Author: Nancy, PANews

Today (February 12) early morning, Solana Degens sat in front of their computers for a long time, eagerly awaiting the official launch of Virtuals Protocol on Solana. However, this largest AIAgent issuance platform on Base did not replicate the wealth effect of the past. At a time when AI Agents are experiencing a downturn, the multi-chain expansion plan of Virtuals Protocol seems to be facing a "lack of adaptability" dilemma, with not only a low graduation rate but also insufficient market participation.

On the first day of launch on Solana, the graduation rate is 8.3%, and market participation is sluggish

On January 25, Virtuals Protocol announced its expansion into the Solana ecosystem and introduced several new plans, including launching Meteora trading on Solana, establishing a Strategic SOL Reserve (SSR), converting 1% of transaction fees into SOL for ecological incentives, and hosting a Virtuals AI hackathon supported by the Solana Foundation in March this year.

To assist more smart agents from the Base ecosystem in expanding to Solana, Virtuals Protocol's liquidity pool on Uniswap has been locked for ten years and is non-transferable. On January 26, co-founder Wee Kee proposed two major solutions to optimize liquidity and user experience. On one hand, the team is exploring allowing interested teams to use 50% of their cbbtc in their agent wallets as a source of liquidity to create additional liquidity pools on the Solana chain. On the other hand, the team is also researching cross-chain abstract swap solutions, which will allow users to purchase agents on Base with SOL or purchase agents on Solana with ETH.

The Solana expansion plan of Virtuals Protocol has also sparked market speculation. In this regard, EtherMage, a core contributor to Virtuals Protocol, stated that moving towards multi-chain is crucial for Virtuals Protocol to achieve its vision. Solana is the first step, and Virtuals Protocol will also expand to several other blockchains, setting aside dedicated resources to collaborate with blockchain leaders/foundations to ensure that projects established within the ecosystem receive funding support.

However, despite Virtuals Protocol taking the first step towards multi-chain expansion, market performance has not met expectations. In the early hours of February 12, Virtuals Protocol announced its official launch on Solana and disclosed several details: all prototype agent tokens on Solana will retain the same contract address when transitioning to Sentient; once an agent accumulates 42,000 VIRTUAL tokens on the binding curve, the agent will graduate and create a liquidity pool on the Solana liquidity platform Meteora (founded by the same team as Jupiter); 1% of Sentient transaction tax revenue will be allocated to Virtuals Protocol and manually distributed to agent creators, agent partners, and agent sub-DAOs in a ratio of 30%-20%-50% until the automated distribution mechanism is launched.

According to the official website, from early morning today until now, only 156 AI Agent tokens have been created on Solana's Virtuals Protocol, with a graduation rate of 8.3%. The market performance of projects that have graduated on Solana is also unsatisfactory, with only 5 projects having a market capitalization exceeding $1 million, the highest being the agent project Nyx, with a market cap of about $13 million. Moreover, overall, most projects have seen their token prices rise initially but then decline, with about half of the projects' prices nearing zero. Particularly in terms of participation, aside from the price-halved project cucumber tester, which has over 2,600 holding addresses, other projects generally have fewer holding addresses, typically in the hundreds or even tens. From the data, the market's response to Virtuals Protocol's entry into Solana has been relatively tepid.

To promote the growth of the Solana ecosystem and enhance network attractiveness, EtherMage also recently disclosed that "we have received many requests from teams wishing to use repurchase funds to establish cross-chain TVL on Solana." To this end, Virtuals Protocol will adjust the repurchase and destruction plan for Base agent projects, planning to assist agent projects with over $10,000 TVL in executing the establishment of cross-chain TVL (about 100 projects).

Business faces cyclical volatility challenges, market share remains at the top

Recently, the overall AI Agent sector has experienced a deep correction, and projects like Virtuals Protocol are facing market challenges brought about by cyclical volatility.

According to Dune data, as of February 12, Virtuals Protocol has successfully launched over 17,000 Agents, with a DEX trading volume of nearly $6.74 billion and cumulative revenue exceeding $37.766 million (only on the Base network).

However, multiple data points for Virtuals Protocol show a trend of slowing growth or even significant decline. Dune data indicates that in terms of the number of AI Agents created, the daily average creation number has significantly decreased since late January, often only in double digits, far below the peak of over 1,300 at the end of November last year. Meanwhile, revenue during this period has also seen a noticeable decline, with daily revenue mostly only in the hundreds of thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars, whereas it once exceeded $1.58 million at the beginning of this year. The trading volume of AI Agents on DEX has also experienced a substantial decline, dropping from the several hundred million dollars level at the beginning of the year to the current tens of millions of dollars level.

Similarly, the price of Virtuals Protocol's token VIRTUAL has also seen a significant pullback. According to CoinGecko data, in the past month, the price of VIRTUAL has dropped by 46.3%. This downward trend is closely related to the overall cooling of the AI Agent sector. According to Cookie.fun data, the overall market capitalization of the AI agent market has shrunk by nearly 65.3% from its peak in the past month.

Despite this, Virtuals Protocol still holds a leading position in the AI agent market. Cookie.fun data shows that the ecological market capitalization of Virtuals Protocol has reached $1.77 billion, ranking first in the market and accounting for 24.8% of the overall market share. However, due to the short time since Virtuals Protocol's launch on Solana, the AI Agent market on Solana is still dominated by ai16z, which has a market share of nearly 19.2%.

In this context, facing the significant decline in the popularity of the AI Agent market, Virtuals Protocol still faces considerable challenges in regaining growth momentum through its multi-chain expansion strategy.

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