VIRTUAL · a capped token whose last vesting stream is still draining.

Virtuals Protocol issues no new VIRTUAL. The whole 1B supply was minted once at launch and the origin-chain contract still reads exactly 1,000,000,000 today — there is no emission curve, no staking reward mint and no block subsidy. The Base balance is bridge-escrowed rather than freshly minted, so nothing on this row can grow.

This is the one live source of new VIRTUAL on the market, and it is the row the project's own documentation gets wrong. A linear lockup contract is still streaming allocations to recipients: on-chain it released about 1.18M VIRTUAL over the last 90 days, against roughly 0.17M in the 90 days before that and about 2.37M across the trailing year. Only about 1.85M is left in the contract, which is the entire remaining vesting overhang, so this stream is in its final stretch.

The standing overhang is large but frozen. The DAO-controlled ecosystem treasury holds about 340.7M VIRTUAL — roughly a third of all supply — and its full transfer log shows the last outflow was in May 2024, more than two years ago, so there is nothing to project forward. Governance has approved a sniper-defence and staking-yield fund of 1% of supply, and a performance grant to the core contributor team of up to 6% of supply that only begins streaming if VIRTUAL trades at $10, $20 and $40 — far above today's price, so it is dormant. No public evidence of release in window — monitored.

There is no bankruptcy estate, trustee schedule or court-ordered distribution attached to VIRTUAL.

This is the most misread fact about Virtuals Protocol. The revenue buyback-and-burn programme buys and burns each AI agent's OWN token — not VIRTUAL. The VIRTUAL spent doing that lands in the agent's liquidity pool and stays in the float, so it is a transfer inside the ecosystem rather than a removal. No VIRTUAL is ever bought back by the protocol.

There is no VIRTUAL burn. Every agent trade pays a 1% tax, but that tax is swapped INTO VIRTUAL and then paid out — about 70% to the agent's creator and 30% to the protocol treasury. The burn address holds under 3 VIRTUAL in total, which confirms on-chain that nothing is being destroyed.

No discretionary open-market VIRTUAL buying by the Foundation or the core team has been observed. The treasury already holds a third of supply, so it accumulates fee revenue rather than buying the token back.

Two mechanisms look like locks but do not remove VIRTUAL. Every graduating agent pairs about 42,000 VIRTUAL into a pool whose liquidity tokens are locked for 10 years, yet the VIRTUAL inside that pool is still reachable by anyone selling the agent token into it, so it is a sink rather than a lock. Vote-escrow staking for up to two years is voluntary and decays back to zero at unlock, and no dated net-lock quantum could be confirmed from two independent angles this window, so nothing is booked here.