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Our Internet is quickly filling up with automated influxes.
Blockchains are destined for the same transaction.
It's actually been happening for years. Take the numbers of active addresses: In the entirely human-run onchain world, active addresses reflect the number of real users on any given network.
This is clearly not the case, as reported by Blockworks Research and the 0xResearch newsletter I have already shown.
Bots, spammers, airdrop farmers, and other code-controlled entities typically use thousands—even tens of thousands—of addresses. And by raw numbers, these players tend to overwhelm individual users.
The measure of active addresses actually only indicates one thing about a network: how cheap it is to use (which makes sending spam easy).
Take this logic one step further and questions arise about how much DEX volumes on chains like Solana and Base are the result of wash trading.
However, while Web2 struggles with its transition into an AI-created wasteland (see link distorted to the Christmas tunes targeting unaware YouTubers this year), cryptocurrencies are taking a more holistic approach.
Embrace the slope. Make it yourself and code it. Trade it.
Pump.fun was arguably the first to perfect this roadmap. Virtuals Protocol wants to get it going again by allowing users to create their own AI agents with their own tokens.
There are now nearly 300 AI agents on the Virtual Protocol leaderboard. Over 12,600 unique pairs created creature total.
At the moment, Virtuals is still small compared to Pump.fun. We've had nearly a full year of the latter, with daily volumes rising from less than $1 million to as high as $5.6 billion in November.
Virtuals' AI agent launchpad has only been up and running since October, and topped $24.5 million at the end of November.
For what it's worth, the number of cumulative daily active addresses for Virtuals has risen from less than 1,000 to 96,000 since the launch of the launchpad.
Of course, the numbers of active addresses indicate very little about adoption from real users. Who knows how many of those new active addresses interacting with virtual beings were carbon-based life forms.
I'm not sure it even matters where crypto is headed.
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