Virtuals Protocol, a tooling platform that enables people to create artificial intelligence (AI) agents, has seen a price jump in numerous cryptocurrencies native to its ecosystem following the reveal of details regarding the protocol’s buyback-and-burn program. 

The price of VIRTUAL has increased more than 30% since 8:30 a.m. EST to trade at $3.90, giving the cryptocurrency a market capitalization of nearly $3.9 billion at presstime, data from CoinGecko shows. 

Meanwhile, the top AI agent coins on Virtuals by market cap – AIXBT, GAME, VADER, and LUNA – have each increased at least 27% in the last 24 hours. The entire ecosystem of Virtuals, which is built on Coinbase-incubated L2 Base, has a market cap of roughly $6 billion.

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Virtuals’ Plan

A buyback-and-burn program typically entails a protocol acquiring tokens and permanently removing them from circulation.  

Virtuals’ plan is to use almost 13 million of the protocol’s native token VIRTUAL ($11.7 million) to buy 25 types of AI agent tokens launched on its platform and burn the freshly acquired AI-related cryptocurrencies, according to an X post from early Wednesday. 

After being acquired across a 30-day time-weighted average price, the biggest burns will be of GAME at 1.6 million tokens, CONVO at 1.1 million tokens, and AIXBT at 880,000 tokens, per a Dune Analytics dashboard.

Representatives of Virtuals did not immediately respond to Unchained’s request for comment.

A Darling of the AI Agent Hype

Virtuals “is continuing to see significant demand for launching new Agents on its platform,” stated Franklin Templeton Digital Assets in a note published on Tuesday. “We can envision a future where AI agents revolutionize content generation on social media and play an integral role across various industries and platforms.” 

Similar to human influencers, AI agents can create economic value through several avenues such as rolling out their own brands, products, music, and movies, Franklin Templeton Digital Assets argued.  

The two largest liquidity pools for Virtuals-related tokens – VIRTUAL/cbBTC and VIRTUAL/WETH – on decentralized exchange Aerodrome have nearly $100 million in total value locked and fetch an annual percentage rate of at least 45% at the time of writing.