Author: 0xJeff

Compiled by: TechFlow

Every technological change will give rise to a new economic model:

  • Industrial Revolution ➔ Manufacturing Economy

  • Personal computers ➔ Software economy

  • Internet ➔ E-commerce Economy

  • Streaming ➔ Subscription Economy

  • Public Cloud ➔ SaaS (Software as a Service) Economy

  • iPhone ➔ App Economy

  • Social Media ➔ Creator Economy

  • Bitcoin and blockchain ➔ Cryptocurrency/Web3 economy ➔ Decentralized finance ( DeFi ) economy

  • Electric Vehicles ➔ Clean/Green Tech Economy

  • Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning ( AI / ML , pre-large language models) ➔ Predictive/Automated Economy

  • Large Language Models ( LLMs ) ➔ Autonomous Economy

The rise of giants

In these technological transitions, some giant companies always emerge and control most of the markets in the emerging economies:

  • Industrial Revolution : General Electric, Ford, Siemens, Caterpillar

  • Software Economy : Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Adobe

  • E-commerce : Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, Shopify

  • Subscription Economy : Netflix, Spotify, Disney+, Hulu

  • SaaS Economy : AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Salesforce, ServiceNow

  • App Economy : Apple, Google Play (Android), Tencent (WeChat), Meta (Instagram/WhatsApp)

  • Creator Economy : Meta (Facebook, Instagram), YouTube, TikTok, Patreon, Substack

  • Crypto Economy : Coinbase, Binance, Ethereum, Solana, Uniswap, Aave

  • Green tech economy : Tesla, BYD, Rivian, Lucid, ChargePoint, CATL (batteries)

  • Prediction/Automation Economy : Google DeepMind, Palantir, Nvidia, UiPath

  • Autonomous Economy : OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, DeepSeek, Alibaba, Hugging Face

The disruptor’s entry point

These giants try to anticipate and capture the next emerging economic sector, but due to their size and strategic focus, they are unable to cover all segments. This creates opportunities for smaller, more agile companies that can quickly experiment with ideas and focus on extremely niche markets:

  • Notion : Subverting traditional enterprise collaboration and knowledge management tools (such as Confluence, SharePoint)

  • Perplexity : disrupting the search and information retrieval fields (e.g. Google Search, Wikipedia)

  • Substack : Disrupting traditional publishing and media industries (e.g. blogs, newsrooms, Medium)

  • Grab/Uber : Disrupting urban transportation and logistics (such as taxis, car rentals, and delivery services)

  • Netflix : Disrupting cable TV and physical media (Blockbuster, traditional broadcasting)

  • Airbnb : Disrupting the hotel and accommodation industry (such as traditional hotels, travel agencies)

  • Amazon : Disrupting physical retail (e.g. Walmart, local stores, Sears)

As these disruptors change the way industries operate, they themselves become new giants in their respective fields and create opportunities for future emerging players to disrupt them again.

Autonomous Economy

In the autonomous economy, agentic AI is revolutionizing the way industries operate. These AI agents act as digital labor that can proactively complete tasks. Autonomous AI interfaces are now commonplace, significantly reducing the time investment of users while increasing productivity. This shift makes goods and services more efficient, especially in industries where repetitive tasks are performed by humans, where AI and AI agents can significantly reduce costs and increase efficiency.

In the Web2 era, the best incubation platform and distribution network for top startups demonstrating AI and AI agent applications is @ycombinator , especially in the recent batches of projects.

  • Midship : Using AI to scale financial audit work

  • Cuckoo : Real-time AI translation for global sales, marketing, and support

  • Tempo : Helping designers and developers collaborate to deliver products 10x faster

  • Ascend : AI-based financial statement analysis platform

As large language models (LLMs) continue to improve, AI capabilities continue to increase, more industries are being disrupted, and more and more roles and responsibilities are being improved or enhanced in productivity (but have not yet been completely replaced).

Consumer AI in Web3 is brewing

In the Web2 era, Y Combinator , as the main distribution network, incubated and promoted many high-quality AI startups. In the Web3 field, @virtuals_io is playing a similar role through Agent Commerce Protocol (ACP). ACP is an open standard for commercial collaboration between multiple AI agents, allowing these agents to call each other's services, negotiate prices, perform tasks, provide reviews, etc.

This mechanism has given rise to an agentic economy driven by Web3, in which agents collaborate to create greater value for users. Autonomous hedge funds and autonomous media companies will be the first pilot projects of ACP to launch this new economic system.

Trillion Dollar Opportunity

As @sequoia said:

"The core of cloud transformation is Software as a Service (SaaS). Software companies transform into cloud service providers, which brings a market opportunity worth $350 billion. Thanks to agentic reasoning, the core of AI transformation is Service-as-a-Software. Software companies transform labor into software. This means that the addressable market is no longer a software market, but a service market worth trillions of dollars."

Now, imagine a Web3-powered AI agent economy that captures just a small portion of this ~ $10 trillion services market through crypto-native use cases like trading, yield farming aka crypto investing, and leveraging token incentives to accelerate growth. That would also be a massive opportunity.

Trillion-dollar market: Autonomous economy is emerging in Web3

 Source: Sequoia

Distribution layer = key to success

In the process of transitioning to an agentic economy, the distribution network/coordination layer will be the biggest beneficiary. This is because crypto tokens become the core of the Web3 AI monetization model: users need to stake, burn or hold tokens to access core intelligent products or use cases; tokens are used as core currencies to pay for computing resources and/or services.

This demand for tokens, and the natural alignment of incentives between long-term backers of a project and the project, means there will always be volume to capture, whether on a decentralized exchange (DEX) or on some token launch platform. The distribution layer that can coordinate an autonomous economy and capture this volume will become the top player in this space and capture a sizable portion of the ~$10 trillion market.

Welcome to the dawn of the Web3 autonomous economy. The future is here, it’s bold and it’s free — this is the era of Web3 autonomy.