Virtuals Protocol Revenue Crashes as AI Agent Demand Sinks

Virtuals Protocol, an AI agent platform operating on Solana, has seen its daily trading revenue decline from a peak of $1.02 million in early January to $34,792 by late February, according to the protocol’s official Dune dashboard.

Meanwhile, the protocol’s native VIRTUAL token has gone through a dramatic 35.2% price decline over the past week according to CoinGecko, significantly underperforming the broader crypto market.

VIRTUAL is now trading 88.8% below its all-time high of $5.07, continuing a prolonged downtrend since reaching its peak in early January 2025.

“AI agent platforms have been in a downtrend recently due to thin liquidity stemming from macroeconomic pressures, unproven utility, oversupply of tokens, and a cooling TradFi AI sector,” Dominick John, an analyst at crypto and venture investment firm Kronos Research, told Decrypt.

The AI sector is “grappling with reduced market depth due to broader economic conditions,” John said, pointing to how the trend signals “traditional finance’s waning AI momentum” across deeper structural deficits.

In a tweet, Blockworks Research analyst Dan Smith noted that the platform was “smart to diversify revenue out of its own token.”

The protocol now holds some $12.1 million of cbBTC (Coinbase Wrapped BTC), a factor that has lent the platform some “runway to iterate on their product,” Smith said.

Holding “more mature assets” such as cbBTC allows platforms like Virtuals to form a “buffer against volatility,” Kronos Research noted.

Its steep decline contrasts with the start of the year, when AI agents were heralded as crypto’s new meta.

The hype over AI agents “is subsiding and now focusing onto genuine utility and quality,” Fraser Edward, CEO of payment and trust protocol Cheqd, told Decrypt. Such types of agents are “beginning to emerge,” Edward added.

Over the past three months, the sector mirrored market instability spurred by geopolitical tensions and trade conflicts. Virtuals Protocol, for instance, has suffered a drastic drop in market capitalization, declining to roughly $360 million from about $1.9 billion back in December 10, 2024, according to CoinGecko data.

In terms of new agent creation on the platform, its metrics dropped from November peaks of 1,300 to fewer than 10 daily throughout February. January’s expansion on Solana generated only $6,300 in daily revenue, failing to offset the steeper decline on the Base network where it began.

Active trading wallets also declined from 181,000 at peak to 7,642 by February 27 across the Base and Solana networks, the Dune Analytics dashboard curated by Virtuals' core team members shows.

Trading activity for the protocol was concentrated between September 26 and December 26, with significant spikes exceeding the $500,000 daily revenue threshold during this period.