Virtual's potential and potential risks

Source: Daoshuo Blockchain

During the online exchange last Saturday, another reader asked questions about Virtual. In addition, with the continuous rise in Virtual prices and the continued popularity of the successful Genesis Launches project, Virtual has begun to attract the attention of many participants.

While we pay attention to the potential of this 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 in a more comprehensive way. In addition to its potential, it is more important to share my views on the risks of the project.

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

- The team is good, the project is continuously built and promoted, even in the bear market, which is very rare.

- The project has a certain profit, and the vision of the project party is to make the project token a "currency" used in the ecosystem. This direction is right in my opinion, that is, the business model of the project is good.

- The last and most important point is that among the current AI + Crypto projects, whether compared with similar competitors or other AI projects, its strength is the strongest, and this strength has a tendency to gradually increase.

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.

In my opinion, the biggest risk is whether 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 need to see more and more powerful AI agents being incubated on the platform.

What is a more powerful AI agent?

It would be best if it could go beyond the circle and be used not only by users of the crypto ecology, but also by users of the traditional Web 2 ecology. If this cannot be done, then at least it must be an AI agent like Uniswap that must rely on blockchain technology to appear, which cannot be achieved by other technologies, and solves a certain rigid demand in the ecology.

Some well-known AI agents that have appeared on the Virtual platform, including AIXBT, do not count 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 personally: the once popular decentralized ace project Filecoin.

In my opinion, decentralized storage should be a rigid demand of human society, whether in the past, present or future, and the implementation of this application should theoretically rely on blockchain technology.

So when Filecoin appeared, it immediately became a hit.

When the Filecoin project was first launched, its conditions were better than those of Virtual today--------it formed a dimensionality reduction attack on its similar competitors as soon as it debuted. It is almost impeccable in terms of technology, team, business model and other aspects, and can be said to be a white horse among white horses.

But what is the result?

After the launch, although it was lively for a while and did attract some users for a period of time, as time went by, people found that after comprehensively considering efficiency, cost, reliability, convenience and other aspects, Filecoin did not have a significant advantage over its biggest competitor (various cloud services in the Web 2 ecosystem), so the project gradually cooled down, and the envisioned large number of users did not turn to Filecoin from traditional centralized cloud services.

What is more noteworthy is that after Filecoin, another originally unknown decentralized storage project, Arweave, came from behind and surpassed Filecoin in terms of popularity and demand.

When people compared Arweave and Filecoin, they found that the permanent storage that Arweave focuses on even better meets the rigid needs of certain specific fields than Filecoin to some extent.

Filecoin slowly became the tepid one it is today.

In addition to using Filecoin as a specific example for comparison, we can also examine this risk from a reverse perspective:

If ICO is a more appropriate combination of AI + Crypto, why has this method only been effective in launching AI agents, but there are few successful cases in other sub-sectors of AI project financing?

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

This method is something I paid attention to earlier, but unfortunately it was not very successful and I have not seen more successful cases.

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

This shows that funds are an indispensable element in the development of language models. In this case, why has the ICO method been practiced in this field, but has not been effective?

I don’t have answers to these questions yet, but I think it’s worth further verification and careful observation.

If this risk really exists, then the future of Virtual will be somewhat uncertain.