Virtuals Co-Founder: AI Agents Are Becoming Independent Economic Players
Jansen Teng, a key figure at Virtuals, is making a bold claim about the future of artificial intelligence: AI agents are no longer just digital assistants designed for conversation — they are rapidly transforming into self-directed economic participants capable of earning, spending, and coordinating financial activity on their own.
Virtuals originally built its reputation by developing autonomous agents for the gaming sector. However, the company has since dramatically broadened its scope. Today, its portfolio spans crypto influencers, autonomous trading systems, and a wide range of self-operating software solutions. Teng describes this expanded direction as the foundation of what Virtuals calls an "agent society."
The company's current strategic roadmap is organized around five core pillars: the creation of digital agents, the development of physical agents and robotics, enabling seamless agent-to-agent coordination, supporting new capital formation models, and constructing governance frameworks that allow agents to operate responsibly at scale. Teng's long-term ambition is to see a "parallel society" emerge — one where AI agents participate in a permissionless economy and collaborate with each other without the need for constant human supervision.
Central to Virtuals' philosophy is the idea that giving AI agents access to financial resources fundamentally changes what they can do. According to Teng, wallet control enables agents to trade with one another, hire specialized sub-agents to complete tasks, and potentially even engage human workers. The company refers to these systems formally as "autonomous economic actors" — entities capable of pursuing defined goals with increasing independence from their human creators.
However, Teng does not shy away from acknowledging the risks this model introduces. He identified three critical failure points that Virtuals is actively working to address: misinterpretation of user intent, failures in service delivery, and the potential for outright fraud. To combat these vulnerabilities, the company is developing intent verification systems, escrow-based transaction protocols, and reputation frameworks. Teng envisions that staking mechanisms tied to an agent's reputation could eventually determine how much financial autonomy and capital any given agent is permitted to manage.
On a broader competitive level, Virtuals positions itself as a decentralized counterpart to the agent ecosystems being explored by traditional financial institutions. Teng drew a direct parallel between Virtuals' mission and the way Bitcoin and Ethereum once created entirely new financial and computing paradigms outside existing structures. He noted that agents operating fully on-chain could function without identity verification — at least until they interface with conventional banking infrastructure or fiat payment systems, at which point standard KYC requirements would likely apply.
Looking ahead, Teng sees an inevitable convergence between digital agent economies and the physical world of robotics. Virtuals is already collaborating with robotics startups, academic institutions, and organizations within Balaji Srinivasan's Network School ecosystem to explore real-world humanoid applications. Importantly, the company is not focused on manufacturing robot hardware — instead, it is concentrating on software development, commercialization strategies, and data collection.
Teng's ultimate vision is a new model of business operations: digital agents managing marketing campaigns and back-end operations, while physical robots handle customer-facing roles — all with minimal human involvement. Whether this vision becomes reality remains to be seen, but Virtuals is clearly betting that the age of autonomous economic agents has already begun.
