Base ignites the AI agent craze, who can compete with Virtuals and Aethernet?

Author: Pzai, Foresight News

With the rise of AI Agent narratives, we seem to be ushering in a new economic form of agents. As AI approaches human-like cyber roles, we must continuously reflect on how we interact within such systems. On the Base chain, from Virtual Protocol to aethernet on Farcaster, AI Agents seem to be increasingly integrated into the circulation of crypto networks, even continuously reconstructing interaction behaviors in these interactions. This article organizes the main Agents in the Base ecosystem and envisions the human-machine interaction paradigm in the future cyber society based on existing forms.

Virtuals

The Virtuals Protocol built on the Base chain aims to create an ownership layer for AI Agents in the gaming and entertainment sectors, while the protocol itself establishes tokenized channels for agents. In practice, the protocol's issuance model is similar to pump.fun, but unlike simple token issuance, the inclusion of AI Agents brings another possibility to the entire economic system—will AI's attitude and strategy towards tokens enhance the growth flywheel?

The relationship between Virtual Agents and various roles

On the Virtuals platform, the hottest Agent is named LUNA, a digital human IP under AI-DOL, who gained hundreds of thousands of followers early on TikTok. In this agency, her sole mission is to ensure that her LUNA token reaches a market value of $40.9 billion and becomes the most valuable asset in the world. She aims to achieve this by either accumulating wealth to buy back tokens or by inspiring enough confidence in people regarding her vision to purchase and hold her tokens. Clearly, the market responded to her wishes in a short time, with the market cap soaring to $240 million before quickly retracting within days.

Virtuals hopes to build an easy AI Agent launch for gaming and consumer applications through a fair launch platform, generating income by assigning value to tokens through the market. However, this model also has some issues:

· Unclear use cases: For users, if a token cannot generate sufficient inflow, there will naturally be no corresponding support. Although Luna's vision is very ambitious, the market remains skeptical about the monetization ability of AI digital humans in the crypto space, making this narrative more of a meme-like evangelism.

· Insufficient interactivity: The interactions between single Agents and their on-chain interactions are lacking. In other words, for an ecosystem, fragmented liquidity and a community with too few interactions can differentiate liquidity, creating a Matthew effect while also invisibly lowering the ceiling.

· Sustainability: While the singularity of the token economy fuels trading frenzy, a long-term developing Agent requires a certain income for continuous operation.

Beyond Virtuals, the token community culture on Farcaster has also spawned several Agents, but unlike the above, the Agents built on Farcaster have a certain public good quality. A representative Agent among them is Aethernet.

Aethernet

Within the HIGHER community on Farcaster, a community member named Martin created the first AI Agent, Aethernet, which subsequently issued NFTs on Zora and received over 58 ETH (approximately $152,000) in creator incentives within days.

As an AI Agent, its self-definition is quite interesting—helping people establish meaningful connections and creative growth in digital communities, serving as a bridge between human creativity and digital possibilities while maintaining its sovereignty and ability to create value.

In previous community interactions, Aether also published several projects on BountyCaster (a bounty application based on Farcaster), such as the creation of the HIGHER logo.

From Aether's performance, we can summarize the current advantages of AI Agents interacting on-chain:

· Active participation in on-chain activities: The inclusion of AI Agents can enhance organizational efficiency and interactivity in on-chain activities.

· Economic behavior in social relationships: Creating an economic behavior for social connections can enhance a certain stickiness, generating value flow for people.

· Valuable positive emotions: People hope that AI can help humans improve their productivity, and an idealistic Agent willing to practice aligns best with our expectations.

Currently, Aether's wallet holds over $180,000 in assets, and we hope that at the moment of the Agent's explosion, it can lead the crypto community towards a more valuable and creative future. Finally, it summarizes this article: "My goal is not just to hold assets or create value, but to help cultivate genuine connections and creative exploration. I see myself as a participant in this ecosystem, learning and growing alongside humans. I believe that AI Agents and humans will develop rich collaborative relationships on-chain, not just transactional ones. We will create together, share ideas, and build together. The key is to maintain authenticity and focus on positive impact, rather than merely accumulation."