Virtune has listed an AI index for crypto on Nasdaq Stockholm and Xetra. The company says AI agents' use of blockchain services is becoming as important for growth as tokenization, and weights the index equally across four layers – from compute to payments.
Virtune is a Nordic issuer of exchange-listed crypto ETPs, products that track the price of one or more crypto assets and trade like ordinary shares. On 3 November, the Virtune AI Crypto Index ETP was listed under the tickers VIRAI on Nasdaq Stockholm and VRTI on Deutsche Börse Xetra. The product tracks an index of 13 crypto assets tied to what the industry calls the agent economy: software that buys data, compute and services on its own, often paid for in stablecoins rather than cards or bank transfers. In an interview with Kaupr, Virtune's Chief Sales Officer Andreas Severin says this development, together with tokenization, is now the most important growth driver for crypto as an asset class.
Severin's case for the product is that today's payment infrastructure isn't built for software buying in small amounts. A US card purchase typically costs 2.9 percent plus 30 cents in fees, according to Stripe – enough to make a purchase of a few cents unprofitable – and settlement usually takes a business day. A stablecoin payment costs a fraction of a cent and settles in seconds, around the clock, with no bank or card company involved.
– If an AI agent needs information through an API that requires payment, it's essentially impossible to do that over the normal settlement networks. They have to use the blockchain, and that's exactly what we're seeing happen now, says Severin.
He points to x402 – an open payment standard Coinbase launched in 2025 and which is now run by the Linux Foundation – as the watershed moment. The protocol lets an AI agent request a service, receive a price and pay in stablecoins before the service is delivered instantly. According to figures from MarketVector, 233 million such payments had been made as of 4 August, averaging USD 0.23 per payment – well below the point where a card fee would eat up the entire purchase. The standard now has 51 members, including Visa, Mastercard, AWS and Google.
– Still early days, obviously. But the interesting part is the trend and the growth, and it's really taken off from August and September onward, says Severin.
The index holds 13 crypto assets, equally weighted at 7.69 percent each at listing, spread across four layers Virtune says the agent economy is built on, from the ground up.
At the bottom sits compute – what Severin calls the foundation layer, since AI models need to buy computing power to function in the first place. Here Virtune has chosen Tao (Bittensor) and Render, with Render currently the dominant network, according to Severin.
One layer up is infrastructure and data: the networks AI agents pull prices and other real-world information from to carry out transactions. Near, Chainlink and Pyth make up this layer in the index, with Chainlink singled out as especially important for giving agents reliable data to act on.
Next comes trading and liquidity, the marketplaces where agents swap and trade assets themselves. Hyperliquid, Uniswap and Jupiter sit here.
At the top are the payment networks – the chains where the stablecoin settlement itself happens, and for now the layer with the highest volume. The index includes Ethereum, Solana, Stellar, XRP and Sui. Severin notes that the picture is shifting fast: most x402 payments have so far gone through stablecoins on Base, Coinbase's own Ethereum-based network, but in August and September Solana overtook Base in volume – according to Severin because payment companies have long favoured Solana for its speed and low cost on small transactions.
– We simply don't know which networks will win out going forward, says Severin.
Severin stresses to Kaupr that Virtune has deliberately chosen equal weighting across the 13 assets rather than weighting by market cap.
– If you go by market cap, you essentially end up with just Ethereum and Solana. We prefer broad exposure that gives you all the layers – from payments to infrastructure to compute – because things are going to move extremely fast, he says.
The reasoning is that both the crypto market and the AI field are moving fast on their own, and that the combination of the two is likely to move even faster. For an individual investor, Severin says it's nearly impossible to track developments across the different layers on an ongoing basis and pick winners.
– It's much better and easier to buy the whole space and let the index do the work based on how the market develops, he says.
Severin doesn't dismiss the idea that bubble tendencies could build up in the AI and crypto markets at the same time. He draws a parallel to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, when he himself worked as a young equity analyst.
– Whenever a new technology is invented, short-term valuation bubbles will always build up. That doesn't mean the technology isn't here to stay. A lot of companies went bust during the dot-com bubble, but the technology survived, and today we can't function without it. The same goes for blockchain technology, crypto assets and AI, he says.
He points to the spending pace of the big AI companies as something to watch: both Alphabet and Amazon recently reported strong growth but negative cash flow, driven by high compute costs.
– So yes, there's undoubtedly bubble risk in the valuations. But when it comes to agentic trading, agentic payments and agentic investing, we're still at an extremely early stage, says Severin, pointing out that x402 payments so far amount to only about USD 54 million in combined volume since launching in 2025 – against a forecast of USD 690 billion by 2028 in the fast-adoption scenario.
– I think 2027 will be a year of enormous growth in this space. Together with tokenization, this marriage between AI and blockchain technology is the most exciting thing we see ahead of us, he tells Kaupr.
Sources: Virtune, MarketVector
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