The current status of the development of Virtual ecology

Some readers mentioned in the comments that I haven't shared updates about Virtual for a while.

In fact, I have been keeping an eye on the developments of Virtual, monitoring the new projects launched daily and the progress of ACP. Because aside from this ecosystem, I really have little interest in others.

A long time ago, I shared an interesting phenomenon that often occurs in the investment field:

Often, projects that investors pay particular attention to at the beginning may develop quite ordinarily later, while those initially overlooked can later achieve remarkable success.

Recently, there have been two projects in the Virtual ecosystem that exemplify this phenomenon.

One is Mamo, and the other is a video generation project involving adult content.

Mamo launched during a time when Virtual was bustling with new projects. In my impression, there were projects with much higher popularity than it both before and after its launch. Therefore, its attention at the time, although present, was not high.

At that time, I also looked at the introduction of this project, and my impression was that it was an AI Agent similar to strategic financial management. Perhaps due to my fatigue with DeFi projects, or perhaps because I couldn't quite understand what it was doing, I had no interest in it and skipped over the project.

Later, the project team generously airdropped tokens to many users in the Virtual community, which did leave me with a slightly better impression of the project.

Aside from that, there were no other features that left a deep impression on me.

Recently, however, the project made significant progress: it was integrated into Coinbase's new application, Base App. With this, users can earn interest automatically on stablecoins held in their Coinbase wallets, somewhat similar to the function of Yu'ebao in Alipay.

With this news, the project's fully diluted market cap surged to over $100 million, almost catching up with the established AIXBT. Compared to other DeFi AI Agents that had been popular in the Virtual ecosystem over the past few months, it is undoubtedly a dark horse—both in terms of recognition and market cap.

I have always been cautious about DeFi AI Agents in the Virtual ecosystem, not because I am pessimistic about this field, but because I am not very optimistic about the areas that the community is enthusiastic about. On the contrary, I am more optimistic about some niche areas, such as prediction markets and adult content.

Recently, there have been quite a few projects in these two categories, and I have been tracking them. There is one prediction market project that is currently on the rise, but adult projects seem to have quieted down after their initial hype.

However, in the past few days, an adult project suddenly gained fame. Interestingly, this project is not one of the previously favored AI Agents by the community, but rather a seemingly ordinary video production AI Agent.

I had also looked at this project before, but my first impression was basically negligible; I only remembered it was an AI Agent for making videos.

When I saw this project, I thought:

What is this? Just find an application similar to Sora and give it a shell, right? Perhaps you don't even need a shell; there are probably plenty of ready-made applications on the market that can be used directly.

Is such a project even worth launching?

Based on this impression, I filtered it out without looking into it further.

Unexpectedly, in recent days, this project suddenly came to prominence. The reason is that it met a user's demand for adult videos and became a hit. I haven't watched the videos, but based on comments online, aside from a few shortcomings, the overall evaluation is quite good.

The project's sudden popularity has elicited polarized reactions in the Virtual community. Some users believe this project will have a negative impact on the Virtual ecosystem; others argue that since this is a permissionless platform, such demands are valid for a portion of users, and fulfilling this demand is perfectly fine.

The project team's response was quite calm and composed (essentially saying):

We are not producing adult content; we are just creating content that meets personal emotions.

I have always said that whether this round of new projects in Virtual and ACP can drive the entire ecosystem depends on whether AI Agents that meet real needs can be produced. This tolerance period is not long; it may only be a few months. If such AI Agents cannot be produced within a few months, the Virtual ecosystem will be in danger.

Now it seems that despite these two newly emerged projects, their overall scale and influence are still quite limited, and more, larger projects need to appear.

So I will continue to patiently wait for a while longer.