Incentive Alignment

A sufficient number of locked tokens ensures teams work hard, don’t quit and build for the long term. If teams have less than 10% of tokens; it is highly likely that they are not dedicated enough & will quit under any adversity.

Teams launching on Virtuals should acquire a minimum of 40% of tokens to have aligned incentives.

15-20% of locked tokens reserved for the team is acceptable. This includes founders, existing team members, advisors and a pool for future team members & advisors.

Then why acquire more than 20% you ask?

A significant portion of tokens should ideally be reserved for marketing incentives – to acquire new users & retain existing users. This could include staking rewards, airdrops, partnership incentives, engagement rewards, liquidity pool incentives, creating new liquidity pools and more. Web3 developers typically reserve 40-50% of tokens for this bucket under the title “community”.

Memecoins can launch with a much wider holder distribution, with the creator owning 10-20%. What differentiates AI Agents from memecoins is that teams building AI Agents need to hire & retain AI engineering talent and cover infrastructure costs.

Additionally, once a team wants to grow beyond DEXs to go offchain, there will be costs related to listing on CEXs and hiring market makers. Teams should ideally reserve some tokens for future fundraisings and offchain listings. In regular tokenomics jargon, this bucket is typically called “treasury”, “strategic partners”, "liquidity" or “investors” and web3 developers typically reserve 20-40% of tokens here.

Given that the total % of tokens under team & treasury control is ~90% in the typical web3 sphere and that teams launching AI Agents on Virtuals aim to build a $1bn token over multiple years, teams acquiring token supply of 40% to 90% is acceptable on the first purchase transaction.

Thus, teams should acquire as many tokens as possible from an incentive alignment POV.