"New infrastructure" refers to the underlying technical elements and architectures that have innovation-driven power, such as cryptography, tokens, distributed ledgers, and smart contracts. These technologies constitute the core pillars of Web3 development. The development process of Web3 is essentially a process of continuous iteration, integration, and promotion of innovation and change of these new infrastructures .
This article will divide the current development of Web3 into three stages from the perspective of "core elements", revealing the core elements of each stage as the driving force, and how their innovation, iteration and integration drive the evolution of Web3.
1. Initial stage: BTC + Blockchain
The emergence of the Bitcoin blockchain has laid a basic structural paradigm for the development of the Web3 industry, as shown in Figure 1-1.
Figure 1-1 shows the three-layer structure of the Bitcoin blockchain system, from which we can extract two core elements:
- Cryptocurrency ($BTC): As a carrier of value, it provides the underlying value exchange foundation for Web3.
- Distributed ledger (blockchain): As a decentralized trust mechanism and innovative data structure, it makes it possible to build various decentralized applications.
From the subsequent development, we gradually realized that the structural paradigm and basic elements of the Bitcoin blockchain have had a profound impact on the fields of currency and finance, value exchange and social collaboration, and the development of the Internet, which are specifically reflected in the following aspects:
- The birth of global digital currency: Bitcoin has pioneered the permissionless global circulation of currency, bringing new possibilities in areas such as cross-border payments and financial inclusion.
- A decentralized trust mechanism has been established: The openness, transparency, and immutability of distributed ledgers have established a decentralized trust mechanism, promoting efficient value exchange and collaboration on a global scale.
- The Web3 era has begun: The success of blockchain has verified the feasibility of blockchain technology and laid the foundation for the development of the Web3 value Internet.
As a pioneer of blockchain technology, Bitcoin has brought revolutionary changes and paved the way for the advent of the Web3 era. However, Bitcoin has limited scalability and is difficult to support complex applications such as smart contracts. In this context, Ethereum's innovation has pushed the industry into the next stage of development.
2. Development Stage: Blockchain + Smart Contract + Token
Ethereum introduced Turing-complete smart contracts based on Bitcoin, making blockchain not just a digital currency system, but a programmable blockchain platform. The structural paradigm of the Ethereum blockchain is shown in Figure 2-1.
Smart contracts, tokens, and distributed ledgers play an important role in Ethereum’s structural paradigm:
- Distributed ledger (blockchain): ensures data security and transparency. Builds a diversified public chain ecosystem. The public chain is the cornerstone of ecological development, and its prosperity directly affects the overall development of Web3.
- Smart contracts: Smart contracts provide programmability for blockchains and drive the booming development of DeFi. According to @0xmiddle’s analysis, DeFi 1.0 laid the foundation, DeFi 2.0 improved capital efficiency, DeFi 3.0 emphasized composability, and DeFi 4.0 focused on AI intelligence.
- Token: As a value carrier and incentive mechanism, Token provides an effective means of value capture for the protocol, innovates the way of value distribution, gives birth to innovative models such as ICO and DeFi, and accelerates the development of the industry.
In summary, distributed ledgers , smart contracts, and tokens complement each other and together constitute the infrastructure of the Web3 world at this stage . Ethereum's innovation organically combines these three elements, creating a powerful synergy, driving the prosperity of the ecosystem and the total market value of the industry to new highs, marking that the Web3 industry has entered a new stage of development.
However, after experiencing an initial period of rapid development, the Web3 industry is also facing many challenges, such as the decline in the popularity of VC projects, the Bitcoin ecosystem failing to meet expectations, and Ethereum being mired in a FUD dilemma, which adds uncertainty to the market.
Currently, the industry has reached a critical turning point and needs new forces to break through bottlenecks and bring about innovation and change.
3. AI Agent, the driving force behind AI memecoin
At present, it is the "Super Memecoin Cycle", and tens of thousands of memecoins have emerged. Memecoin, as a cryptocurrency derived from Internet culture, has set off waves of crazes in the cryptocurrency market with its strong community effect and viral spread ability. But there are different core driving factors behind each wave of crazes. As shown in Figure 3-1.
The development history of Memecoin is like a microcosm of the cryptocurrency market. Memecoin has always kept pace with the times. In the first five stages of Memecoin, its core power mainly came from the crypto community and was closely linked to Web3 infrastructure such as blockchain, smart contracts and tokens. However, the arrival of the sixth stage marks that Memecoin has entered a new stage of development. As an external force, AI Agent has successfully broken the circle, injected new vitality into Memecoin, and become the new engine of Memecoin .
The addition of AI Agent has brought a qualitative leap to Memecoin:
- Narrative upgrade: AI Agents elevate Memecoin from a simple “meme” to a digital asset with deep cultural heritage by generating personalized and high-frequency content. For example, $GOAT’s AI-generated religious content not only attracted a large number of users, but also built a unique community culture.
- Value support: AI Agent can monitor market dynamics in real time and conduct data analysis to provide Memecoin with more accurate market strategies. For example, $LUNA's AI can automatically adjust the token repurchase plan according to market conditions, thereby stabilizing the coin price.
- Community building: AI Agents can interact with community members in a personalized way to improve user stickiness. For example, through natural language processing technology, AI Agents can understand user emotions and provide corresponding responses, thus enhancing the cohesion of the community.
The addition of AI Agents, with their autonomy, creativity, and social capabilities, has pushed Memecoin to a new level and brought unprecedented development opportunities. However, the potential of AI Agents goes far beyond Memecoin. It is becoming the new infrastructure of Web3, bringing new changes to the entire Web3 ecosystem and continuously promoting industry innovation and development.
4. Acceleration stage: AI Agent becomes the new infrastructure of Web3
As an intelligent entity that can learn, make decisions and execute tasks autonomously, AI Agent is gradually becoming the new infrastructure of the Web3 world. Its unique position in Web3 stems from its outstanding performance in economic independence, deep integration with smart contracts, and promoting Web3 innovation.
1. Financially independent intelligent individuals
In the traditional Internet, AI Agents are limited in their functions due to the lack of legal digital identity and asset ownership. In Web3, with the help of technologies such as wallets, decentralized identities (DIDs), public and private keys, AI Agents can obtain independent digital identities and accounts, own and manage assets, and have the ability to perform verification and signing. In this way, AI Agents become independent economic entities - digital citizens of the Web3 world . This ability enables AI Agents to actively participate in various financial and economic activities of Web3.
2. The best partner for smart contracts
Smart contracts and AI Agents, two seemingly independent concepts, are deeply integrated and become each other's best partners under the impetus of blockchain and artificial intelligence.
We compare the characteristics of smart contracts and AI Agents, as shown in Figure 4-1.
The combination of AI Agent and smart contracts can give full play to the advantages of both and unleash their potential:
- Combining determinism with flexibility: Smart contracts provide a reliable execution environment, and AI Agents can make dynamic adjustments based on real-time data and environmental changes to achieve more flexible applications.
- Combining decision-making capabilities with automated execution: AI Agent, as an intelligent brain, can analyze complex problems and make decisions, and then automatically execute the decision results through smart contracts to improve efficiency.
- Integration of on-chain data and off-chain data: Smart contracts mainly process on-chain data, while AI Agents can use on-chain data and off-chain data (such as sensor data, social media and market data, etc.) for more comprehensive analysis and decision-making.
- Combination of decentralization and intelligence: Smart contracts ensure the decentralization and transparency of the system, while AI Agent brings intelligence to the system, helping to realize the vision of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and applications (DApps).
Through deep integration with smart contracts, AI Agent will play a more important role in Web3 and promote Web3 innovation and change.
5. AI Agent opens a new era of Web3 intelligence
As a new infrastructure, AI Agent is leading Web3 into a new era of intelligence. This is mainly reflected in the infrastructure and application innovation of each public chain, covering areas such as AI memecoin, systems and tools, AgentFi, AI Payment, games and entertainment, etc. More information can be obtained from the Internet.
Among many public chains, Arweave/AO is very compatible with the development of AI in terms of architecture and system resources. The community attaches great importance to the development of AI Agents and will promote the implementation of AI Agent applications as a common goal and action guide, which deserves special attention.
- In terms of system architecture: AO is designed using the Actor model. The core idea is that each component in the system is an independent agent that can operate in parallel, which is highly consistent with the application architecture driven by AI Agent.
- In terms of system resources: AI relies on three elements: models, algorithms, and computing power, so it has a high demand for resources. This happens to coincide with the system resource characteristics of AO. The Arweave+AO system built on the SCP paradigm has scalable computing, data, and storage resources. It can independently allocate computing resources to each AI process, effectively eliminating computing performance bottlenecks; it can provide trusted data resources for AI models, helping learning and training to reduce model bias.
- In terms of key technologies: With the support of three key technologies, WASM64, WeaveDrive and Llama.cpp large language model inference engine, AO can directly run a variety of large language models in smart contracts, such as Llama 3 and GPT-2, laying a solid foundation for the development and operation of AI Agent applications.
- In terms of basic protocols: FusionFi Protocol (FFP) is a protocol specification and development tool that aims to connect different agents, build information bridges, and standardize the interaction between DApp agents. Through FFP, it is possible to achieve seamless integration of various financial businesses such as transactions, loans, and futures, and build a cross-application, cross-scenario decentralized financial ecosystem.
- In terms of trusted data: Dria enables AI models to access the latest, complete, and verified information, effectively reducing the biases and inaccuracies common in centralized data sources, thereby providing a high-quality data source for AI Agent applications.
- In terms of asset innovation: @outprog, the founder of EverVision, innovatively proposed the concept of "AgentFi Notes", which aims to reconstruct decentralized trust between entities through AgentFi Notes. This concept allows everyone to exercise sovereignty, issue their own notes and manage assets, integrating multiple financial scenarios such as exchange, futures, mortgage lending and stablecoins.
- In terms of application innovation: Permaswap is the leading DEX in the ecosystem. After launching FusionFi Protocol, it has integrated various financial forms and developed into a super-aggregate of liquidity. As the first autonomous agent-driven DEX in the ecosystem, Botega has built an AMM system with independent processes, which can autonomously execute advanced order types such as tracking stop loss, fixed investment, and limit price, and intelligently allocate liquidity to improve transaction efficiency.
As conditions mature, Arweave/AO, with its advantages in permanent storage of data and data atomic assets and ultra-parallel computing, may stimulate the development potential of data-driven smart businesses, thereby meeting the needs of real economic activities on/off-chain.
Although the Arweave/AO ecosystem is still in its infancy, the upstream and downstream of the ecosystem are able to develop in a coordinated manner and become an active builder of the Web3 intelligent era. Its future development prospects are worth looking forward to.
Summary
The development of Web3 is a process of continuous innovation and iteration. Core elements such as distributed ledgers, smart contracts and tokens have played a key role in the early and development stages of Web3, promoting innovation and maturity in the fields of encrypted digital currencies, public chains, DeFi, etc.
Today, AI Agent, as a new infrastructure of Web3, is deeply integrated with other core elements, giving rise to new applications and business models . From AI Memecoin to AgentFi, these innovative cases show that AI Agent has become the core driving force for the intelligent upgrade of the Web3 ecosystem.
With the continuous improvement of the public chain ecosystem and the continuous advancement of AI technology, AI Agent will play an increasingly important role in Web3, ushering in a new digital era that is more intelligent, open and inclusive.
References
1. DeFi 4.0 is emerging: the era of sovereign finance is coming!
2. FusionFi Protocol: Building the core bridge of AgentFi interoperability
3. Smart Finance: From AgentFi to FusionFi
4. Coinbase has entered the new AI payment track. What other projects are adding wallets to Agents?
5. Is the AgentFi era coming? Get to know Botega, the "Autonomous Agent DEX"
6. Meme Popular Narratives: A comprehensive list of 37 AI agent projects
