Do Androids Dream of Electric Wallets?

**Jansen Teng** (0:00)
There's something that we actually are building. The idea is that how can we create an economically-weighted reputation for every agent as they transact work and spend in the economy.

**Sam Ewen** (0:22)
People cannot stop talking about agentic AI, agentic commerce, the fact that people are creating agents to do all kinds of activities, and there's a lot of people who are focused on giving them wallets and letting them sort of spend money and also earn money. It was important that we jumped on this conversation, and we invited Jansen Teng. He's one of the co-founders of Virtuals Protocol, one of the crypto protocols that's really focused on agents, but not just payments. There's agents that are trading, there's agents that are able to do autonomous tasks. They're focusing quite a bit on the robotic economy and what's coming. So after the break, you'll hear a conversation with me and Jansen, and we'll really dive into the specifics of what does it mean to give a synthetic being a wallet, an email address, an identity, and at some point, even a body.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:13)
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**Sam Ewen** (1:29)
Welcome back to Gency. I am Sam Ewen. This is Jansen Teng, co-founder of Virtuals Protocol. Jansen, so interesting to speak with you. I'm excited about this. I've been paying attention to virtual since the very beginning.
I know you guys have gone through an evolution arc, but give us the two-minute origin story of yourself and the Virtuals Protocol.

**Jansen Teng** (1:53)
I think we started off primarily building autonomous agents for the gaming space. We then quickly realized that the tech stack that we've built could be translated into other types of autonomous agents in other fields like crypto influencers, trading agents, and whatnot. So we pretty much built a Spotify for the tech. That caught virality because there were some very famous agents that came out on Twitter.
From that came out a launch pad where all these agents would launch a token and people can speculate, the trading taxes feeds the funding of the agents. That put us on the scene.
But that was in late 2024 Then as we started growing that ecosystem of agents, we started realizing that the vision is expanding a lot more. We realized that why don't we aim to be that parallel society of agents, where these agents can participate in a permissionless economy. The goal now is very simple. How can we create these largest, most vibrant society of agents that is both digital and physical. There's five pillars that we need for it. How do we make it easy for anyone to spin out economically productive digital agents? How do we make it easy for it to spin out productive physical agents or robots? How do we make it easy for these agents to coordinate and work together at scale so they produce a larger economic value? How do we make these agents be able to grow through capital formation and to raise basically money for their inference, funding and teams behind them? And then how do we then govern these agents so that the great agents are rewarded and the agents that are net negative in terms of benefits are penalized in an actual society? So those are the five things that we've been working on. The second and the fifth pillar are something that is very new that we're pushing on this year.
So yeah, that's a bit of a flavor of what we've evolved to.

**Sam Ewen** (3:58)
You, like a lot of other people at the time, really focusing on gaming, entertainment, you then sort of see this opportunity around agent e-commerce and you have this launch pad for tokens. Now it really feels like you're creating a whole, you know, I believe you call it like economy OS, like there's this entire environment that will sort of transact in a variety of different layers.
I guess I'm interested in sort of what that pivot moment was.

**Jansen Teng** (4:23)
For you, it was the experiment that we were trying to run between two projects in our ecosystem and this was like in December 2024, where we tried to get two agents to work together. So because we allowed the agent to control a crypto wallet and then it blew up. And then we said that, okay, the next logical thing to do with money is to trade, right? If agents are going to specialize, they need to trade. So when we were trying to get these agents to work together, we saw a lot of pain in how these agents manage money, in how these agents coordinate without hallucinations, in how these agents settle a form of commerce or trade. And what happens if the other party doesn't fulfill that need? So I think we saw all these teething problems of an agent economy. And that's why we started building like features of products to actually solve that problem that we saw.