Potential and potential risks of Virtual

In last Saturday's online chat, another reader asked about Virtual. In addition, with the continuous increase in the price of Virtual and the continued popularity of the successful project of Genesis Launches, Virtual has begun to attract the attention of many participants again.

While we are concerned about the potential of the 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, and more importantly, my views on the risks of the project, in addition to its potential.

I have shared a lot about its potential in previous articles, mainly including:

- The team is good, and the project continues to be built and advanced, even in a bear market, which is very rare.

- The project has a certain profit, and the vision of the project team is to make the project token into a "currency" used in the ecosystem. This direction seems to me to be the right one, which means that the business model of the project is good.

- Last but not least, in the current AI + Crypto project, it is the strongest compared to similar competitors and other AI projects, and this strength has a gradual increasing trend.

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

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

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

To verify this, we also need to see more and more powerful AI agents incubated on the platform.

What is a more powerful AI agent?

The best thing is to be able to get out of the circle, not only for users in the crypto ecosystem, but also for users in the traditional Web 2 ecosystem. If this can't be done, then at least it must rely on blockchain technology like Uniswap to appear, which cannot be achieved by other technologies, and solve some kind of just-needed AI agent in the ecosystem.

Some of the well-known AI agents that are currently on the Virtual platform, including AIXBT, are not quite in my opinion.

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

In my opinion, decentralized storage should be a rigid need of human society in the past, now and in the future, and the realization of this application should theoretically rely on blockchain technology.

So when Filecoin came along, it was an instant hit.

When Filecoin first came out, it was even better off than Virtual is today-------- and it hit its competitors in a dimensionality reduction as soon as it debuted. It is almost impeccable in all aspects such as technology, team, business model, etc., and can be said to be the white horse of white horses.

But the result?

After the launch, although it was lively for a while, and it did attract some users for a period of time, with the test of time, people found that after considering the efficiency, cost, reliability, convenience and other aspects, Filecoin has no obvious advantages over its biggest competitors (various cloud services in the Web 2 ecosystem), so the project has gradually cooled down, and the subsequent non-realization of the large number of users from the traditional centralized cloud service to Filecoin has not been seen.

What's more noteworthy is that after Filecoin, Arweave, another previously unknown decentralized storage project, has caught up and surpassed Filecoin in terms of popularity and demand.

When people compare Arweave and Filecoin, they see that Arweave's focus on permanent storage is even better than Filecoin's ability to meet the needs of certain domains.

Filecoin slowly became the tepid it is today.

In addition to using the specific example of Filecoin, we can also look at this risk from a reverse perspective:

If ICO is a more suitable combination of AI + Crypto, why is it that this method has only seen results in launching AI agents, but there are few successful cases in other segments of AI project financing?

In a previous article, I introduced another case that I saw earlier last year: using an ICO to start building a small AI model.

This method was something I had been looking at earlier, but unfortunately it wasn't very successful, and I haven't seen more successful cases.

DeepSeek, as it's so well known now, actually does the work of building models. They optimized the open source model and developed their own model on this basis. In addition to the strength of the team, there is another reason for their success that cannot be ignored: they made a lot of money in quantitative trading in the early years, so they have enough financial strength to develop this model on their own.

It can be seen that funding is an indispensable element in the development of language models. In this case, why has the ICO method been practiced in this field, but it has not been effective?

I don't have answers to these questions at the moment, but I think it deserves further investigation and careful observation.

If this risk does exist, then there is a certain uncertainty about the future of Virtual.