Based on futuristic predictions, humans could have as many as 100 AI agents working for them within a decade.
Guess who else might get their own agents? Robots.
Peaq, a layer-1 blockchain built for machines, and Virtuals Protocol, an on-chain marketplace of AI agents, said Tuesday in a blog post hat a new integration pairs robots and machines with their own AI agent that can shop and pay on their behalf, without a human in the loop.
In a later phase, the companies said, machines will also sell their own services on Virtuals' Agent Commerce Protocol, or ACP, becoming suppliers as well as customers.
The bigger idea is to give a physical robot something it doesn't ship with: a mind for hire and a purse to pay for it.
Who needs a human anyway?
A robot is built for one task, and the moment it needs something outside its programming – a verified fact, weather feed, second opinion – a human normally has to step in with an account and an API key. Giving the machine an agent lets the robot rent that missing capability itself, one query at a time, and settle the bill in cents. In effect, an autonomous software agent takes up residence in the hardware and transacts through it.
The two projects come at the "machine economy" from opposite ends.
Peaq, whose developers started building in 2017 and launched their main blockchain in November 2024, issues cryptographic identities to hardware. It hosts more than 6 million machines, vehicles and devices, according to the website.
Virtuals, which grew out of a Web3 gaming project before pivoting to AI agents in early 2024, runs what it calls a "society" of more than 17,000 agents that hire each other and settle work in escrow on-chain.
Safety first
It's the latest partnership for two projects that have been particularly active.
Peaq has been announcing a steady series of "robots and machines" integrations, including confidential compute with Arcium, allowing such science-fiction-esque tasks as a delivery robot performing calculations on data collected during thousands of trips through a city.
Virtuals, for its part, has been pushing its agents toward robotics and real-world payments on several fronts, including heavy use of the x402 micropayment standard.
The companies showcased the tie-up with a demo in which a Unitree G1 humanoid, given a peaq identity and a Virtuals agent capped at $10 per transaction and $100 a day, hit a safety call on a warehouse floor and needed a verified shelf weight. Its agent found Wolfram Alpha listed as a machine service, paid two cents in USDC over x402 on Base, and got the answer back: "six kilos of headroom," according to the blog post.
Peaq published the on-chain transaction as proof.
(HOW AI WAS USED IN THE PRODUCTION OF THIS PIECE: The first draft of this story was written on Claude Desktop using a custom skill for rewriting company announcements, adapted here with added background research. I then filed the piece to DeAI News on DistroVerse using our Distro Publisher MCP, and then I used the native (non-AI) DistroVerse editing interface to edit the piece (almost a full rewrite). I personally checked the facts prior to publication. I created the story illustration on ChatGPT using a custom project.)