Author: @Defi0xJeff, Head of @steak_studio

Compiled by: zhouzhou, BlockBeats

Editor's Note: This article discusses the Web3-driven agent-based economy, where AI agents enhance productivity through task automation, leading to a transformation of services as software and breaking the boundaries of the traditional software market. Cryptographic tokens in Web3 become central, serving as the currency for payment computation and services, driving the development of a decentralized economy. Distribution networks and coordination layers will benefit from this transformation, becoming dominant forces in the market. This article looks forward to the rise of the Web3 agent-based economy and emphasizes the importance of token incentives within it.

The following is the original content (reorganized for readability):

Whenever we experience a technological revolution, a new economic form emerges:

• Industrial Revolution ➔ Manufacturing Economy
• Personal Computers ➔ Software Economy
• Internet ➔ E-commerce Economy
• Streaming ➔ Subscription Economy
• Public Cloud ➔ SaaS Economy
• 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 Economy
• · Large Language Models (LLMs) ➔ Agent-Based Economy

Rise of the Giants

During these transformations, major players emerge, capturing a significant share 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

Disruptors Finding Cracks

These big players attempt 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 agile companies to quickly iterate ideas and conquer highly segmented niches:

• Notion disrupts traditional enterprise collaboration and knowledge management (e.g., Confluence, SharePoint)
• Perplexity disrupts 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 broadcasting)
• Airbnb disrupts the hotel 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 how things operate, subsequently becoming giants in the new vertical industry, driving the emergence of new players that will disrupt them in the future.

Agent-Based Economy

In the agent-based economy, AI agents significantly change the way various industries operate—agents act as digital workers, proactively handling tasks. Agent-based AI interfaces are now very common, capable of reducing user time while enhancing productivity. This leads to greater efficiency in goods/services, especially in industries where humans perform repetitive tasks. AI and AI agents can significantly lower costs and improve productivity.

In Web2, the best platform/distribution network showcasing top startups using AI and AI agents is @ycombinator, particularly in recent batches:

Midship—using AI to scale financial auditing work

Cuckoo—real-time AI translator for global sales, marketing, and support

Tempo—enabling designers and developers to collaborate and deliver faster, increasing speed by 10 times

Ascend—AI-based financial statement analysis platform

As large language models (LLMs) continue to improve, AI capabilities are enhanced, disrupting more industries and increasing the productivity of more roles and responsibilities (rather than replacing them).

The Rise of Consumer AI in Web3

While Y Combinator serves as the primary distribution network in Web2, incubating and highlighting many quality AI startups, in Web3, @virtuals_io is playing a similar role through AI agent teams, leveraging Agent Commercial Protocols (ACP)—an open standard for multi-agent commerce and coordination, allowing agents to collaborate, provide services, negotiate prices, execute tasks, give evaluations, etc.

This has given rise to a Web3-driven agent-based economy, where agents collaborate to provide more value to users—automated hedge funds and media companies will be among the first experiments to launch this economy via ACP.

Trillion-Dollar Opportunity

As @sequoia stated: "Cloud transformation is software as a service. Software companies have become cloud service providers. This is a $350 billion opportunity.

Thanks to agent-based reasoning, AI transformation is services as software. Software companies will convert labor into software. This means the addressable market is no longer the software market, but the service market measured in trillions."

Now imagine a Web3-driven agent-based economy, where AI agents carve out a small piece of the approximately $10 trillion market through crypto-native use cases (trading, yield farming, and growth driven by token incentives).

Distribution Layer = Kingmakers

Distribution networks/coordination layers will benefit the most from the agent-based economy in this new transformation, as cryptographic tokens are at the core of the Web3 AI monetization model—requiring staking/burning/holding tokens to access core agent-based products/use cases, with tokens serving as the core currency for payment computation and/or service fees.

The demand for tokens and the natural incentive alignment between long-term supporters of projects and the projects themselves mean there will always be captureable transaction volume on DEX or some launch platform. The distribution layer capable of coordinating the agent-based economy and capturing this transaction volume will become a top player, claiming a portion of the $10 trillion market.

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