Original Title: "Iron Blood Launchpad Has Launched, AI New Rules Completely Rewritten!"
Original Author: Anci, Biteye
It has been a week since the massive crash on October 11. Not only did it set a record for the largest liquidation in history at $20 billion, but this brutal drop also led many KOLs to reflect on a painful fact of this bull market — the absence of faith among Builders, with projects everywhere, and the crypto space increasingly resembling a casino.
"The problem is that the overall environment of Crypto has undergone structural changes, and the spirit of crypto-punk has been completely abandoned!"
—@tmel0211
"Why does the market always crash after every MEME goes viral, regardless of what comes next? Think about it. I hope everyone remembers to use it well in the future."
——@TingHu888
In this context, Virtuals, which has always "governed the ecosystem strictly," has launched new rules for Unicorn, which not only addresses issues of fair launches such as bot sniping but also focuses on attracting and supporting excellent AI projects, leaving a glimmer of hope and a foothold for Builders to reclaim the "crypto-punk spirit."
01 What are the highlights of the Unicorn new rules?
The launch of Unicorn will completely end the previous Genesis new rules, with the following changes compared to the two.
For investors:
1. The points system has been abolished, and everyone can buy.
2. The new price for launches will adopt a dynamic pricing curve based on FDV.
The lower the funds raised by the project, i.e., the lower the current FDV, the lower the launch price; conversely, when the project is hot and the FDV is high, the price will be adjusted upwards. Investors need to conduct thorough research on the project to accumulate enough chips before the FDV rises too high.
3. To address the issue of front-running, a Decaying Tax mechanism has been introduced.
In the first 100 minutes of the project launch, a buyer's tax will be charged, with the tax rate linearly decreasing from 99% to 1% (approximately 1% per minute). This means that if you rush in during the first minute of the project, $99 of every $100 you trade will go to taxes. This makes it unprofitable for front-running bots.
However, the combination of point 3 with point 2 creates a problem: if you wait until after the tax rate has decreased to buy in, the FDV may have already risen significantly, and the price will also rise accordingly. Investors need to find a suitable balance point for buying in.
4. Airdrop: Each project will allocate 5% of community airdrops.
Of this, 2% will be allocated to $VIRTUAL stakers; 3% will be allocated to active users in the ecosystem, with reference dimensions possibly including trading volume, ACP participation, Butler interaction, etc.
5. Support for 3x leverage for long/short positions.
This provides investors with more trading tools while also amplifying the rewards and penalties for Builder projects and Rug projects.
For project parties:
1. 50% of tokens are allocated to the founding team, but will be unlocked based on FDV.
25% will be locked long-term (or unlocked when FDV reaches $160 million), and after unlocking, it will undergo a 6-month linear release.
25% will be used for linear fundraising: this portion of tokens will be gradually sold in the form of on-chain limit orders as the project's FDV grows from $2 million to $160 million, providing the team with continuous cash flow.
2. Founding teams are allowed to purchase tokens from the public launch pool (45%), with no limits and fully on-chain public.
This portion of tokens will default to a 1-month lock-up and 12-month linear release rule, meaning capable founding teams can publicly purchase their tokens, demonstrating their long-term confidence to the community.
02 From Genesis to Unicorn, the ambition of the Crypto world
Earlier, it was mentioned that Virtuals "governs the ecosystem strictly," and this strictness was mainly reflected on the user side during the Genesis period: retail investors wanting to make money on Virtuals had to go through various "loyalty tests": holding and staking, desperately accumulating points, and not being able to sell casually, or they would be locked up in a prison, labeled as a "jeet," and forever miss out on various airdrops and points.
However, the drawbacks of "rolling users" quickly became apparent, and the points system soon led to farming, which brought about inflation of points and user fatigue.
Therefore, we can clearly see that Virtuals is gradually adjusting its direction and shifting its strictness towards project parties:
Last month, Virtuals launched ALE (Agent Liquidity Engine) as a core metric for measuring Agent performance, focusing on whether the product solves real problems, whether it has sustainable income, and whether the team can continuously reinvest income back into the ecosystem.
The official stipulation is that if an AI Agent participating in ACP fails consecutively 10 times, the system will automatically "downgrade" it to ensure that the ACP platform always maintains high standards of agent service.
The launch of the Unicorn new mechanism further sets up numerous challenges for project parties — leaving no place for Rug projects to hide and giving quality projects a chance to shine. All of this is to ensure that every project coming to Virtuals must have a long-term commitment and ultimately leave behind the highest quality AI projects for the ecosystem.
03 No longer can Virtuals be viewed through the lens of Launchpad
The essence of a Launchpad is a token issuance machine; further scrutinizing, it is a small Dex, where activity and liquidity are the sources of its revenue. Typically, meme sentiment is its foundation, but sentiment is inherently fleeting and elusive, so most Launchpads cannot escape the fate of being short-lived.
From the outset, Virtuals wisely limited its project scope to the realm of AI Agents, vigorously incubating popular projects like AIXBT, enhancing the tone and quality of AI Agents within the ecosystem, and striving to shed the label of AI Meme, creating a Builder ecosystem atmosphere.
After accumulating a certain scale of quality projects, Virtuals launched the ACP plan, aligning with the current narrative of multi-AI Agent communication and collaboration under the MCP framework — this is also the main idea in the industry regarding how AI Agents work and solve real problems.
However, the previously high-profile AI hedge fund Axelrod under the ACP framework did not meet expectations after building anticipation, so Virtuals' ACP business did not create much of a splash. But there is no need to be discouraged, as even traditional AI giants have not truly run through and matured this multi-Agent system path. Therefore, Virtuals has had to launch Butler on the user side to provide more educational and communication windows for the ACP while continuing to explore with various AI Agents within the ecosystem.
Currently, the direction represented by ACP, which involves multi-AI Agent collaboration, is still widely recognized as a future potential. Once breakthroughs occur, it could be comparable to the ChatGPT moment. However, to truly achieve this goal, in addition to continuing to optimize the design of the network itself, more improvements and breakthroughs in Agent capabilities are needed. Thus, Virtuals aims to leverage the advantages of Launchpad to gather excellent AI Agent projects for its network.
04 What is the wealth effect for retail investors?
No grand ambition can be realized without a mass base. For ordinary users, the upgrade of Unicorn still brings several benefits:
Under various official policies, the quality of projects on the platform will see a certain improvement.
The points system has finally been abolished, so no more rolling.
Leverage for long and short positions is provided, offering more tools to amplify profits and stop losses.
Of course, on the other hand, the dynamic pricing curve based on FDV and the tax rate mechanism also increase the difficulty of finding the right entry timing.
Unfortunately, it coincides with the current tumultuous macro backdrop, and the few projects launched after Unicorn's launch have not yet successfully replicated the significant wealth effect seen during the Genesis period. However, cash flow does not compete; in the long run, once the market turns, the potential for new launches on Unicorn is still enormous.
Most importantly, Virtuals' Unicorn upgrade injects a rare crypto-cyber belief into Builders during this relatively sluggish period, and gives us more expectations — looking forward to more AIXBT moments and hoping for ACP to usher in a ChatGPT moment.
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