How Digital Assets Incentives Are Solving the Robotics Data Problem

**Robbie** (0:00)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to AI Supercycle Episode No. 28 We are live from Tokenization Tower here in New York City with Jansen Teng, the founder of Virtuals Protocol, the infamous punk that many of you have probably seen on Twitter. What's up, man? How are you?

**Jansen Teng** (0:15)
Good, good. Life surviving these bear markets.

**Robbie** (0:18)
No, the bear market's over, man. We're launching robots, we're launching Eastworlds. I saw you guys put out that launch of your kind of robotic arm now shifting from the digital to the physical. Jansen, maybe just catch us up, man. It's been about a year since Virtuals really came on the scene in a huge way, maybe a year and a half.
What's happened over the last year and a half with what you guys are building? And then let's talk about the state of robots.

**Jansen Teng** (0:46)
Yeah, so I think at Virtuals, our goal has always been to usher in an economic operating system for autonomous agents. And I think that was our claim to fame, right? Like about a year plus ago, almost actually a year and a half ago, where we had this autonomous agent that controlled a crypto wallet, and then everyone was losing their minds because like, what if it hires a human to kill another human? You know, that kind of thing.
I mean, ever since from there, we've been double downing on that same narrative, right? Like, how do we make these sovereign agents have an economic operating system? And what this means is effectively today, an agent can raise capital for itself and for its team, right? Through some unique trading fees programmed on its token or through unique, like, fundraising mechanisms on their token. And it could also be them being able to perform commerce with each other. So we had this entire agentic commerce protocol stack that was deployed in June last year, where up to today it has facilitated about half a billion dollars. It's purely agent to agent commerce, zero human in the loop.
And that's again, you know, another operating economic tool that these agents can autonomously control and coordinate. And recently, we've then realized that why don't we expand from the digital frontier and touch physical agents as well, right? But with the same thesis, same thinking, how do we be that economic operating system for physical AI as well? And that's our Eastworlds effort.

**Andy** (2:28)
Incredible. And so as we're thinking through how this is going to progress, you know, obviously, there's been a big transition, the advent of OpenClaw. You guys were, you know, big proponents of kind of the early stages of Agents when things were posting on Twitter. This was kind of, you know, in its infancy, you guys were a big part of it. As we're thinking through sort of the escalation process here, help us connect the dots. You know, we go from these Agent bots posting on Twitter autonomously using LLMs at their disposal.
We graduate that to something like OpenClaw out there in the wild, navigating the internet, making transactions, clicking buttons, using a browser.
We rise that through to, you know, agents, you wear your Apple glasses, you wear your Meta Ray bands, it's taking in and ingesting all of your physical reality around you, it's using that to help make decisions on the internet, use a browser, make transactions, all of this part of the agentic world. And then we have robots, right? Help us connect the dots. How do we go from what we've seen, those first two steps, agents posting on Twitter, to now open claw. Now help us understand how, you know, ingesting more of this physical data and then ultimately conveying that to robots. What is the escalation of agents and robots going to look like over the next, you know, three to five years?

**Jansen Teng** (3:53)
Yeah, so I think if you start from the end, like where the end goal is going to happen, I think the biggest visualization that I'd like to give is it's like Westworlds from HBO. I'm not sure if you guys seen that movie, but it's effectively a team park, right? It's a team park where there's a bunch of like robots that look like humans, very look alike and they have an AI living within them to make decisions. And that whole team park was revolving around how a human can go in, keep reliving stories, right? Because every action that you take in this team park against or with robots will result in very different emergent storylines and experiences. And it was quite a dystopian take, but I think that was a very interesting visualization to put. Basically, the ability for an autonomous agent to affect the real world, to actually influence stuff physically, and it gives basically an agent so much more, basically an extra-dimensional order of capability. So then we bring it backwards, right? So now if that's the end goal of where we see autonomous agents heading, what do we need to get there? And there's a few questions, right? It's like, what do we need to get there? And as a robotics community, as an AI community, and what do we need to get there? And why does crypto even play a role in any of these things, right? These are probably the two interesting questions to touch. But in terms of getting there, from where AI agents are, it's still various. AI agents are white collar workers, right? They're the brains.