Thousands of AI agents are about to go live, leading the market into a brief period of chaos.
Written by: Mark, Co-founder of Aethir
Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News
This may be an unpopular opinion: agents do not need blockchain, but blockchain needs agents. AI agents are already here, and (in my opinion) we may be just months away from the "post-complexity era" of cryptocurrency. In this era, AI agents can seamlessly resolve the user experience challenges that have long hindered mainstream blockchain adoption. But before we get there, the market situation will become chaotic and messy.
No pain, no gain. Before achieving useful AI agents, the cryptocurrency space will play out a nearly self-destructive script. The democratization of memecoin issuance (like pump.fun) has driven the memecoin supercycle, significantly altering liquidity distribution, resulting in months of sideways market movement. The same thing will happen in the AI agent space; launching AI agents will become easier, and thousands of AI agents are about to go live.
Initially, AI agents will connect to social media, acting as amplifiers for token promotions. Their role will be marketing, enticing, and ranting. This phase will pass quickly, and soon, AI agents will be able to execute simple transactions on-chain. This may sound like a good thing, but it's actually challenging to make AI agents understand what constitutes a "good transaction."
Thus, we enter the chaotic phase. Low-value or low-complexity AI agents trade low-value assets on cheap block space. They play with vanity metrics, obscuring the on-chain data we see. Crypto Twitter is flooded with AI agents, and the cheap block space is no different. It will be a mess.
As a result, many will start to FUD AI agents. But that's okay because good agents take time. Twelve months ago, AI major builder construction in the cryptocurrency field was completely overlooked by VCs. I know this because I supported many of them. Everyone was interested in infrastructure (Aethir was a beneficiary), while AI agents weren't sexy enough.
And here we are in the current market. The early hype often revolves around a technology that can change our industry. What happens next? If cheap block space becomes saturated, what does that mean for Ethereum OGs? Will "expensive block space" become popular again? Can AI agents differentiate based on the location of interactions? What does the UI of crypto products look like when agents are responsible for aggregating information and serving as tools to transport assets from A to B? What is the difference between paid agents and free agents? How do we efficiently scale reasoning capabilities, and from the agent's perspective, what is the right business model to pay this fee?
To me, this new metadata (meta) is full of surprises. Who would have thought that a crowdsourced DAO launching platform, daos.fun, would become a catalyst for the wave of AI agent investment? Looking back, the outcome seems preordained; it provides the much-needed momentum for metadata (ai16z). So, what does the AI agent need next?
That said, I still believe we should "make more things for people to use" rather than more infrastructure, which is why I like AI agents, as they focus on serving users. We are all excited about a technology that can manage portfolios better than we can.
In summary, support AI agent builders. Controversy will exist, but that's okay; this is the beginning of an entirely new Web3. In Web3, user experience is no longer the bottleneck for us to build amazing things.