Author: @Defi0xJeff, Head of @steak_studio
Compiled by: zhouzhou, BlockBeats
Editor's note: This article discusses the Web3-driven agent economy. AI agents improve productivity by automating tasks, bringing about the transformation of software as a service and breaking the boundaries of the traditional software market. Crypto tokens in Web3 have become the core, and as a currency for paying for computing and services, they have promoted the development of a decentralized economy. The distribution network and coordination layer will benefit from this transformation and become the dominant force in the market. This article looks forward to the rise of the Web3 agent economy and emphasizes the importance of token incentives in it.
The following is the original content (for easier reading and understanding, the original content has been reorganized):
Every time we go through a technological shift, a new economic form emerges:
- Industrial Revolution ➔ Manufacturing Economy
- Personal computers ➔ Software economics
- Internet ➔ E-commerce Economy
- Streaming ➔ Subscription Economy
- Public Cloud ➔ SaaS Economics
- iPhone ➔ App Economy
- Social Media ➔ Creator Economy
- Bitcoin and blockchain ➔ Cryptocurrency/Web3 economy ➔ DeFi economy
- Electric Vehicles ➔ Clean/Green Technology Economy
- AI/Machine Learning (pre-LLM) ➔ Predictive/Automated Economics
- Large Language Models (LLMs) ➔ Agent-based Economy
The rise of giants
As these changes occur, major players emerge, capturing large shares of the economy:
➤ General Electric, Ford, Siemens, Caterpillar
➤ Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Adobe
➤ Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, Shopify
➤ Netflix, Spotify, Disney+, Hulu
➤ AWS (Amazon), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Salesforce, ServiceNow
➤ Apple, Google Play (Android), Tencent (WeChat), Meta (Instagram/WhatsApp)
➤ Meta (Facebook, Instagram), YouTube, TikTok, Patreon, Substack
➤ Coinbase, Binance, Ethereum, Solana, Uniswap, Aave
➤ Tesla, BYD, Rivian, Lucid, ChargePoint, CATL (batteries)
➤ Google DeepMind, Palantir, Nvidia, UiPath
➤ OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, DeepSeek, Alibaba, Hugging Face
The cracks through which change agents sneak in
These big players try to predict and capture the next emerging economic form, but due to their size and focus, they cannot capture all opportunities. This creates opportunities for smaller, more nimble companies to iterate ideas quickly and capture very niche areas:
- Notion disrupts traditional enterprise collaboration and knowledge management (e.g. Confluence, SharePoint)
- Perplexity revolutionizes search and information retrieval (e.g., Google Search, Wikipedia)
- Substack disrupts traditional publishing and media (e.g., blogs, newsrooms, Medium)
- Grab/Uber disrupts urban transportation and logistics (e.g., taxis, car rentals, delivery services)
- Netflix disrupts cable TV and physical media (e.g., Blockbuster, traditional broadcast)
- Airbnb disrupts the hospitality and accommodation industry (e.g., hotels, travel agencies)
- Amazon disrupts physical retail (e.g., Walmart, local stores, Sears)
When these players disrupt an industry, they change the way things work and subsequently become giants themselves in new verticals, driving new emerging players to emerge, which will disrupt them in the future.
Agency Economy
In the agent economy, AI agents are dramatically changing the way industries operate - agents act as digital workers, proactively handling tasks, and agent-based AI interfaces are now common, reducing user time while increasing productivity. This makes goods/services more efficient, especially in industries where repetitive tasks are performed by humans. AI and AI agents can significantly reduce costs and increase productivity.
Best platform/distribution network for top startups showing AI and AI agents use in Web2 @ycombinator, especially in recent batches:
Midship—Using AI to scale financial audit work
Cuckoo — Real-time AI translator for global sales, marketing, and support
Tempo — enables designers and developers to collaborate and deliver 10x faster
Ascend—AI-based financial statement analysis platform
As large language models (LLMs) continue to improve and AI capabilities grow, more industries are disrupted and more roles and responsibilities are seeing productivity improved/augmented (rather than replaced).
The Rise of Consumer AI in Web3
While Y Combinator served as the primary distribution network in Web2, incubating and highlighting many high-quality AI startups, in Web3, @virtuals_io is playing a similar role through the AI Agent team, leveraging the Agent Commerce Protocol (ACP) - an open standard for multi-agent commerce and coordination, where agents can collaborate with each other to provide services, negotiate prices, perform tasks, give reviews, etc.
This gives rise to a Web3-powered agent economy where agents collaborate to provide more value to users — automated hedge funds and media companies will be the first experiments in ACP to enable this economy.
Trillion Dollar Opportunity
As @sequoia said: “Cloud transformation is Software as a Service. Software companies become cloud service providers. This is a $350 billion opportunity.
Thanks to agent-based reasoning, AI transformation is software as a service. Software companies transform labor into software. This means the addressable market is no longer a software market, but a trillion-dollar services market.”
Now imagine a Web3-powered agent-based economy where AI agents carve out a small piece of the ~$10 trillion market through crypto-native use cases (trading, yield farming i.e. crypto investing, and promoting growth through token incentives).
Distribution Layer = King Maker
The distribution network/coordination layer will benefit the most from this new transformation to the agent-based economy, as crypto tokens are at the core of the Web3 AI monetization model - i.e. tokens need to be staked/burned/held to access core agent-based products/use cases, and tokens serve as the core currency to pay for computation and/or services.
The demand for the token and the natural incentive alignment between the long-term backers of the project and the project means there will always be volume to capture on a DEX or some launchpad. The distribution layer that can coordinate the agent-based economy and capture this volume will become a top player, capturing a portion of the $10 trillion market.
