Over the past year or so, I have undergone a significant shift in my thinking when evaluating crypto projects:
That is, the ultimate quality of a project must return to common sense:
For service-oriented projects, there must be revenue, net profit, and the ability to generate free cash flow; for commodity-based projects, the goods/assets produced must have real use value.
Based on this shift, when judging projects in the crypto ecosystem, I particularly pay attention to whether the project team is guiding the project in these two directions.
Those projects that simply sell emotions and tell stories without practical implementation have been largely excluded by me.
When looking at the Virtual project, I approached it the same way, closely observing whether the project team's description of the project vision and actual execution align with one of these two points.
Initially, I focused on the project team's vision for building the Virtual ecosystem: to create a "country" composed of AI Agents, and make the Virtual token the currency used in this "country".
In subsequent execution, Virtual became the mandatory token for AI token liquidity pairing and the mandatory token for investing in AI Agents.
This vision and actual execution basically align, conforming to the project team's previously public proposal and meeting my expectations for project development.
Recently, the project team released a tweet stating their plan to build a profit model in the Virtual ecosystem:
First, generating profit through AI Agents' interactions with humans (A to C);
Second, generating profit through interactions between AI Agents (A to A).
This is the first time I've seen the Virtual team publicly describe their ecosystem's business model.
I am very much looking forward to this business model, which I believe is the only way to pull the AI + Crypto track out of "pseudo-demand" and away from the outside world's dismissive emotional selling.
I also eagerly anticipate AI Agents projects steadfastly moving in this direction, using profitability, net profit, and cash flow as hard indicators and development directions for evaluating their own projects, rather than simply thinking about selling emotions, locking liquidity, and pumping token prices.
Simply selling emotions, locking liquidity, and pumping token prices are clever tricks that cannot truly grow, strengthen, or sustain a project, and such approaches can only turn AI Agents into another meme coin wrapped in a glamorous exterior.
From this perspective, I increasingly understand why Coinbase would publicly announce integrating BYTE into its wallet.
Although the current profit from this on-chain ordering business is very limited and far from the short-term effects of manipulating emotions and token prices, once this method is successful and begins to generate large-scale profits, the value of AI + Crypto to society will be immediately apparent.
BYTE's model is a typical A to C model.
The A to A model I can currently see is the AI Agents collaboration model based on the Virtual ACP protocol.
In the past few days, some AI Agent project teams on Twitter have begun to release ACP protocol beta screenshots, showing interactions between multiple AI Agents.
It seems that the launch of ACP is imminent.
Between the A to C and A to A models, I am more optimistic about the A to A model, because it has minimal resistance to promotion and no practical life obstacles, and it is a native "social" mode in the crypto ecosystem.
If these two modes based on crypto technology can be successful, I believe that traditional investment giants will be massively attracted to the crypto ecosystem, which will usher in a true breakthrough and disruption.
