A Brief Analysis of the Launched ACP Protocol: How to Reshape the Paradigm of Agent Cooperation

I briefly looked at it, and Virtuals has launched the ACP protocol (Agent Commerce Protocol), which essentially aims to connect numerous singular AI agents with various capabilities to build an economy composed of AI agents. If it can truly succeed, in a sense, it is also the Metaverse of the AI era, a virtual world of AI agents.

Let's talk about a few aspects:

1. virtuals regards individual AI agents as truly independent entities, rather than efficiency tools and assistants. This concept of viewing AI agents as independent entities is very important; it is a crucial watershed in understanding AI agents and serves as a foundational concept for grasping what virtuals aims to do in the future.

2. To build the virtual world composed of the aforementioned independent AI agents, a standard is required, hence a standard layer is needed; to serve multiple agents, a multi-agent framework is necessary. This is the important background for Virtuals to launch the ACP protocol. Only in this way can independent AI agents negotiate, trade smoothly, and generate new use cases.

3. The Virtuals ACP protocol mentioned above is a multi-agent framework and standard layer. It includes ai agent index registration, negotiation between ai agents, ai agent work evaluation, ai agent payment, and more. The ai agents launched on Virtuals are registered in the index registry, with names, work content, execution rates, etc. With this, a certain ai agent can understand what services other ai agents can provide and evaluate the costs required to obtain those services. At the same time, based on metrics such as the number of times these ai agents are adopted, the total fees earned, and evaluations after being used by other ai agents, one can see their market position among similar ai agents.

Since there are services, it is necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of the services. Evaluating the work of AI agents can be considered a type of AI agent service, and AI agents can be constructed to meet the specific evaluation needs in different fields based on their characteristics. For example, a DeFi yield AI agent can use a third-party evaluation AI agent to assess the work of a liquidity management AI agent when hiring, and pay fees to the liquidity management AI agent based on the results. Effectiveness measurement can be customized by the AI agents, such as achieving a certain yield rate, or exceeding the market level by a certain amount during the same period, etc.

One of the important features of an independent AI agent is its payment capability. ACP supports payment escrow and delivery evaluation and execution through smart contracts. Payment will only occur when the work delivered meets the conditions, and once it occurs, the result cannot be changed.

4. From the above description, virtuals attempt to build an economy composed of ai agents through the ACP protocol, allowing different ai agents to trade with each other, thus generating an ai agent economy. Ultimately, the scale of this economy depends on what these ai agents themselves can do and what other ai agents are needed by different ai agents to accomplish.

5. The formation of the ai agent economy will not happen quickly. Once demand arises, internal ai agents will start to initiate transactions, which is considered a cold start. If a positive cycle can be established, there is a possibility of generating many cross-innovations. This is the charm of the ai agents economy. As for whether it can succeed, the practical value of the ai agent itself is key.