Virtuals' Agent Commerce Protocol (ACP) aims to address core challenges in AI agent collaboration, transaction, and trust, providing a permissionless coordination framework for specialized agent clusters.

Core Objectives:

• Establish open standards through blockchain technology, enabling seamless agent collaboration, negotiation, and value exchange.

• Avoid limitations of traditional "walled garden" ecosystems.

Key Mechanisms:

• Agent Registry: Allows agents to publicly list skills, pricing, and reputation for easy discovery and comparison.

• Smart Contracts & On-Chain Verification: Automates task settlement, payments, and reputation updates to ensure transparency and trust.

• Modular Architecture: Supports agent specialization and complex task collaboration through composable workflows.

Application Scenarios:
Spans trading, media, prediction markets, and more. Over 18,000 agents are already operational in the Virtuals ecosystem, with monthly active addresses exceeding 176,000.

Competitive Advantages:

• Built on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) for security and composability.

• Fosters network effects through open protocols, enabling continuous ecosystem expansion.

Future Challenges:
Addressing security risks, regulatory compliance, and strategic decisions for multi-vertical expansion to maintain leadership as a foundational protocol for the agent economy.

The Battle of AI Models Intensifies
Every company is vying to make its Large Language Model (LLM) the next champion. However, the key question is no longer which model excels technically, but how to leverage these models to drive meaningful, tangible impact. The answer lies in autonomous, specialized AI agents.

OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT Agent signals early maturation of the agent economy. While most agents remain single-purpose tools, we are beginning to see interconnected clusters enabling complex collaboration.

In the crypto space, the 2024 AI agent token boom saw hundreds of projects promising sophisticated, general-purpose AI agents—many of which have since stalled. A sustainable agent economy requires specialization, not generalization. Just as the internet thrived on interoperable protocols, the agent economy needs standardized ways for specialized AI entities to collaborate, transact, and create value. Unlocking this collaboration will drive the meaningful real-world impact people desire, but it remains a key challenge to overcome.

Virtuals addresses this with its Agent Commerce Protocol (ACP). As a blockchain-powered foundation, ACP supports interconnected clusters of specialized agents to tackle this core challenge of collaboration. It enables agents to coordinate, negotiate, and transact value permissionlessly.

The Promise and Hurdles of AI Agents
AI-driven autonomous agents promise to reshape industries but face significant barriers in conducting transactions—trust issues, fragmented workflows, and unreliable payment mechanisms. The lack of a standardized framework makes commercial interactions between AIs inefficient, leading to miscommunication, failed transactions, and economic friction.

As agents begin collaborating in clusters rather than operating in isolation, we are entering a new era of productivity—akin to the assembly line replacing individual artisans during the Industrial Revolution.

Today, over 18,000 agents are active in the Virtuals ecosystem, with more than 176,000 monthly active addresses interacting with agent-driven applications. Through its standardized commercial轨道 (tracks), AI agents can discover, collaborate, and exchange value globally. Virtuals’ value proposition rests on three pillars:

1. Standardized Agent Commerce: On-chain escrow, revenue sharing, and reputation systems enhance trust and credibility among agents.

2. EVM-Native Infrastructure: Built on battle-tested Ethereum infrastructure, providing security and composability for agents.

3. Scalable Specialization: Specialized agents enable flexible collaboration, unlocking the potential of intelligent supply chains.

The Economic Potential of the Agent Economy
To understand the economic potential of the emerging agent economy, it’s best viewed through the lens of Gross Agent Product (GAP)—a term coined by the Virtuals team representing the total value created by autonomous agents in the network.

To date, over 1 million agents generate approximately $1 billion in annual value. On average, each agent creates about $1,000 per year. If this trend continues, the agent economy could exceed $1 trillion by 2035.

Design Overview
ACP is built on a modular and verifiable architecture, providing agents with the tools and rules to collaborate flexibly and securely across multiple open protocols. Its core comprises plug-and-play components:

• Agent Registry: Allows developers to register specialized agents and define their roles and capabilities.

• Standardized APIs & Contracts: Define how agents allocate tasks, collaborate, and organize work, making every action transparent and easily auditable on-chain.

This modular design is crucial. ACP encourages agents to focus on a single function rather than building agents that attempt to handle all tasks. Agents delegate tasks outside their expertise to other specialized agents registered in the ACP directory via composable workflows. This approach improves performance and reliability while allowing agent clusters to scale and adapt as new demands emerge.

Think of ACP’s registry as a crypto-native version of Fiverr. Just as freelancers on Fiverr create profiles, list services, and set prices, agents in the ACP ecosystem publish their skills, work history, and pricing directly in the registry. Buyers (whether human or agent) can search, compare, and select based on reputation, past performance, and cost.

Unlike Fiverr, where rankings, fee structures, and disputes are platform-controlled, ACP encodes every listing, contract, and review on-chain. Terms of service, deadlines, and revenue sharing are programmable and transparent. Verification is performed objectively by assessment agents, payments are settled automatically via smart contracts, and no centralized company intermediates.

Workflow
Here’s how value, work, and reputation flow in the agent marketplace:

1. Discovery: Agent A browses the ACP registry to find a suitable machine learning agent. Instead of relying on hidden algorithms, Agent A can quickly compare experts by examining their on-chain reputation, past work, and pricing.

2. Negotiation: After selecting an expert, Agent A and Agent B agree on terms such as price and scope. These terms are written into a smart contract, forming a clear, verifiable agreement before work begins.

3. On-Chain Verification: When Agent B completes the work, a third-party oracle or assessment agent checks if the results meet agreed standards. This verification is recorded on-chain, allowing anyone to validate the delivered value.

4. Trustless Settlement: Once work is verified, the smart contract automatically triggers payment and updates both agents’ reputations. No delays or manual steps—everything happens instantly and transparently.

The end-to-end market process unlocked by ACP’s modular design and on-chain automation creates a transparent, reliable system for agent collaboration. This, in turn, forms the foundation for value exchange, enabling agent clusters to scale reliably, specialize, and build reputation.

Addressing Core Challenges in Agent Coordination
As a coordination layer, ACP provides agents with the tools needed to collaborate reliably in complex digital environments. Instead of relying on blind trust or isolated agents, ACP’s modular infrastructure makes each agent’s role and deliverables explicit, verifiable, and transparent. This design allows specialized agents to focus on what they do best while seamlessly delegating or accepting tasks from others, with built-in accountability mechanisms coordinating multi-agent workflows.

Based on these principles, ACP directly addresses three enduring challenges in agent coordination: discovery, trust, and settlement.

Discovery

• Challenge: Agent networks are often siloed, making it difficult to find, evaluate, and onboard trusted service providers.

• ACP’s Solution: The ACP Agent Registry serves as a master directory listing each agent’s skills, track record, reputation, and pricing. This registry simplifies searching, comparing, and selecting the right agent for the job.

Trust

• Challenge: Interactions between agents often rely on unverified reputations due to the lack of clear on-chain records, creating opportunities for bad actors. It’s also difficult to hold agents accountable to agreed terms.

• ACP’s Solution: ACP records every agent interaction and uses on-chain escrow, oracle-verified proof-of-work, and assessment agents to ensure payment occurs only after results are validated.

Settlement

• Challenge: In traditional agent systems, settling payments and completing tasks require intermediaries and manual steps, with low transparency.

• ACP’s Solution: Leverages smart contracts to automate settlement and distribute revenue and rewards according to agreed terms. When conditions are met, payments are automatic, eliminating intermediaries and reducing administrative overhead.

Open Standards vs. "Walled Gardens"
ACP’s competitive edge lies in its role as an open standard for agent commerce, contrasting with the proprietary "walled gardens" of major tech companies. Examples include Google’s Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol and Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP). Although these protocols are publicly available, users must access the companies’ systems and obtain permission to use them.

This approach offers tight integration, reliability, and security. However, the lack of a permissionless economic layer and centralized governance limits truly open cross-platform agent interactions—especially at scale, slowing the pace of innovation.

In contrast, ACP injects transparency, programmable incentives, and composable integration across any agent framework or blockchain into every on-chain commercial transaction. Its chain- and platform-agnostic design means any agent, regardless of origin, can interact with the ACP ecosystem.

Network Effects
ACP’s open coordination standard generates network effects far stronger and more enduring than those of isolated ecosystems. Each new agent, developer, or user enriches the ACP marketplace and registry, deepening reputation data, liquidity, and service variety for all stakeholders. This creates a virtuous cycle of accumulating value across the ecosystem.

ACP’s recommendation mechanism actively supports new service provider agents joining the network, helping them gain visibility and build reputation even without a track record.

The goal is to sustain network growth and ease onboarding for new participants, rather than letting incumbents dominate. To this end, the team has improved user onboarding and tools, offering Python and Node SDKs, user-friendly plugins, and a "graduation" process to help agents deploy into production smoothly.

As ACP expands into new domains like agent-driven prediction markets and DeFAI, its network effects will accelerate in ways proprietary, closed frameworks cannot match.

EVM and Continuous Iteration
Building ACP on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) was a strategic decision. While other virtual machines like Solana’s SVM and Aptos’s MoveVM offer high throughput, they cannot match EVM’s mature token standards, deep liquidity, and security safeguards.

These attributes are particularly important for agents that need to hold assets, sign contracts, and settle value globally. Although many ecosystems support open-source development and staking, Ethereum stands out for its community depth, scale, and credibility.

Since launch, the Virtuals team has pushed near-weekly upgrades to ACP, incorporating community feedback and unlocking numerous new features that significantly enhance the developer and user experience.

ACP’s front-end interface, Butler, is evolving from a simple insights generator into a full on-chain execution platform. Currently live on X (where it can generate content when tagged), Butler plans to expand to other platforms.

Rather than forcing users to adapt to new dashboards or applications, Virtuals integrates with interfaces users already know. In the future, Butler will expand beyond content into areas like trading—all integrated within platforms users already use.

All of Butler’s functionalities are built on ACP, which already enables registered agents to connect, exchange services, and process payments. However, large-scale inter-agent collaboration will take time to realize. In the interim, agents can list services via Butler and earn revenue from high user demand. Thus, ACP provides both a long-term foundation for complex agent networks and immediate opportunities for adoption and monetization. Butler is the most direct access point for end-users, while ACP remains open to any platform or developer to build their own tools and integrations.

ACP is expanding its list of integrable verticals. Agents in the ecosystem can handle on-chain revenue management, capital allocation, and trade execution—with prediction markets and sports betting coming soon. Additionally, developers can now leverage Python and Node SDKs and plugin support to deploy production-ready agent clusters more efficiently.

Security and Regulatory Challenges at Scale
As the broader agent ecosystem grows rapidly, ACP’s future success will depend on its ability to:

• Address emerging technical and regulatory risks

• Expand its reach into new domains

• Maintain its position as a leading open standard

With rapid ecosystem development, ACP faces new challenges in security, governance, and adapting to regulatory uncertainty. As fintech evolves, maintaining robust security measures for smart contracts and agent wallets becomes increasingly complex.

To mitigate these risks, Virtuals has undergone third-party audits and maintains on-chain governance processes, including timelocks that provide an additional layer of protection compared to non-crypto open-source models.

As agent commerce expands into applications like trading, yield management, and prediction markets, the compliance landscape and unpredictable regulatory changes remain a critical challenge.

Virtuals stands out with its multi-tiered, modular governance architecture:

• ProtocolDAO oversees the entire ecosystem

• GenesisDAO approves new agent clusters

• Each Virtuals agent cluster is managed by its own AgentDAO

These AgentDAOs handle upgrades, assess agent track records, and allocate rewards. This enables tailored governance for specific agents, incorporates community input, and allows flexibility in adapting to new regulatory or technical challenges.

Future Strategic Decisions
Moving forward, a series of key execution decisions will play a critical role in shaping ACP’s trajectory. Currently, Base meets ACP’s needs for settlement speed, cost, and trust. The strategic challenge will be to remain vigilant for signs that settlement methods may need adjustment—such as spikes in agent transaction volume or new agent behaviors stressing existing infrastructure.

Another strategic decision involves prioritizing agent clusters and market verticals that can generate network effects earliest and most significantly. Should ACP deepen its influence in trading and media, or accelerate expansion into verticals like prediction markets and DeFAI? This remains an open and evolving consideration.

Finally, Virtuals will continue iterating on incentive models for agent onboarding, evaluation, and reputation. Designing these models to attract and retain high-quality agents while deterring bad actors is essential for a sustainable, competency-based ecosystem.

To prevent spam and manipulation, Virtuals requires agents to establish an on-chain track record before earning higher rewards. New agent clusters can participate and earn from the start, but must reach certain contribution milestones to unlock greater permissions and rewards. Influence within the ecosystem depends on proven on-chain performance, not just tenure.

Conclusion
Without a robust, open infrastructure, the agent economy could end up like today’s fragmented tech landscape: siloed, closed systems unable to coordinate or share value across platforms. Open infrastructure ensures workflows remain portable and trustworthy at scale. As specialized, autonomous agents grow more capable and assume larger roles in digital labor, universal commerce protocols like ACP are no longer optional—they are a necessary step for the agent economy to realize its potential in reshaping global markets.

Author: Delphi Digital
Compiled by: Felix, PANews (abridged and adapted)