Can investors make any money off the AI Agent projects on-chain?
AI Agents, and artificial intelligence more broadly, dominate the water cooler banter and Slack channel chatter at work. It’s all led by the usual players – most of them Big Tech names, others newcomers that made a name for themselves with the large language models led by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The blockchain world got in on this, too. The biggest, most liquid names in the business crashed and burned last year and many, like Fetch.AI (CRYPTO: FET) are underwater. FET is down 90% from its all-time-highs reached in March 2024.
Still, “The AI agent narrative is one of the hottest in crypto right now and capital is chasing it hard, with both the excitement and the recklessness that implies,” said MinChi Park, CO-founder and COO of CoinFello.
“Three names that keep coming up in conversations I’m having include the Virtuals Protocol, which is arguably the project that first kicked off the AI agent token meta,” she said. “Virtuals built a vibrant ecosystem of autonomous AI agents with applications in gaming and social media, and I think this versatility is why so many people are chasing it.”
Anyone can use Virtuals Protocol to build an AI agent and benefit from the economic activity it generates.
She also mentioned Kite, an AI payments blockchain, which is building a key part of the infrastructure for blockchain agents. The token is up more than 50% in the last 12 months, going from $0.10 in March 2025 to $0.22 as of March 21, 2026.
Kite operates in what is arguably the most exciting segment of the crossroad between AI and blockchain protocols. One of the technological reasons behind this trend is the emergence of the x402 payment standard launched by Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN) May 2025. (Coinbase’s share price has fallen since the AI rush, going from a high of $419 in July down to $197 currently.) The x402 standard ultimately allows AI agents to pay for services and data directly …