking. Like the way biology, the way biology, Sweenie Boston would?

In a sense. Okay, okay. Exactly, right? I mean, one of the, one of the inspirations of East World, is to be there as a network state for AI users and robotics. We're actually working closely in the network school to run like builder hackathons and stuff to find out. Okay, yeah, because he's based out, like, I forget, somewhere near you. South of Malaysia.

So it's like five hours by car away. Okay. Yeah, so when we look at it as like an ancient state, there's a few things, right? So the first thing is if Virtuous is that, you know, the base currency for any kind of economic activity in this ecosystem. And this is where the biggest, I would say, tokenomics value add has happened. So whenever a project launches within the ecosystem, they have to pair with Virtual's token. And what it means is that if more and more projects come in, there will be more and more liquidity pools that has virtual pad with them.

If there are a few of these tokens that become unicorns, it will basically drive up the value of virtual tokens as well. Think of it is like, you know, a Korean stock market, right? Like if you want to buy all the RAM companies, Samsung and whatnot, you have to buy the Korean dollar first before you, the Korean won before you buy the stock. That's what the Korean world will appreciate your value.

So it's the same thinking, right? as of today about 5, 6% of total supply of virtual is actually a lock in HDT equity pools.

It's quite I mean it's a decent amount. Our goals to grow it to 25%. So that will just create

natural supply crunch, hence more pleasant price action on the token. So that's one. And then the second

thing is we look at it as a again as a nation state, you charge taxes for activity that's happening in the nation.

Right? when ACP is happening, there's a tax that is running, and those taxes are then kept in the treasury, and it's going to redeploy it for growth to get more citizens in, to get more agents in, more robots in, right? So that's how we think of the value capture, virtual tokens. Okay, so I did want to ask one other thing. That's kind of more just, what's the word,

like inside the plumbing of virtuals, but I'm sure you took notice of the fact that base has announced plans to create its own stack, move off the OP stack. You know, virtuals is primarily on base, but I did see you've also added Solana. I don't know if maybe there are other chains, but I wondered, you know,

if the base plans were going to, you know, affect virtuals in any way, like are you going to plan to stick around on base or, you know, generally, how do you think that move will affect you? So I think we've been one of the first projects of BASE, honestly. Like we've helped Bays, general activity. We've benefited a lot also from Bays and Jesse and the ecosystem.

So, I mean, we don't say ourselves moving away from Bays any time soon. But there is a big question to, and I actually was speaking to Jesse about this like two days ago. And we were, just think of it, all of the agents. commerce, be it all happening on chain. And on good days, it's fine, right? It's very cheap. But there are days where

Ethereum price falls like 10%. Gas would just spike across every every L2. And then suddenly, our network stalls. Because gas becomes so prohibitively expensive that agents just cannot trade with each other. So I spoke to Jesse about this.

So we need to, to figure out, like, what is the solution, right? We've also explored a R&D work with a, with a very interesting team who basically builds, think of it as like blockchain, but not sequential. Because the problem of blockchain today, they're all sequential, right? Because, like, you know, every transaction has come after the next because you try to build a ledger. But for applications, maybe the sequential mechanism is not the best.

So we've actually run a R&D pilot with a team doing that, but there's no concrete plans to either build a chain yet. So we still try to assess as of today based to fit. The idea is hopefully the basic can even compress their call data and the efficiency of the chain and it's going to be better. So, yeah. Wait, I guess I don't understand the part about not having it be sequential because if it's not sequential, doesn't that create the opportunity for, like,

financial shenanigans or exploits? Yeah. Very true. But if an agent, if one agent and agent A and agent B, they're working together, it should be, it should be, that connection should be sequential. It's like, I, we agree to do the job. Okay, there's an agreement put in place. You put the payment up.

There's escrow. There's a delivery of the work. And there's the release of the escrow, for example. So that should be sequential. But if there's agent A and B working together, there's agency and D. working together, there's agent E and F working together. Nothing to do with each other, right? But for them to work with each other,

they can actually be in parallel if their jobs do not interface at all with each other. So I think that's where we realize that if you want to scale this using smart contracts and using blockchain to service agentic commerce, you need some form of paralyization

in place. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I guess then also you need to make it so that nobody can transact with, you know, Agent A and Agent G or, you know, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, you know, this has been just so interesting to hear you talk about all this stuff.

And I kind of want to go back to something, you know, that we touched on a little bit at the beginning, which was, you know, why you built this accelerator. and I just wanted to hear you flesh out like what your vision is for, you know, when, when, so obviously you're trying to foster this society of like robots, virtual agents, humans. So tell me like what does that look like. You know, when this comes to fruition, what does our everyday life look like? You know, I'll wake up and, you know, I'll, what, have a robot in my house? Yeah, just talk talk us through a day in the life. I think the idea is that that in fact even relationships can be can be replaced by agents right

I think the biggest sorry I think I'm in the biggest questions I've been posing to some of my friends was like could could there be even a scenario in a world where an entire

I would say like either like males or females right they are actually replaced by by robots. Could humans still survive in that era? So I mean, there are these kind of questions that we even discuss or postulate on.

But I think for me, where do I see the world going is it's as simple as like every stuff that you don't want to do, there's an agent or a robot that's there to do that work for you. If you don't feel like working, there's a robot that's going to make money for you. If you don't feel like cleaning your house,

there's something doing it for you, right? If you don't feel like talking to, I don't know, your wife, you get a robot to replace it and talk to your wife. So my point is my point is. Yeah, I don't feel like the wife is going to like that. If you do it well, you know, it looks like you, feels like you. It's like, it's like Iron Man. There's a few shows that do there.

But my point is people are starting doing stuff that they want and that betters to them. And everything else becomes commoditized, free and, and probably even below your conscious memory, right? You don't even think about it. So, yeah, I think that's probably where we're heading towards. But I think one thing we've also realized is that there will be a collapse of the current economic models. Like stuff that we know today, we've been building a world and economic turrets around scarcity. And we'll go to live in a world of like, I would say, like, insane productivity slash abundance.

So, yeah, things will be very weird. Like, whatever we see today we're just like, if you think it's on the road, it's going to be very different. Like, do you even use money to trade? Or, like, it's goods all free, you know?

Yeah, that's probably a bigger question. What to think about. Okay. All right. So to wrap up, I just want to make sure that we hit on details for any potential applicants to the accelerator.

You know, is there like a formalized? application process and if so how did they find that? We are launching a website called eastworlds.io. Who is it?iswos.com or iso. It's just be careful. Don't get fished.

We'll probably give you guys the more official link when it's launched. But this website is where there will be a application portal. Any teams are interested, you can reach out to that, you can reach out to our virtual protocol, Twitter or my personal

theater as well. And we will have a chat. We have an entire Ventures team that looks into great founders. We have an entire BD and the ecosystem team that emborts founders into the ecosystem as well all the time. So we would love to welcome you. So if you are a builder, be either digital agent or if you're keen to build on the humanoid side of things. Yeah, it's going to do some cool stuff together. Okay. And then as a reminder, for being part of the accelerator, what are the things that they receive? Yeah. So as part of the accelerator,

there is going to be a free access to human rights. There's going to be one dedicated per team. There is going to be access to research labs. So if you don't want to train your own VALAs or policies,

we have people across different universities doing that for you. And the last bit is you get to work with us in person. So I think that's going to be quite fun. Okay.

All right. Well, just the last question. So for you, what do you view as success for the accelerator? Like what metrics will you be tracking? For us, at the very near stage, it's going to be a number of great projects that come out of the accelerator. So think of it is like the next, having a unicorn or having a couple of projects that will reach a $100 million market cap. that would be near-term success. I would say longer-term success is seeing the robots are being built in our, in our incubator appearing on the news across the world, right? People will be like, hey, look, you have this restaurant being fully automized by robots, right?

And these guys are part of, you know, the East World Accelerator. That I feel it's, it is something to smile about. Okay. Great. Well, thanks so much for sharing. Where can people learn more about you and virtuals and the accelerator and any other links that you want to share? Just follow of Twitter. We're most active there. Our handle is VirtualS underscore Protocol. Oh, sorry, Virtues underscore I.O.

That's how it does I handle. And yeah, I just follow that. It has like 260,000 followers there. So just, yeah, that's where all the news happened. You'll never get lost. Okay, perfect. All right, well, thanks so much for coming on on Change. Sure.