Original author: TechFlow
Last year, we paid attention to VIRTUALS Protocol early on. At that time, the AI Agent craze had not yet begun, and the market value of the VIRTUAL token was only around 800k.
(For details, see: virtuals.io | AI Agent version of Pump.fun is coming: What is it like to issue an AI agent token and let AI make money for you? )
Everyone knows the story that followed. Virtuals started a new AI Agent craze on Base. In addition to the eye-catching Virtuals token itself, it also produced phenomenal tokens such as AIXBT.
But after one cycle, the hype about AI Agents gradually faded, and the market seemed to fall into silence; and with the emergence and iteration of large models such as DeepSeek, everyone felt that the AI Agent narrative in Web3 was gradually falsified and of little use.
When you let your guard down and feel discouraged about the market, there are always new ways of creating assets, which always cause sharp fluctuations in token prices.
In the past week, the token of Virtuals has risen by 150%, and in the past day it has risen by 42%. Discussions related to Virtuals have returned to the timeline of crypto information.
The catalyst for Virtuals rise is the new Genesis Launches event on its own platform.
If you haven’t heard of this activity yet, you can briefly understand it as follows:
A gameplay that allows you to get “priority ticket purchase rights” for the hot new AI agent tokens by holding $VIRTUAL tokens and earning points.
To put it more simply, it is the change in the new stock model.
Each version has its own god, and each version creates assets. New tokens, new stories, and new mechanisms can always ignite market enthusiasm.
Carrying out various activities and designing mechanisms around asset creation can easily become the beginning of a new trend.
The last round of AI Agent wave on Base was more or less brought about by Virtuals; does this round of Genesis Launch contain new opportunities?
We also experienced the product and will give you a quick introduction to the gameplay and mechanics of Genesis Launch.
Contribution first, Buddhist IPO
According to the official description, Genesis Launch is a fair launch platform created by Virtuals Protocol specifically for AI agent tokens.
In simple terms, it is a mechanism for new AI agent projects to issue tokens in a community-driven manner. Users can get priority distribution rights for these new tokens by holding $VIRTUAL tokens and earning points.
In other words, unlike Pump.fun where everyone can compete with each other in terms of hand speed to participate in the dog-beating, participation in the current launch of new tokens on Virtuals is conditional; and this condition is essentially using the upfront contribution judgment to curb the rush for chips at the opening to a certain extent.
Specifically, in some previous platforms, snipers used high-speed scripts to buy low-priced chips, and scientists could also monopolize most of the shares through bulk wallets and gas fee bidding. Sometimes retail investors didn’t even load the trading interface, and the token price had doubled.
If you want to participate in the new listing, you have to know how to set the gas fee, monitor the contract deployment, and even get up in the middle of the night to watch the dynamics on the chain. Ordinary players dont have the skills and energy to do this. In the end, they can only watch the technical experts make money from the new listing, while they can hardly drink the soup.
The Genesis Launch seems to be relatively Buddhist and gentle. You don’t need to rush to buy stocks at the opening of the new shares, but use a different logic:
Want to participate in the new AI token issuance? Then first contribute to the Virtuals ecosystem and accumulate enough points.
How do you earn points? For example, by holding $VIRTUAL tokens, staking other tokens, or helping to promote Virtuals through content contribution, etc. This logic will be described in detail below.
But first looking at the overall picture, the effect of Genesis Launch is that it simplifies the new stock process to the extreme.
You just need to hold $VIRTUAL tokens, accumulate enough points, and then pledge these two things within the 24-hour new coin pre-sale window, and the system will automatically calculate the share of new coins you can get.
Detailed explanation of how to play points
Next, let’s take a closer look at how the Genesis Launch system uses points to buy new items.
First of all, how do you get points?
The official website provides 3 ways to earn points:
Invest in other agents in the Virtuals ecosystem, which are currently divided into two categories: Sentient (emotional AI Agent) and Prototype (prototype AI Agent). This is actually using Virtuals to purchase some AI Agent tokens that already exist in the ecosystem. After the purchase, the points are equivalent to cashback, and you can use this cashback to participate in the Genesis Launch on the platform.
Buy and hold Virtuals tokens directly. This does not need much introduction. It is equivalent to earning points by hoarding coins, which is similar to a loyalty reward.
Stake $VADER tokens. VADER is also the token of Vader AI, an AI Agent project in the Virtuals ecosystem. Staking this token will earn points to participate in new listings, which is essentially support for the Vader AI project. The author believes that this is a leading example of ecological support, because the staking rules are not actually set in stone, and other projects may also become the objects of staking points in the future.
It should be noted that this points system is dynamically updated every day.
Virtuals will distribute a certain total number of points every day to players who meet the above three types of behaviors according to different distribution ratios to encourage their contribution to the ecosystem.
In terms of distribution ratio, the purchase of other AI Agents in the ecosystem accounts for 75% of the points distribution weight; direct currency holding accounts for about 20%, and the remaining 5% is given to the staking of VADER tokens.
This may also explain to some extent why the tokens in the Virtuals ecosystem, as well as the VIRTUALS tokens themselves, have seen a sharp rise in the past week or two.
After understanding the points rules, let’s take a look at how the new AI tokens are issued.
Genesis Launch uses a 24-hour pre-sale window with transparent allocation rules to prevent monopoly, as follows:
Distribution ratio: 37.5% of the total supply of new tokens is used for pre-sale, 12.5% is injected into the liquidity pool (such as the Sentient Agent pool), and the remaining 50% is used for project development, finance and marketing. The 37.5% of the pre-sale is the big cake that retail investors can grab.
Dynamic allocation: During the 24-hour pre-sale window, your staked points determine your allocation share. The more points you have, the more tokens you get, but each person can only take a maximum of 0.5% of the total supply to prevent large players from eating up the pool. The system will calculate each persons share in real time based on the total point pool of all participants. For example, 1,000 points may get 1% of the pre-sale share in a total point pool of 100,000.
Refund mechanism: Haven’t used up all the $VIRTUAL and points you pledged? Don’t panic, the system will return them to you.
During the Genesis Launch process, both points and $VIRTUAL tokens need to be pledged to compete for the right to allocate new AI tokens.
A simple process is as follows:
Hold $VIRTUAL: Buy $VIRTUAL tokens and prepare your tickets.
Accumulate points: Get a certain number of points through the above 3 points acquisition modes.
Staking: Stake your points and $VIRTUAL within a 24-hour window on the Virtuals website after the new token presale begins. The system will estimate the amount of $VIRTUAL that needs to be staked.
Waiting for allocation: After the pre-sale ends, the system will calculate your share based on the total points pool, and the new tokens will be directly credited to your account. Unused $VIRTUAL and points will be refunded.
Receive or trade: After receiving the new token, you can hold it or trade it on DEX.
Points are your priority certificate for participating in the new issue, which determines how much new tokens you can get. The more points you have, the higher the allocation ratio (but the upper limit for each person is 0.5% of the total supply of new tokens).
It should be noted that points will be consumed when participating in the pre-sale. If you do not use the points allocated to you by Virtuals, they will expire after a certain period of time, so it is also encouraging you to invest points to participate in the new issuance.
The Virtuals tokens themselves are the cost you invest when you buy new shares. The system will also give you suggestions on the number of Virtuals tokens you need to invest based on the points you invest. The logic here is:
The more points you have, the higher the upper limit of tokens you can get from new listings.
With few points, it makes little sense to invest more Virtuals in new IPOs.
To prevent monopoly, a wallet can invest up to 566 Virtuals for new issuance, and there is also a 1% transaction tax.
What if you don’t have enough points and don’t want to buy old assets?
Virtuals has also launched its own Yaps mechanism, which allows players to earn points through content contribution and publicity, giving players who want to play new games at a low cost more options.
Start new assets and revitalize old assets
Experience tells us that when designing mechanisms around crypto assets, we cannot think one step at a time and it is best to kill two birds with one stone.
The gameplay of Genesis Launch is very clear, which is to revitalize old assets while creating new assets.
In the Virtuals ecosystem, old AI tokens (such as Luna and AIXBT) already have their own market stories.
As the AI Agent craze cools down, the trading volume and community popularity of these old coins have inevitably experienced a significant decline compared to before.
This wave requires points to buy new shares, and points must be obtained by purchasing old assets. This design increases the demand for old assets by creating new rules for assets, thereby pushing up the prices of old assets.
At the same time, the prices of new assets on Virtuals are also rising secretly even though not many people are participating yet.
For example, the BasisOS token, which was created through this Genesis Launch, has a market value of 5.5 M in the 12 days since its launch, which is a 40-fold increase from the initial launch.
In the absence of major changes in Virtuals technology and narrative tone, this new leading old approach at the asset issuance level can indeed create a certain degree of waves in the recent dull market.
If you look back at the overall environment, you will find that the AI Agent tokens that were popular before have all rebounded to a certain extent.
Therefore, the AI Agent narrative may not be truly shattered, but it is in urgent need of new asset issuance methods. The leading projects in the previous cycle are also actively saving themselves and regaining market enthusiasm through more gameplay expansion.
Everyone’s ideas are similar. Ai16z in the Solana ecosystem seems to be doing something similar, creating a new asset launch pad Auto.fun, and then using rule design to create economic incentives for demand for AI16Z tokens, thereby driving price changes in old coins.
When “bringing old with new” becomes the new version of the gameplay for this round of AI Agent platforms, a better way for us is to treat old coins as Beta, and actively look for new Alpha in the market environment that is not too competitive at this time.
