Author: Mark, Co-founder of Aethir
Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News
This may be an unpopular view: agents don't need blockchain, but blockchain needs agents. AI agents have arrived, and (in my view) we may be just a few months away from the "post-complexity era" of cryptocurrencies. In this era, AI agents can seamlessly solve the user experience challenges that have long hindered mainstream blockchain adoption. But before we get there, the market situation will become chaotic and messy.
There is no gain without pain. Before we get useful AI agents, cryptocurrencies will play out a near-suicidal script. The democratization of MEME coin issuance (e.g. pump.fun) has driven a MEME coin super-cycle, significantly changing the distribution of liquidity, leading to a market consolidation for months. The same thing will happen in the AI agent field, with the launch of AI agents becoming increasingly easy, and thousands of AI agents are about to go online.
Initially, AI agents will connect to social media, acting as amplifiers for token promotion, playing the role of pitching, luring, and trolling. This stage will pass quickly, and soon after, AI agents will be able to execute simple transactions on-chain. This may sound like a good thing, but it's actually quite difficult to make AI agents understand what a "good trade" is.
So we enter the chaos phase. Low-value or low-complexity AI agents are trading low-value assets on cheap blockchain space. They manipulate vanity metrics, confusing the on-chain data we see. AI agents are flooding crypto Twitter, as well as cheap blockchain space. It will be a mess.
So many people will start FUDing AI agents. But that's okay, because good agents take time. 12 months ago, the AI infrastructure builders in the crypto space were completely ignored by VCs. I know this because I've backed many of them. Everyone was interested in the infrastructure (Aethir is a beneficiary), but AI agents weren't sexy enough.
And so we come to the current market. Early hype usually revolves around a technology that can change our industry. What happens next? If cheap blockchain space is saturated, what does that mean for ETH OGs? Will "expensive blockchain space" become fashionable again? Can AI agents be differentiated based on the location of their interactions? What will the UI of crypto products look like when agents are responsible for aggregating information and acting as tools to move assets from A to B? What's the difference between paid agents and free agents? How do we scale reasoning capabilities in an economically efficient way, and from the agent's perspective, what is the right business model for paying this fee?
For me, these new meta are full of surprises. Who would have thought that a crowdsourced DAO launch platform, daos.fun, would become a catalyst for the AI agent investment wave. In retrospect, the outcome seems almost destined, providing the much-needed momentum for the meta (ai16z). So what's next for AI agents?
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're all excited about a technology that can manage our portfolios better than we can.
In summary, support the AI agent builders. Controversy will exist, but that's okay, this is the start of a whole new Web3. In Web3, user experience is no longer the bottleneck to building amazing things.
