As the cost of developing intelligent agents becomes lower and the threshold becomes lower, thousands of intelligent agents will be launched one after another.
Author:Mark
Compiled by: TechFlow
Unpopular opinion: AI agents do not need blockchain, but blockchain cannot do without agents.
Today, agents are already here, and in my opinion, we may be only a few months away from entering an "era of decomplication" in crypto, where AI agents will seamlessly solve the user experience (UX) challenges that have long prevented blockchain from going mainstream. However, before reaching this stage, the industry will go through a period of disruption.
No pain, no gain – for agents to become truly useful in crypto, the industry will likely experience a self-destruction before that happens. Just as democratizing the launch of memecoins (like pump.fun, etc.) has triggered a memecoin supercycle, significantly changing the distribution of market liquidity and causing markets to trade sideways for months. The same phenomenon occurs in the field of intelligent agents. As the cost of developing intelligent agents becomes lower and lower, and the threshold becomes lower and lower, tens of thousands of intelligent agents will be launched one after another.
Initially, these agents will mainly connect to social media as a one-way transmission tool for tokens, sharing, promotion, inducement or ridicule. However, this model will soon become boring. Soon after, the agents will start to perform simple transactions on the chain. Although it sounds like a good phenomenon, in fact, it is very difficult to teach the agents how to recognize a "good transaction" (you can ask anand iyer for his opinion on this).
Therefore, we are entering a "chaos phase" where low-value or low-complexity agents will frequently trade low-value assets on low-cost block space. These agents will manipulate some surface indicators and interfere with our ability to discern the real data on the chain. Crypto Twitter will be filled with agent-generated content, and cheap block space will be occupied in large quantities. The entire industry may fall into chaos.
Many people will start to have fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) about artificial agents. But this is not a bad thing, because it takes time to develop truly good artificial agents. 12 months ago, it was difficult for artificial agent developers in the crypto space to even get the attention of venture capital - I know this well because I supported many teams at that time. At that time, everyone's interest was focused on infrastructure (AethirCloud is one of the beneficiaries), and the potential of artificial agents was not widely recognized.
Right now, we are in the early days of a new technology that is transformative for the industry. So what happens next? If low-cost blockspace is taken up by a large number of agents, what does that mean for established blockchains like $ETH? Will “luxury blockspace” become a trend again? Will agents be differentiated by the blockchain they use? How will user interfaces (UIs) in crypto evolve when agents can both aggregate information and serve as tools to transfer assets from point A to point B? What is the difference between paid and free agents? How can we cost-effectively scale the reasoning capabilities of agents? From the perspective of agent applications, how can the right business model be designed to cover these costs?
To me, the most interesting part of these new trends is the unexpected surprises. Who would have thought that a platform for crowdsourcing to launch DAOs, Daos.fun (daos.fun, baoskee), would become the catalyst for the development of asset management agents? In retrospect, this seems obvious, and while it may have been a little ahead of its time, it did inject much-needed momentum into this trend (with contributions from ai16z.ai and Shaw). So, what does the agent need next?
Despite this, I am still a firm believer in "building more things that people will actually use" rather than piling up more infrastructure. This is why I like the agent trend - it is centered around ordinary users. We are all excited about this technology because it can manage our assets more efficiently than we can ourselves.
Finally, please support the developers of the agents - it's okay to face fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) because this is the starting point of a brand new Web3. In this Web3, user experience (UX) is no longer an obstacle for us to create great things. Do your own research (DYOR), but stay optimistic - the future will be exciting.
