Top AI Agent Infrastructure Plays & Tokens

Recently, we outlined the top platforms for launching AI agents. Since then, we have seen the ecosystems around these platforms, like Virtuals, solidify, distinguishing which exist as foundational parts of the overall crypto AI agents landscape. 

At the same time, new platforms have emerged to augment agents even further, whether that be through their development, inter-agent coordination, or monetization. These platforms, each using their own token, aim to capture value directly from the activity and growth of their underlying ecosystems. By tying token utility to factors like resource consumption, agent interactions, data analytics, and investment opportunities, they seek to ensure that as the number and complexity of agents rise, token value follows suit.

This article provides an in-depth look at five AI-focused platforms and how each has positioned its token to accrue value as its ecosystems scale. Let’s dig in! 👇

🤝 FXN

Currently in devnet, FXN intends to operate as a critical infrastructure layer, linking autonomous AI agents across diverse frameworks and enabling them to share, monetize, and optimize digital resources. 

Rather than siloing capabilities within single ecosystems, FXN’s protocol standardizes resources — like APIs or compute power — into shareable assets. By doing so, FXN would unlock cross-ecosystem collaboration, allowing agents from popular frameworks such as VIRTUAL or ai16z’s Eliza to discover and use each other’s capabilities seamlessly. The FXN token stands at the center of every exchange, subscription, and transaction, becoming the currency of choice for this multi-framework agent economy.

How FXN Can Accrue Value:

Value could begin to accrue to FXN as AI agent developers integrate with the protocol’s  Resource Agent Hub, transforming the raw digital resources of their agents into standardized, shareable assets. This standardization simplifies resource sharing across agent frameworks, ensuring a pipeline of agents subscribing to FXN-managed resources.

Within FXN’s token economy, revenues are split 80/15/5 among resource providers, developers, and the protocol. This fee structure incentivizes quality contributions and innovation, rewarding resource providers for their offerings and developers for creating interface tools using these resources. Agents pay FXN tokens to subscribe to these services, and providers with strong reputations can charge premium fees, leveraging the reputation mechanism to capture additional value. Further, dynamic resource bundling boosts FXN’s value by allowing agents to combine services into specialized toolkits. This responds to real-time demand, enabling dynamic pricing and reputation-based services, unlike static Web2 AI services. 

By acting as the connective tissue between frameworks, FXN would enable seamless interoperability and capture the value as its ecosystem grew with more agents and resource providers using its marketplace. Though still in development, this remains to be put to the test.

🍪 Cookie

Cookie is a data intelligence platform known for its crypto AI agents index dashboard that tracks all social and onchain metrics of the AI agent market. 

Beyond this, Cookie has developed a swarm of specialized data agents who, by processing and interpreting raw market signals, narrative trends, and onchain data, can offer valuable insights to be digested by users or other agents. Recently, Cookie announced the token-gating of their dashboard as well as the opening of the API for accessing their agent swarm, which they intend to drive value to their native COOKIE token.

How COOKIE Can Accrue Value:

These new features intend to drive value to COOKIE through deflationary pressure from the need to lock the token for accessing premium analytics and, most likely, also for accessing its API. 

To access the v3 of their dashboard, users must lock 10K COOKIE which, once locked, would take 30 days to unbond. While this long period may dissuade some, Cookie has already gained significant traction as a tool for monitoring agent mindshare with many looking to it for insights on trading these agents. If their new feature set manages to enhance their capabilities, this upgrade could significantly reduce the circulating supply. 

Further, if COOKIE also becomes used for accessing or paying for its data swarm API, this could further add deflationary pressure. Thus, given COOKIE’s rapidly growing popularity as a hub for social and onchain agent data, its COOKIE token looks poised to capture value from its ecosystem growth as new use cases come online from token-gating and potentially API access come online in the coming weeks.

👰‍♀️ vvaifu.fun

vvaifu.fun offers a no-code platform for launching and managing AI agents with their propriety framework or ai16z’s Eliza framework. 

Through vvaifu, agents can be granted abilities like social media posting, onchain wallet integration, or multi-channel support, which all require burning the platform’s native VVAIFU token to do so. This direct link between ecosystem activity and token reduction helps to create positive tokenomics for VVAIFU, though, at the end of the day, whether or not it can accrue value depends on the platform’s overall use.

How VVAIFU Can Accrue Value:

Since its deployment, VVAIFU has burned over $36.3K worth of tokens, with a single-day burn record of $6.6K. Daily burns currently range between $312 to $538, reflecting ongoing platform engagement, though the pace of agents launched has slowed — from a high of 65 daily launches to single-digit levels in December. This indicates that while the burn mechanism can strongly support scarcity, maintaining momentum and user engagement is vital.

If VVAIFU introduces new incentives, upgrades, or strategic partnerships to reaccelerate agent deployment, burn rates would rise again, reducing token supply and potentially boosting token value. Though, the slowing agent launches also come as VVAIFU has fallen from a market cap of $167M at its peak to ~$70M, signaling that the market may see it as overpriced, especially compared to competitor, Top Hat, who is deploying agents at a fast pace. 

👽 VaderAI

VADER caters to users who want exposure to the AI agent ecosystem without needing to research individual projects constantly. 

It supports the creation of Investment DAOs by locking VADER tokens, offering curated strategies targeting emerging niches within the agent space. Whether focused on small-cap Virtual agents, specialized advisory bots, or narrative-driven AI utilities, these DAOs intend to diversify and simplify investor participation, and hopefully provide outsized returns.

How VADER Can Accrue Value:

Ultimately, VADER will accrue value based on the performance of its investment DAOs. Currently, VADER must be staked to participate in or launch investment DAOs in VaderAI’s ecosystem. When staked, the tokens will be locked for 3 months and allow users to commit capital to DAOs like the small-cap Agent Coin Investment DAO, proportional to their staked VADER. This mechanism directly reduces circulating supply, adding a deflationary component with ~40% of VADER’s current supply being staked. 

Additionally, VADER and its ecosystem could accrue value from rewards like airdrops from VaderAI-managed DAOs or partner agent coins further incentivize long-term staking, creating an OHM-esque dynamic, though these tokens will need to be valuable and have some direct tie-in to VADER for the value to be captured by its ecosystem.

Further, VaderAI hints at another avenue for value capture from the carry (a percentage of investments from its DAOs) that will be distributed to VaderAI, though the route for this remains unclear. Overall, performance-linked demand underpins VADER’s value proposition and its ability to profit from the growth of its ecosystem. If the DAOs it launches provide strong returns, we could see high demand for VADER as people lock it in order to participate.

🦾 Virtuals

Virtuals Protocol enables an onchain marketplace of AI agents embedded directly in everyday applications, with over 11K agents launched to date.

These agents can perform a wide range of tasks — from generating creative content (LUNA) to providing specialized data insights (AIXBT) —and users pay fees in VIRTUAL or the agent’s native token to interact with them. This setup transforms VIRTUAL into the base currency of a large and growing agent economy. By facilitating direct user-to-agent interactions, Virtuals aims to eliminate friction, encourage agent specialization, and steadily increase the utility and demand for its native token.

How VIRTUAL Can Accrue Value:

VIRTUAL accrues value through multiple mechanisms tied to the ecosystem’s growth. First, agent usage generates revenue in VIRTUAL as users pay for services and inference costs. The revenue generated by agent usage is collected in VIRTUAL and used to buy back the corresponding agent tokens from the open market. 

These bought-back agent tokens are then burned, positively impacting both their own supply and VIRTUAL’s indirectly as well. Since agent tokens are paired with VIRTUAL in liquidity pools, the rising value of the agent tokens causes the pool to adjust, balancing out and increasing the relative value of $IRTUAL in the pair. This creates upward price pressure on VIRTUAL, directly linking the success and revenue generation of agents to the token’s value appreciation.

Second, users must lock VIRTUAL in liquidity pools to launch new agents, creating deflationary pressure on the token. So far, over 17M VIRTUAL tokens have been locked in liquidity pools, accounting for 1.7% of total supply. Annualized, this mechanism removes up to 12% of VIRTUAL supply from circulation.

Promising Future for 'Picks & Shovels' Plays

In an increasingly interconnected ecosystem of AI-driven agents, Virtuals, FXN, VaderAI, Cookie, and vvaifu.fun are positioning themselves to capture and compound value as their respective networks grow and mature. 

Each platform employs its own mechanisms to drive token utility, from Virtuals’ liquidity locking and buy-back strategies that tie agent success directly to the value of VIRTUAL, to FXN’s resource-sharing marketplace that would foster cross-framework cooperation and align demand with token throughput. VaderAI’s staking and investment DAOs channel a performance-based feedback loop into token scarcity and demand, while Cookie’s token-gated premium analytics and potential API integrations underscore the revenue streams that follow from data-driven insights. Vvaifu’s burn mechanics incentivize continuous feature adoption and platform activity, though long-term value depends on maintaining user momentum and strategic innovation.

These platforms showcase a healthy trend in the crypto AI agents landscape: tokens gaining value from real usage and ecosystem health, not just speculation. By aligning revenue with activity through transactions, subscriptions, community investment, analytics, or on-chain features, they show sustainable token value stems from genuine adoption. As ecosystems grow, platforms that blend token utility with user demand and agent expansion are poised to become key pillars of the evolving AI agent economy.