The potential and potential risks of Virtual

Source: Dao Talks Blockchain

During the online communication last Saturday, readers raised questions about Virtual again. In addition, with the continuous rise in Virtual's price and the sustained popularity of the successful Genesis Launches project during this period, Virtual has once again attracted the attention of many participants.

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

Therefore, in today's article, I would like to share my views on this project more comprehensively. Besides its potential, it is more important to share my thoughts on the risks of the project.

I have shared quite a lot about its potential in the previous article, mainly including:

• The team is good, and the project is continuously being built and promoted, even during the bear market without interruption, which is very rare.

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

• Last but not least, in the current AI + Crypto projects, whether compared to similar competitors or other AI projects, its strength is the strongest, and this strength shows a trend of gradual increase.

From these aspects, among the AI + Crypto projects I am currently looking at, I think it is the strongest.

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

In my opinion, the biggest risk is whether this approach of starting from ICOs 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 verify this, we also need to see more and stronger AI agents being incubated on the platform.

What is a more powerful AI agent?

The best scenario would be to create an AI agent that not only attracts users from the crypto ecosystem but also from the traditional Web 2 ecosystem. If this cannot be achieved, then at least it should be an AI agent that, like Uniswap, must rely on Blockchain technology to exist, which cannot be realized by other technologies, and solves a certain essential need within the ecosystem.

Currently, some well-known AI agents that have appeared on the Virtual platform, including AIXBT, don't really count in my opinion.

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 personally: the once extremely popular decentralized flagship project Filecoin.

In my opinion, decentralized storage has always been a necessity for human society, whether in the past, present, or 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 today's Virtual conditions--------it delivered a dimensionality reduction attack on its competitors from the very beginning. It is nearly flawless in terms of technology, team, business model, and other aspects, and can be said to be the white horse among white horses.

But what is the result?

After going live, although there was a lot of buzz for a while and it did attract some users for a period of time, as time went on, people found that after considering various aspects such as efficiency, cost, reliability, and convenience, Filecoin does not have a significant advantage compared to its biggest competitors (various cloud services in the Web 2 ecosystem). Therefore, the project gradually cooled down, and there has not been a noticeable shift of a large number of users from traditional centralized cloud services to Filecoin as initially envisioned.

It is worth noting that after Filecoin, another relatively obscure decentralized storage project, Arweave, has unexpectedly surpassed Filecoin in terms of popularity and demand.

When people compare Arweave and Filecoin, they find that Arweave's focus on permanent storage meets certain specific needs even better than Filecoin to some extent.

Filecoin has slowly become what it is today, neither hot nor cold.

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

If ICOs are a suitable combination of AI + Crypto as a financial method, why have we only seen success in launching AI agents with this method, while there are few successful cases in other niche areas of AI project financing?

In a previous article, I introduced another case I saw earlier last year: starting the construction of AI small models through ICO.

This method is something I have been paying attention to for a long time, but unfortunately, it hasn't been very successful, and I haven't seen more successful cases.

The now widely known DeepSeek is actually engaged in the work of building models. They optimize open-source large models and have developed their own model based on this. In addition to the strength of the team, another factor that cannot be ignored for their success is that they earned a significant amount of money in quantitative trading in their early years, thus having enough financial strength to develop this model.

It can be seen that funding is an essential element in the development of language models. Since this is the case, why has the ICO method already been practiced in this field, yet there have been no results?

I currently have no answers to these questions, but I believe it is worth further verification and careful observation.

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