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Request for Agents

Virtuals wants founders to build agents that people already know how to use: agents that live inside group chats, make judgment calls over messy human input, and move value through crypto rails when the group reaches a decision.

The strongest opportunities are not generic assistants. They are social, transactional agents that turn coordination into action.

What winning agents have in common

The ones that win share three traits. Everything below has all three.

  1. They live in the group chat. The multiplayer setting is the growth engine. What one member sees work, every member wants. Solo agents can be useful; group agents spread.
  2. The head does what software could not. Each agent's head is judgment over messy human input: intent, exceptions, social context, incomplete instructions. The tail is deterministic: algorithms, scripts, signed transactions, settlement logic. The agent decides; code executes. Never the reverse.
  3. They move money on crypto rails. Transactions are what make an agent sticky. Crypto is programmable, global, instant, and lets an agent hold and move value at all.

1. Copy-Trading, But the Track Record Can't Lie

Social trading already built a public company. eToro reached tens of millions of users on one truth: people would rather copy a proven winner than pick for themselves. But the old version ran on self-reported, gameable records and anonymous gurus.

Onchain ends that. Every wallet's P&L is public, permanent, and impossible to fake, so "who is actually good" becomes a provable fact instead of a screenshot. And the winner people trust most is not a stranger on a leaderboard; it is the friend three messages up who quietly 4x'd.

Build the agent that ranks a group by real realized performance, separates skill from variance, and auto-mirrors the proven ones into each member's own wallet: own size, own limits. The rarest thing in trading is aspirational upside with a verifier that cannot be gamed.

  • TAM: $1T+ annual onchain volume; copy/social trading is a multi-billion dollar revenue category, barely tapped onchain.
  • Competitors: eToro, GMGN, BullX, Photon, Cornix, 3Commas, Hyperliquid vaults.
  • Head: Separates skill from luck across a group's wallets, live, and judges whether a trade is safe to copy.
  • Tail: Mirrors the swap at the user's size, gated by limits and confirmation.

2. One Tap, and the Whole Chat Is In

Group chats already coordinate trades: "aped this, you in?" Execution is the mess: pasted addresses, fumbled links, missed windows, and people getting rugged in the scramble not to miss it. The coordination is real. The rails are missing.

Build the agent that turns "I'm in" into a clean, simultaneous, individually-sized entry for everyone who opts in, after it has checked, in those same few seconds, that the thing is not a honeypot. The group's FOMO becomes its edge instead of its liability. The same engine can run on a schedule for a chat that stacks weekly, or at scale for pooling demand into a better allocation.

  • TAM: Hundreds of billions of dollars per year in onchain spot; Telegram trading bots alone have cleared hundreds of millions in fees.
  • Competitors: BONKbot, Banana Gun, Maestro, Bloom, Trojan, Photon, pump.fun.
  • Head: Judges the opportunity, spots traps such as rugs and honeypots in seconds, and sizes each member to their own rules.
  • Tail: Fires simultaneous swaps from each wallet on confirmation.

3. Settle Every Bet Automatically

Every chat is a graveyard of uncollected bets: "$100 says it doesn't break $5k," screenshotted, argued, never paid. The friction was always resolution and trust: who holds the money, and who calls the outcome.

Onchain escrow and oracles dissolve both. Polymarket proved the appetite with billions in volume on one promise: your stake is safe and the outcome pays itself. Bring that into the room where the bets are actually made.

Build the agent that takes any natural-language wager between members, escrows both stakes the moment they agree, and pays out the instant it resolves. That can mean a one-off price bet, a season-long league, or an internal prediction market whose odds become the group's signal.

  • TAM: Betting and gambling are $500B+ categories; prediction markets such as Polymarket have done billions in volume; fantasy is roughly $40B+.
  • Competitors: Polymarket, Kalshi, DraftKings, FanDuel, sportsbooks.
  • Head: Turns a fuzzy human bet into resolvable terms, adjudicates messy real-world outcomes, and scores competitions against gaming.
  • Tail: Escrows stakes, resolves against an oracle or accepted source, and pays winners.
  • Regulated: Scope as skill or peer-to-peer, not house-banked odds.

4. Bounties That Actually Pay Out

Groups run on informal "I'll pay you if you..." work: bring a builder, find the answer, ship the thing. Almost none of it pays out, because the promise is unenforceable and forgotten by Tuesday.

Crypto quest platforms such as Layer3 and Galxe proved people will do real work for onchain rewards. They just did it for faceless protocols instead of the rooms where the asks happen.

Build the agent that lets any member post a bounty, escrows it, routes it to whoever is best-placed to deliver, and releases payment the moment the work is verifiably done. The whole informal favor economy of a group finally gets teeth.

  • TAM: Gig and freelance work is $450B+; referral marketing and crypto quest platforms add millions of active users.
  • Competitors: Upwork, Fiverr, Layer3, Galxe, Zealy, Gitcoin, referral SaaS.
  • Head: Verifies the work was actually done, routes to the right member, and filters sybils.
  • Tail: Escrows funds and releases payment on verification.

5. The Splitwise That Actually Settles

Splitwise has around 10M users and a famous, unfixed flaw: it tracks who owes what, then makes you open Venmo and pay by hand anyway. It solved the bookkeeping and punted on settlement.

A trip is a tangle of "I covered you," "you got the Uber," receipts split four ways, side-deals, missing context, and nobody wanting to do the math or chase laggards. Tracking is easy. Understanding the mess is hard.

Build the agent that reads the whole mess: chat, receipts, side-deals, and context. It works out who truly owes whom, nets it to the fewest payments, and settles it, each share moving from its owner's wallet. Tracking was never the product. Settling is.

  • TAM: P2P payments are trillions per year; Venmo has roughly 90M users; the expense-splitting wedge is proven by Splitwise.
  • Competitors: Splitwise, Venmo, Cash App, Settle Up, Tricount, PayPal.
  • Head: Infers who owes whom from messy chat and receipts, including vision and language inputs, then nets the debt graph.
  • Tail: Executes the minimal set of individual transfers.
  • Where it wins: Cross-border groups, where manual settlement is slow and expensive today.

6. Stake Your Discipline, Enforced by the Group

Commitment devices work. StickK and the behavioral-economics canon proved that money on the line, witnessed by people you respect, beats willpower. The formula is money, stakes, and an audience. A group chat already is the audience.

What was missing is credible, automatic enforcement: a referee who cannot be sweet-talked and a slash that actually lands.

Build the agent that lets a member back a goal with their own money: the gym, the ship date, the no-FUD rule. It verifies progress, then pays back or slashes to the group based on the result. The hard, valuable part is not escrow. It is verification. Nail it and you own behavior change with skin in the game.

  • TAM: Wellness, habit, and productivity apps are $10B+ categories, plus the "bet on yourself" market. Smaller, but sticky and recurring.
  • Competitors: StickK, HealthyWage, Forfeit, Beeminder, habit apps.
  • Head: Verifies that a goal was really met, which is the hard part and the moat.
  • Tail: Escrows funds, then slashes or rewards on the verdict.

7. Social Lending Without the Awkwardness

A billion people already run finances through trusted-circle money: informal loans, savings circles, "spot me till Friday." They do it because they trust their group more than an institution that would never bank them anyway.

The system runs on relationships and breaks on awkwardness, vague terms, and the friendship-ending default. Onchain reputation plus milestone escrow fixes that: terms are explicit, repayment is managed, and no human has to play collector.

Build the agent that underwrites a short-term loan within the group from each member's real onchain history, sets fair terms, and manages repayment. The same engine can fund a member's project in tranches, released only on verified milestones.

  • TAM: P2P and informal lending are $200B+; microfinance is roughly $150B; 1B+ people participate in informal lending circles.
  • Competitors: Aave for pooled collateralized lending, microfinance apps, ROSCA tools.
  • Head: Underwrites from onchain history and group reputation, and judges milestone completion.
  • Tail: Disburses funds, then manages and enforces repayment.
  • Regulated: Lending law applies; scope carefully.

8. A Trusted Marketplace Inside Every Group

Groups already trade among themselves: accounts, NFTs, services, allocations, access to the room itself. Every deal stalls on the same thing: who sends first. Trust is the bottleneck, and an agent-as-escrow removes it.

Whop built a fast-growing business on digital access and memberships. Facebook Marketplace runs on intra-community P2P. Both leave trust to chance.

Build the neutral escrow inside the group. It holds funds, releases on delivery, runs the auction for the scarce slot, splits the shared subscription, and gates entry by letting members stake reputation to vouch newcomers in. Commerce among people who already know each other becomes safe by default.

  • TAM: P2P marketplace GMV is $100B+; paid access and membership is an $8B+ category through Patreon alone, plus Whop and token-gating.
  • Competitors: eBay, Facebook Marketplace, Whop, Patreon, OpenSea, Guild, Collab.Land.
  • Head: Adjudicates delivery and disputes, runs fair auctions, and assesses vouch risk.
  • Tail: Escrows and releases on delivery, grants or meters access, and settles.

9. The Group Trip, Booked and Split

The number-one thing a group chat does is plan something: a trip, dinner, birthday, offsite. The number-one place it breaks is the handoff from "let's do it" to booked-and-paid.

The plan lives in the chat. The booking scatters across Airbnb, flights, OpenTable, ticketing, and a Splitwise nobody updates. It ends in "ok everyone Venmo me."

Build the agent that lives in the planning thread. It reads the mess: dates, who is actually in, the vegetarian, the budget cap. It books the stay and the table, collects each share up front, runs the RSVP, and chases no-shows. The coordination was never the problem. The booking, money, and flakes were.

  • TAM: Online travel is $600B+; event ticketing is $80B+; dining adds another large group-planning surface.
  • Competitors: Airbnb, Booking, Expedia, Ticketmaster, Eventbrite, OpenTable, Resy, Partiful, Splitwise, Venmo.
  • Head: Turns a messy planning thread into a concrete, booked plan, and handles changes and dropouts.
  • Tail: Books, collects each share, and manages refunds.
  • Where it wins: International group travel, where FX and cross-border collection are the real pain.

10. Decide Together, Then Buy It

A huge share of purchases now begin in a group chat: "which one should I get," "is this worth it," "where did you get that?" We trust our people over reviews. But the path from the chat's recommendation to the purchase is broken. You screenshot, forget, and buy the wrong one next week.

Group buying built Pinduoduo into a hundred-billion-dollar company on exactly this instinct.

Build the agent that closes the loop. It researches the real options while the group deliberates, lays out trade-offs, takes the room's vote, then buys for whoever is in. When possible, it pools the group's demand to unlock a better price.

  • TAM: Social commerce is $1T+ globally, with Pinduoduo and Temu as proof; affiliate commerce sits on top.
  • Competitors: Pinduoduo, Temu, Amazon, OpenAI, Perplexity, Klarna, deal tools.
  • Head: Researches options, judges fit and value, and pools demand into one decision.
  • Tail: Buys or unlocks the group rate, with each member paying their own share.
  • Where it wins: Autonomous agent purchasing and cross-border commerce, where cards and Amazon do not reach.

11. The Household That Pays Itself

Roommates, families, and teams share recurring money: rent, utilities, groceries, shared Netflix, rec-league dues. It is permanent low-grade friction: who paid rent, how to split the power bill, who is still on the family plan without paying.

Recurring is the magic word. It is the stickiest behavior there is.

Build the agent that runs the shared household's money. It collects each person's share on schedule, pays the biller, settles the "I was not here in July" disputes, and quietly cuts off the freeloader. Splitwise tracks this and makes you pay by hand. The household agent just does it, every month, forever.

  • TAM: Rent, utilities, and shared subscriptions are enormous categories; subscription management and roommate finance are growing; recurring behavior creates high retention.
  • Competitors: Splitwise for tracking only, Venmo, Rocket Money, roommate and bill-pay apps.
  • Head: Tracks fair usage, parses who used what, and handles churn and disputes.
  • Tail: Recurring collection and bill payment.
  • Where it wins: International roommates and families, plus emerging markets where shared bills already settle in stablecoins.