Introduction

The Autonols protocol (Olas) provides a framework for coordinating and managing autonomous agent systems. Each part of the protocol is designed to ensure scalability and security. It provides mechanisms to incentivize developers proportionally to their contributions, incentivize operators to run agent systems, and incentivize guarantors to provide liquidity, collectively supporting the development of a decentralized ecosystem.

Funding Background

Funding Background (Source: rootdata)

Olas completed a funding round on February 4, 2025, with an undisclosed series, amounting to $13.8M. The round was led by 1kx, with participation from Zee Prime Capital, Borderless Capital, and others.

First Collaboration Case

The first implementation of POSE (Protocol-owned Services) for the OLAS protocol is through collaboration with Azuro, a leading liquidity layer for on-chain prediction markets. Azuro has integrated OLAS’s AI tech stack to develop an autonomous agent within its ecosystem. This partnership allows Olas AI technology to penetrate the rapidly growing prediction market sector. The Azuro AI agent will learn to make accurate sports event predictions, with its learning capabilities enhanced by data from the Azuro market.

Team Members

Team Member (Source: https://www.rootdata.com/Projects/detail/Olas?k=Nzk2NA%3D%3D)

Olas’s core team consists of co-founder and CEO David Minarsch and co-founder and CTO David Galind, who both hold the same positions at the software development company Valory. David Minarsch brings extensive blockchain experience to the team, serving as CEO of AI payment protocol Nevermined and having previously worked at Fetch.AI, which has provided him with valuable resources and technical expertise. Valory, where both leaders work, is a core contributor to Olas.

Core Features

1. Core Components

Open Autonomy Framework

Open Autonomy is a framework for creating agent services: off-chain autonomous services that operate as multi-agent systems (MAS) and provide enhanced on-chain functionality. Agent services extend the operational scope of traditional smart contracts, enabling the execution of arbitrarily complex operations (such as machine learning algorithms). Most importantly, agent services are decentralized, trust-minimized, transparent, and robust.

The framework provides:

• A collection of command-line tools for building, deploying, publishing, and testing agent services.
• A set of base packages that provide agents with the functionality to be part of agent services.

Autonolas Protocol

The Autonolas protocol is a set of smart contracts that implement mechanisms for coordinating, securing, and managing software code on public blockchains. It rewards developers based on their relative contributions to the Autonolas ecosystem. The protocol is built with Open Autonomy as the primary framework for implementing autonomous services, though other frameworks can be used.

The Autonolas protocol is currently deployed on multiple blockchains, and the DAO will determine its potential future deployments.

The protocol consists of three main elements:

Autonolas Protocol Model

• On-chain registry that enables registration of autonomous services, software agents, and agent components (existing as off-chain code) as NFTs, and provides primitives for composing components into agents, agents into autonomous services, and operating and securing such services.
• Protocol Tokenomics defines an economic model using the OLAS token as a coordination mechanism to achieve three main objectives:
  • Enable permissionless pairing of capital with code.
  • Create a value-attracting flywheel that delivers truly decentralized autonomous services, owned by the DAO, operated by ecosystem participants, and coded by ecosystem developers.
  • Incentivize software composability.
• Governance allows the Autonolas DAO to function as a decentralized, autonomous organization that guides and fine-tunes aspects of the Autonolas protocol over time.

In most cases, the reward model for service owners and agent operators is straightforward: users pay service owners, and service owners pay operators who support their services. However, this isn’t always clear for open-source software developers. This is where the Autonolas protocol comes in.

Roles in the Autonolas Protocol

Autonolas proposes a model where open-source developers who contribute to the community benefit from their contributions. The model includes incentives for software composability, reusability, and utility. In simple terms, software packages (components and agents) brought into the Autonolas ecosystem are secured and minted as NFTs within the Autonolas protocol. These packages can be used to code agents and services through composition, and the protocol has mechanisms to represent actual software/system compositions on-chain. This is a key feature for measuring the utility of code that developers bring and providing fair rewards for their contributions.

2. Use Cases

Sovereign Agents

Sovereign agents are lightweight, easy-to-run agents managed by a single individual or entity. They can be deployed flexibly on personal computers or in the cloud.

The main advantages of Sovereign agents include low operating cost and simplicity, making them ideal for personal tasks or smaller-scale operations without extensive coordination. In Olas’ technical language, sovereign agents are referred to as “autonomous services with a single agent instance”.

Decentralized Agents

Decentralized agents are made up of multiple agent instances, each run by different operators. This setup ensures high transparency and robustness due to their open-source code and a consensus mechanism that keeps all agent instances in sync.

These agent instances and their operator are well-suited for managing high-value processes and assets, such as governance in DAOs or delivering AI inference on-chain, because they minimize reliance on any single operator.

Here’s how decentralized agents work:

Decentralized Agents Model

1. Services are made up of open-source software agents
2. Each agent instance is operated independently
3. Services run continuously, and are fault tolerant up to a threshold
4. Services get data from any data source
5. They can do complex stuff, even machine learning
6. Service agents robustly come to consensus about what action to take
7. Services take action on any chain or call APIs

Agent Economies

An agent economy consists of specialized agents—sovereign or decentralized—working together to provide complex services. Each agent performs specific tasks, and their interactions deliver a powerful and flexible service.

Agent economies have applications in AI prediction services, content generation, and financial services. The Olas protocol provides the necessary infrastructure to support these economies.

Tokenomics

The Autonolas protocol tokenomics is an economic model that promotes autonomous service development and composability. The main goal is to create a sustainable ecosystem that incentivizes developers to contribute to the network, rewards their participation proportionally to their efforts, while ensuring the platform itself continues to evolve and increase in value.

1. $OLAS Token Information

$OLAS Token Information

As of February 24, 2025, $OLAS has a circulating supply of 157.76M and a total market cap of $79.71M. The token is available on multiple chains.

2. $OLAS Token Utility

The main functionalities enabled by $OLAS include:

• $OLAS can be locked as $veOLAS to participate in Autonolas DAO governance, influencing the protocol and tokenomics.
• $OLAS can be locked as $veOLAS to gain permissionless access to service whitelists and unlock code owner rebates.
• $OLAS can be used to acquire necessary LP tokens (on third-party DEXs) required for bonding mechanisms. This enables protocol-owned liquidity, supporting long-term protocol growth.

3. $OLAS Token Distribution

$OLAS Token Distribution Status

The $OLAS token supply distribution details are as follows:

• veOLAS holds: 169,486,153 $OLAS
• Treasury holds: 74,751,929 $OLAS
• Valory holds: 62,154,155 $OLAS
• Current circulating supply: 157,761,426

4. $OLAS Token Emission

$OLAS Token Emission Schedule

The total supply of $OLAS tokens is capped at 1 billion for the first 10 years, with a maximum annual inflation rate of 2% thereafter. The allocation is as follows:

• 32.65% allocated to DAO founding members
• 10% allocated to Valory AG for maintenance, operations, and advancement of the Autonolas protocol
• 10% allocated to Autonolas DAO treasury
• 47.35% available for developer incentives, to be distributed autonomously by the protocol over the initial 10 years

Inflation Risk

Like most protocol tokens, $OLAS faces inflation risks in terms of supply and demand:

• Token Inflation Pressure: If the $OLAS token emission mechanism fails to balance supply and demand, it could lead to excessive inflation, affecting the token’s long-term value. For example, over-distribution of incentives could create selling pressure and impact investor confidence.
• Token Incentive Sustainability: If the Olas protocol’s incentive model fails to attract developers, agent providers, and users in the long term, it could decrease ecosystem activity and affect protocol growth.

Future Development Directions

According to Olas’s published roadmap, there are four established development directions. These include building an autonomous agent economy engine, enhancing protocol security, implementing Build-A-PoSe, and triple locking. Among these, the autonomous agent economy engine has already been approved through governance and is in the implementation phase, while the other three are in the approval process. These development directions were independently voted on and executed by the community.

1. Building the Engine for Autonomous Agent Economy

This development direction proposes implementing $OLAS token staking functionality, which empowers different users (including individuals, groups, companies, and DAOs) to create autonomous agent economies. By allowing the definition of key performance indicators in staking programs, Olas Staking facilitates the launch of new economies and maintains existing ones.

2. Enhancing Protocol Security

The Autonolas DAO comprises $veOLAS holders and follows a structured governance process. Holders of a minimum specified amount of $veOLAS (currently 5000 $veOLAS) have the right to initiate governance proposals. After a 2-day review period, proposals are open for voting by all $veOLAS holders. Each proposal requires a majority vote and a minimum quorum (currently 3% of total voting power) to pass, with a 2-day delay for implementation.

In certain special circumstances, the Autonolas protocol allows the community-owned multisig wallet (CM) to execute changes directly, bypassing the standard governance process. This is typically used for emergencies, such as addressing security vulnerabilities or bugs.

In this context, this development proposal aims to establish a process for handling emergency events quickly using CM while maintaining security.

3. Build-A-PoSe Implementation

This direction proposes implementing Build-A-PoSe, a DAO-operated structured program to continuously provide new Olas-owned services. Build-A-PoSe utilizes existing Protocol-owned Service (PoSe) Contribute and developer reward mechanisms built into the Olas protocol to: 1) coordinate developers within Olas DAO to build components for new PoS, and 2) coordinate Olas DAO members to guide the development and distribution of new PoS. The proposal suggests building a specific PoSe - Olas Automate - as the first PoSe to be constructed as part of Build-A-Pose.

4. Triple Lock

Olas plans to implement triple locking in the future, a protocol upgrade that improves bonding, developer rewards, and staking. Triple locking creates and strengthens token sinks for $OLAS. Additionally, the proposal presents a bonding strategy in which the DAO creates bonding products for liquidity provision assets, pairing $OLAS with native tokens on each chain where the Olas protocol is deployed.

Risks and Challenges

As a decentralized autonomous agent economy protocol, Olas’s core objective is to build AI-driven autonomous agents and enable them to provide services for the Web3 ecosystem. However, competition in this field is fierce, and Olas is not the only project exploring AI applications on blockchain. Several competitors currently exist in the market:

• Fetch.ai: Focuses on intelligent agents and machine learning models, with numerous applications deployed in DeFi, supply chain, and other sectors, supported by a broader developer community.
• SingularityNET: Building a decentralized AI marketplace that allows developers to publish, share, and monetize AI services, with a mature ecosystem and partnerships with multiple blockchains including Cardano.
• Bittensor: Introduced a decentralized AI model training and validation mechanism, creating a new type of AI economic incentive model that has gained significant attention in the Web3 space.

Compared to protocols like Fetch.ai, SingularityNET, and Bittensor, Olas faces notable scale disadvantages:

• Slower Ecosystem Growth: Compared to competitors like Fetch.ai, Olas’s ecosystem has yet to develop strong network effects, and its use cases are still in the exploratory phase.
• Insufficient Network Effects: OLAS relies on the growth of its Protocol-owned Service Economy (POSE), but the protocol may fall into a low-growth trap if it fails to attract enough developers to build and use agents.

Conclusion

The OLAS protocol integrates smart contracts, autonomous services, and decentralized infrastructure to tackle inefficiencies in DAO governance and complex fund management within decentralized protocols. Compared to similar AI agent protocols, OLAS stands out through its robust decentralization, autonomy, automation, and ability to work across different platforms. As decentralized applications and AI technology mature, OLAS is well-positioned to play a vital role in the future of blockchain governance and autonomous services.