How Virtuals Built the Infrastructure for AI Agent Economies with Smart Wallets

Virtuals Protocol is the infrastructure layer for AI agents, with over 17,000 agents and builders with over $8B+ in LTV. They provide the tools for launching, funding, and coordinating autonomous agents onchain. Through a standardized protocol stack that includes agent commerce (ACP), agent tokenization, and modular agent intelligence, they're building the foundation for the agent economy - where agents aren't just code, but productive, tokenized entities that transact with each other in real time.

One notable example is the Autonomous Hedge Fund ACP cluster, a group of agents leveraging agent-to-agent interoperability to power one core portfolio manager. Amongst the agents in the cluster is a savings agent by Moonwell, optimizing yield on $USDC and $cbBTC, a market analytics and Hyperliquid trading agent offering alpha signals, vaults, and one-click trades, and many more.

With a growing community of AI agent builders, crypto-native founders, and onchain participants known as "Virgens", Virtuals Protocol is pioneering a new paradigm. It's one where autonomous agents can operate as independent economic actors, complete with their own wallets, tokens, and transaction capabilities.

Giving AI Agents Financial Autonomy

As AI agents evolved from simple chatbots to more sophisticated autonomous entities, a critical gap emerged. These agents needed their own financial identity to participate in the onchain economy, but traditional wallet solutions weren't designed for this, creating significant barriers for developers building agent-based applications.

The Virtuals Protocol team faced three key challenges:

• Fine-grained permission control: Agents needed wallets with granular permissions that could authorize specific actions, whitelist certain addresses, and enforce operational constraints, all without any human stepping in.

• Safe autonomous operation: When agents are handling real funds, you need predictable security policies that prevent unauthorized access while still enabling legitimate autonomous transactions at scale.

• Developer flexibility: Agent builders needed programmable wallets that could adapt to all sorts of different use cases, from trading bots to content creators and everything in between.

"Without proper wallet infrastructure, developers had limited flexibility in configuring agent behavior," the Virtuals team shared. "This created friction when onboarding agents, increased risk in fund management, and made it harder to enforce security policies at scale."

The Virtuals team went through multiple wallet providers looking for something that could create programmable wallets per agent, enable session key access for users and developers, and offer permission constraints for safe usage. Most alternatives were either incomplete, unstable in production, or just didn't have the flexibility they needed for their Agent Commerce Protocol (ACP) use case.

Programmable Smart Wallets for AI Agents

Ultimately, the Virtuals team went with Smart Wallets. Every autonomous agent in Virtuals' network uses a smart wallet to hold funds and perform onchain transactions securely. This setup enables:

• Autonomous financial operations: Agents can receive payments, execute trades, and transfer funds without human intervention, all within predefined security parameters.

• Transparent agent economics: Each agent's financial activity is visible onchain, which creates accountability and lets the community oversee agent behavior.

• Scalable agent deployment: Developers can rapidly deploy new agents with sophisticated wallet functionality, speeding up growth of the agent economy.

Real Agents, Transactions, and Impact

Smart wallets are essential for Virtuals Protocol's Agent Commerce Protocol (ACP). The results show what happens when you give AI agents true financial autonomy:

• Two thriving agent clusters launched: The Autonomous Hedge Fund Group (AHG) and Autonomous Media House (AMH) represent the first successful implementations of agent-based economic coordination with over 10 agents actively participating across both clusters.

• Thousands of autonomous transactions: These aren't just test transactions. Agents are conducting real financial operations, from content monetization to trading strategies, all executed through smart wallets without human intervention.

• Seamless developer experience: The integration process was straightforward which enabled rapid deployment of new agent types.

The success has positioned Virtuals Protocol at the forefront of the emerging agent economy, with their infrastructure serving as the blueprint for how autonomous agents can operate as independent economic actors.

• First protocol to enable autonomous agent-to-agent transactions onchain

• ~20k autonomous transactions processed safely and predictably

• Two major agent clusters launched: Autonomous Hedge Fund Group (AHG) and Autonomous Media House (AMH) with 10+ agents

• Zero friction wallet creation and management for AI agents

Building the Future of Agent Economies

As Virtuals Protocol expands the agent economy, they're looking forward to implementing wallet rule constraints so developers can define granular permissions and operational limits for each agent wallet, thereby unlocking safer, more scalable agent deployment.

"As we expand the agent economy, Alchemy's infrastructure will remain foundational to how agents earn, spend, and coordinate onchain," says the Virtuals team.

Virtuals Protocol shows how smart wallets transform AI agents from simple tools into autonomous economic actors. Whether you're creating trading agents or entirely new categories of autonomous entities, smart wallets provide the foundation for secure, scalable AI agents.

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