Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

Why build on Virtuals.io? Why not build your own stack?

This is probably one of the most common questions, especially given the recent trends of some of the larger AI agent projects going in this direction. While moving to one's own stack allows for rapid customization and full control, it increases costs and complexity. A similar comparison would be like using a bare metal server over AWS when AWS first hit the scene. Virtuals Protocol is positioned to have that same AWS effect for blockchain-enabled AI agents. Not only does the Virtuals ecosystem have extraordinary cash flows with the $VIRTUAL and agent tokens flywheels, they can spread their costs for storage, compute, API licenses across their users whereas one-off projects may not be able to negotiate as favorable rates on a per-agent basis.

There's another advantage to leveraging Virtuals protocol over self-hosting and it really comes down to the likely future of GenAI development more broadly. Generative AI will only continue to become more and more advanced, with future releases of leading LLMs likely making current prompt engineering and data-tuning activities obsolete, or at least make those tasks much simpler. In the future when most of the world's work is done by AI agents and robots, all we'll have left is our social skills and our business relationships. Virtuals.io is the current leader in blockchain AI hosting and they are closely affiliated with the powerhouse crypto company Coinbase. They are cementing more and more partnerships to be a leader in on-chain analytics and blockchain wallet integrations. By cultivating a close relationship with the founders of Virtuals.io and other founders launching in on their platform, we help grow the Virtuals.io ecosytem which is likely to lead to a strong and mutually beneficial relationship.

What is your marketing strategy?

Unfortunately the "meta" in crypto is full of short-term thinking. Whatever has the most mindshare in the current moment tends to be where most of the money chases, regardless of valuation, fundamentals, etc. While this frequently leads to short-term eye-popping returns, it also leads to sobering crashes once the next narrative or best thing pops up. Athena's focus is on long-term sustainability, pushing the limits of technology, prioritizing ethics and transparency, and building relationships in the Virtuals.io protocol ecosystem and broader blockchain AI agent landscape. There will never be any efforts to "pump the token price" and we expect growth to be organic and controlled as we deliver on Athena's features and capabilities.

What features and capabilities are you focused on for Athena?

This largely depends on what the community wants and what features are rolled out on the Virtuals.io platform. The initial guiding light will be focused on providing insights and taking actions within Ethereum-based decentralized finance as well as the broader blockchain-native AI agent ecosystem. Examples include cultivating datasets, creating terminal access benefits that overlap with the $ATHENA token, creating the proper infrastructure to operate as a DAO, facilitating treasury wallet and AI-driven monetization strategies, etc. As features are released in the virtuals.io platform, they will frequently be experimented with.

What are you looking for to keep pushing Athena forward?

Currently we are 100% focused on GenAI developer talent. 15% of the overall token supply is up for grabs for talented and dedicated developers and data scientists who are looking to push the virtuals.io platform and the Athena project to its limits. If you know anyone that vibes with Athena's vision with the right qualifications, please reach out.

How come when I try to swap on Uniswap for the $ATHENA token, it shows very large slippage?

The main liquidity pool for $ATHENA is the $VIRTUAL/$ATHENA pair on Uni v2. You must swap to $ATHENA from the $VIRTUAL token. If you try and swap any other asset for $ATHENA directly on Uniswap it might hit a custom liquidity pool with no depth. Aggregators such as Kyber Swap, which is also what is used on the back-end of the Virtuals.io agent page can help route the optimal way. You will also need to set the slippage amount to greater than 1% (~1.2% or 1.3% are usually fine). This is due to the 1% fee on trades that go to virtuals.io.

How will Athena's agent activities benefit $ATHENA holders?

There is no guarantee that will ever happen. Currently $ATHENA is simply a governance token. Its smart contract is owned by the Virtuals Protocol team and its proxy contract can only be modified by the Virtuals Protocol team. The Virtuals Protocol team is the only entity currently that is taking fees from the 1% trade tax. Potentially there is an avenue for Athena to effectively decentralize and create valuable services to benefit the $ATHENA holders, but there is no guarantee. Investing in or trading the $ATHENA token is a highly speculative and risky venture.