The potential and potential risks of Virtual

In last Saturday's online discussion, readers asked more questions related to Virtual. Additionally, during this period, with the continuous rise in Virtual's price and the ongoing success of the Genesis Launches project, Virtual has begun to attract a lot of attention from participants.

While we focus on the potential of this project, it is also necessary to pay attention to the risks associated with it.

Therefore, in today's article, I would like to share a more comprehensive view of this project, focusing not only on its potential but also on my perspective regarding the project's risks.

Regarding its potential, I have shared quite a bit in previous articles, mainly including:

• The team is good, and the project is continuously being built and promoted, even during the bear market, which is quite rare.

• The project has certain profitability, and the vision of the project team is to turn the project token into a "currency" used within the ecosystem. In my view, this direction is correct, meaning that the project's business model is solid.

• Lastly, and most importantly, among the current AI + Crypto projects, whether compared to similar competitors or other AI projects, its strength is the strongest, and this strength is gradually increasing.

From these aspects, I believe it is the strongest among the AI + Crypto projects I have seen so far.

However, at the same time, the potential risks faced by the project are also worth noting.

The biggest risk, in my opinion, is whether this approach of starting from ICO and using financial methods to combine AI and the crypto ecosystem is a long-term, stable, and sustainable way for the AI + Crypto track?

To validate this, we need to see more and stronger AI agents being incubated on the platform.

What are stronger AI agents?

The best would be those that can break out of the niche, used not only by users in the crypto ecosystem but also by users in the traditional Web 2 ecosystem. If this cannot be achieved, at the very least, it must be like Uniswap, relying on blockchain technology to exist, with other technologies unable to achieve it, and solving a certain essential need within the ecosystem.

Currently, some well-known AI agents appearing on the Virtual platform, such as AIXBT, do not quite fit this description in my view.

In fact, this kind of risk has already appeared in the past development of the crypto ecosystem, and I believe many readers have experienced it firsthand: the once-popular decentralized flagship project, Filecoin.

In my view, decentralized storage should be an essential need for human society, both in the past, present, and future, and the realization of this application should theoretically rely on blockchain technology.

So when Filecoin emerged, it immediately became a sensation.

When the Filecoin project was first launched, its conditions were even better than those of Virtual today— it delivered a dimensionality reduction strike against its competitors. It was nearly impeccable in terms of technology, team, business model, etc., and could be considered the white horse among white horses.

But what was the result?

After its launch, although it was lively for a while and did attract some users for a period, as time went on, people found that when considering efficiency, cost, reliability, convenience, and other aspects comprehensively, Filecoin did not have a significant advantage over its biggest competitor (various cloud services in the Web 2 ecosystem). Therefore, the project gradually cooled down, and there were no signs of a large number of users transitioning from traditional centralized cloud services to Filecoin as envisioned.

More notably, after Filecoin, another previously obscure decentralized storage project, Arweave, actually surpassed it in terms of popularity and demand.

When people compared Arweave and Filecoin, they found that Arweave's focus on permanent storage even better met certain specific needs than Filecoin did to some extent.

As a result, Filecoin slowly became what it is today—lukewarm.

In addition to using Filecoin as a specific example for comparison, we can also examine this risk from a reverse perspective:

If the ICO financial method is a relatively suitable way to combine AI + Crypto, why has this method only seen success in launching AI agents, while there are few successful cases in other subfields of AI project financing?

In previous articles, I mentioned another case I saw earlier last year: using ICO to initiate the construction of small AI models.

This method is something I had been paying attention to for a while, but unfortunately, it was not very successful, and I have not seen more successful cases.

The now well-known DeepSeek is actually engaged in model construction. They optimize open-source large models and develop their own models based on that. Their success, apart from the strength of the team, has another non-negligible reason: they made a considerable amount of money in quantitative trading in their early years, thus having sufficient financial strength to develop this model.

This shows that funding is an essential element in the development of language models. If that is the case, why has the ICO method been practiced in this field but has not yielded results?

I currently do not have answers to these questions, but I believe they are worth further verification and cautious observation.

If this risk truly exists, then the future of Virtual has a certain degree of uncertainty.