Author: @Defi0xJeff, Head of @steak_studio
Translated by: zhouzhou, BlockBeats
Editor's Note: This article discusses the agent-based economy driven by Web3, where AI agents enhance productivity through task automation, bringing about a transformation to "service as software" and breaking traditional software market boundaries. Crypto tokens in Web3 become the core, serving as currency for computing and service payments, driving the development of a decentralized economy. Distribution networks and coordination layers will benefit from this transformation, becoming market leaders, as the article looks forward to the rise of the Web3 agent-based economy and emphasizes the importance of token incentives.
Following is the original content (slightly edited for readability):
Whenever we experience a technological revolution, a new economic form emerges:
- Industrial Revolution ➔ Manufacturing Economy
- Personal Computer ➔ Software Economy
- Internet ➔ E-commerce Economy
- Streaming ➔ Subscription Economy
- Public Cloud ➔ SaaS Economy
- iPhone ➔ App Economy
- Social Media ➔ Creator Economy
- Bitcoin and Blockchain ➔ Crypto/Web3 Economy ➔ DeFi Economy
- Electric Vehicles ➔ Clean/Green Technology Economy
- AI/Machine Learning (Pre-LLM) ➔ Prediction/Automation Economy
- Large Language Models (LLMs) ➔ Agent-based Economy
Rise of Giants
During these transformations, major players emerge, capturing most of the economic share:
➤ 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
Cracks for Disruptors
These giants try to predict and capture the next emerging economic form, but due to their size and focus, they cannot capture all opportunities. This provides opportunities for smaller, more flexible companies to quickly iterate ideas and capture highly specialized domains:
- Notion disrupting traditional enterprise collaboration and knowledge management (e.g., Confluence, SharePoint)
- Perplexity disrupting search and information retrieval (e.g., Google Search, Wikipedia)
- Substack disrupting traditional publishing and media (e.g., blogs, newsrooms, Medium)
- Grab/Uber disrupting urban transportation and logistics (e.g., taxis, car rentals, delivery services)
- Netflix disrupting cable TV and physical media (e.g., Blockbuster, traditional broadcasting)
- Airbnb disrupting hotels and accommodation (e.g., hotels, travel agencies)
- Amazon disrupting physical retail (e.g., Walmart, local stores, Sears)
When these players disrupt an industry, they change how things work, and subsequently become giants in the new vertical, driving the emergence of new players who will disrupt them in the future.
Agent-based Economy
In the agent-based economy, AI agents dramatically change how industries operate—agents act as digital workers, proactively handling tasks, with agent-based AI interfaces now ubiquitous, reducing user time while increasing productivity. This makes goods/services more efficient, especially in industries with repetitive human tasks. AI and AI agents can significantly reduce costs and improve productivity.
In Web2, the top platform/distribution network for showcasing AI and AI agents is @ycombinator, especially in recent batches:
Midship—Using AI to expand financial audit work
Cuckoo—Real-time AI translator for global sales, marketing, and support
Tempo—Enabling designers and developers to collaborate and deliver 10x faster
Ascend—AI-based financial statement analysis platform
As large language models (LLMs) continue to improve, AI capabilities enhance, more industries are disrupted, and productivity of more roles and responsibilities is enhanced/upgraded (rather than replaced).
Consumer AI's Rise in Web3
While Y Combinator serves as the primary distribution network in Web2, showcasing many quality AI startups, in Web3, @virtuals_io is playing a similar role through AI agent teams, leveraging the Agent Commercial Protocol (ACP)—an open standard for multi-agent commerce and coordination, where agents can collaborate, provide services, negotiate prices, execute tasks, and give evaluations.
This gives birth to a Web3-driven agent-based economy, where agents collaborate to provide more value for users—automated hedge funds and media companies will be the first experiments launching this economy.
Trillion-Dollar Opportunity
As @sequoia says: "Cloud transformation is software as a service. Software companies become cloud service providers. This is a $350 billion opportunity.
Thanks to agent-based inference, AI transformation is service as software. Software companies convert labor into software. This means the addressable market is no longer the software market, but a trillion-dollar services market."
Now imagine the Web3-driven agent-based economy, with AI agents carving out a small piece of the approximately $10 trillion market through crypto-native use cases (trading, yield farming, or crypto investing, and growth facilitated by token incentives).
Distribution Layer = Kingmaker
Distribution networks/coordination layers will benefit most from this new transformation in the agent-based economy, as crypto tokens are at the core of Web3 AI monetization models—requiring staking/burning/holding tokens to access core agent-based products/use cases, with tokens serving as the core currency for computing and/or service fees.
The demand for tokens and the natural incentive alignment between long-term project supporters and the project means there will always be capturable trading volume on a DEX or launch platform. Distribution layers that can coordinate the agent-based economy and capture this trading volume will become top players, occupying a portion of the $10 trillion market.
