"New Infrastructure", refers to the underlying technological elements and architectures with innovative driving forces, such as cryptography, Tokens, distributed ledgers, and smart contracts. These technologies constitute the core pillars of the development of Web3.The development process of Web3 is essentially the continuous iteration, integration, and promotion of innovation and transformation of these new infrastructures.

This article will divide the current development of Web3 into three stages from the perspective of "core elements", and reveal how the innovation, iteration and integration of the core elements in each stage drive the evolution of Web3.

I. Initial Stage: BTC + Blockchain

The emergence of the Bitcoin Blockchain laid the basic structural paradigm for the development of the Web3 industry, as shown in Figure 2-1.

Figure 1-1 The structural paradigm of the Bitcoin Blockchain

Figure 1-1 shows the three-layer structure of the Bitcoin Blockchain system, from which we can extract two core elements:

• Encrypted digital currency ($BTC): As a carrier of value, it provides the underlying basis for value exchange in Web3.
• Distributed ledger (Blockchain): As a decentralized trust mechanism and innovative data structure, it provides the possibility for building various decentralized applications.

From the subsequent development, we gradually realize that the structural paradigm and basic elements of the Bitcoin Blockchain have had a far-reaching impact on areas such as currency and finance, value exchange and social collaboration, and the development of the Internet, specifically reflected in the following aspects:

• Spawned a globalized digital currency: Bitcoin has pioneered the global circulation of permissionless currency, bringing new possibilities to cross-border payments and financial inclusion.
• Constructed a decentralized trust mechanism: The public transparency and immutability of the distributed ledger have built a decentralized trust mechanism, promoting efficient value exchange and collaboration worldwide.
• Opened the era of Web3: The success of Blockchain has verified the feasibility of Blockchain technology, laying the foundation for the development of the Web3 value internet.

As the pioneer of Blockchain technology, Bitcoin has brought revolutionary changes and paved the way for the advent of the Web3 era. However, Bitcoin's scalability is limited and it is difficult to support complex smart contract applications. In this case, the innovation of Ethereum has pushed the industry into the next stage of development.

II. Development Stage: Blockchain + Smart Contract + Token

Ethereum introduced Turing-complete smart contracts on the basis of Bitcoin, making the Blockchain not just a digital currency system, but a programmable Blockchain platform. The structural paradigm of the Ethereum Blockchain is shown in Figure 3-1.

Figure 2-1 The structural paradigm of the Ethereum Blockchain

Smart contracts, Tokens, and distributed ledgers play an important role in the structural paradigm of Ethereum:

• Distributed ledger (Blockchain): Ensures the security and transparency of data. Builds a diversified public chain ecosystem. The public chain is the foundation of ecosystem development, and its prosperity directly affects the overall development of Web3.
• Smart contracts: Smart contracts provide programmability for the Blockchain, driving the flourishing development of DeFi. According to the analysis of @0xmiddle, DeFi 1.0 laid the foundation, DeFi 2.0 improved capital efficiency, DeFi 3.0 emphasized composability, and DeFi 4.0 focused on AI intelligence.
• Token: Tokens, as carriers of value and incentive mechanisms, provide effective means of value capture for protocols, innovate value distribution methods, and give rise to innovative models such as ICO and DeFi, accelerating industry development.

In summary, distributed ledgers, smart contracts, and Tokens complement each other and together constitute the infrastructure of the Web3 world in this stage. The innovation of Ethereum organically combines these three elements, generating a powerful synergistic effect, driving the prosperity of the ecosystem and the repeated highs of the industry's total market value, marking a new stage of development for the Web3 industry.

However, after experiencing the initial rapid development stage, the Web3 industry also faces many challenges, such as the decline in the popularity of VC projects, the failure of the Bitcoin ecosystem to meet expectations, and Ethereum being mired in the FUD dilemma, adding uncertainty to the market.

Currently, the industry has reached a critical turning point and needs new forces to break through the bottleneck and bring innovation and transformation.

III. Acceleration Stage: AI Agent as the New Infrastructure of Web3

The current period is the "Super MEME Coin Cycle", with tens of thousands of MEME coins emerging. MEME coins, as a type of cryptocurrency originating from Internet culture, have triggered wave after wave of fervor in the cryptocurrency market, relying on their strong community effects and viral dissemination capabilities. But behind each wave of fervor are different core driving factors. As shown in Figure 3-1.

Figure 3-1 Different development stages and core driving forces of MEME coins

The development of MEME coins is a microcosm of the cryptocurrency market. MEME coins have always kept pace with the times. In the first five stages of MEME coin development, the core driving force mainly comes from within the crypto community and is closely related to Web3 infrastructure such as Blockchain, smart contracts, and Tokens. However, the arrival of the sixth stage marks a new stage of MEME coin development. AI Agent, as an external force, has successfully broken through the circle and injected new vitality into MEME coins, becoming the new engine for MEME coins.

The addition of AI Agent has brought a qualitative leap to MEME coins:

• Narrative Upgrade: AI Agent, through the generation of personalized and high-frequency content, has elevated MEME coins from simple "memes" to digital assets with a deep cultural foundation. For example, the AI-generated religious content of $GOAT not only attracted a large number of users, but also built a unique community culture.
• Value Support: AI Agent can monitor market dynamics in real-time and perform data analysis, providing more accurate market strategies for MEME coins. For example, the AI of $LUNA can automatically adjust the token repurchase plan based on market conditions to stabilize the token price.
• Community Building: AI Agent can interact with community members in a personalized way, enhancing user stickiness. For example, through natural language processing technology, AI Agent can understand user emotions and provide appropriate responses, enhancing the cohesion of the community.

The addition of AI Agent, with its autonomy, creativity, and social capabilities, has propelled MEME coins to a new level and brought unprecedented development opportunities. However, the potential of AI Agent goes far beyond MEME coins, as it is becoming the new infrastructure of Web3, bringing new transformations to the entire Web3 ecosystem and continuously driving innovation and development in the industry.

IV. Acceleration Stage: AI Agent Becoming the New Infrastructure of Web3

As an intelligent agent capable of autonomous learning, decision-making, and task execution, AI Agent is gradually becoming the new infrastructure of the Web3 world. Its unique position in Web3 stems from its outstanding performance in economic independence, deep integration with smart contracts, and driving Web3 innovation.

1. Economically Independent Digital Entities

In the traditional Internet, AI Agent's functionality is limited due to the lack of legitimate digital identity and asset ownership. However, in Web3, with the help of technologies such as wallets, decentralized identity (DID), and public-private keys, AI Agent can obtain independent digital identity and accounts, be able to own and manage assets, and have the ability to perform verification and signing. In this way, AI Agent becomes an independent economic entity—a digital citizen of the Web3 world. This capability allows AI Agent to actively participate in various financial and economic activities in Web3.

2. The Best Partner of Smart Contracts

Smart contracts and AI Agents, these two seemingly independent concepts, are deeply integrating with the push of blockchain and artificial intelligence, becoming the best partners of each other.

We will compare the characteristics of smart contracts and AI Agents, as shown in Figure 4-1.

Figure 4-1: Comparison of the characteristics of smart contracts and AI Agents

The combination of AI Agents and smart contracts can fully utilize the advantages of both and release their potential:

• Combination of determinacy and flexibility: Smart contracts provide a reliable execution environment, while AI Agents can make dynamic adjustments based on real-time data and environmental changes, achieving more flexible applications.
• Combination of decision-making ability and automated execution: AI Agents as the intelligent brain can analyze complex problems and make decisions, and then automatically execute the decision results through smart contracts, improving efficiency.
• Integration of on-chain data and off-chain data: Smart contracts mainly process on-chain data, while AI Agents can utilize both on-chain data and off-chain data (such as sensor data, social media data, and market data) for more comprehensive analysis and decision-making.
• Combination of decentralization and intelligence: Smart contracts guarantee the decentralization and transparency of the system, while AI Agents bring intelligence to the system, helping to realize the vision of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and decentralized applications (DApps).

Through deep integration with smart contracts, AI Agents will play an increasingly important role in Web3, driving innovation and transformation of Web3.

V. AI Agents Usher in a New Era of Intelligence in Web3

As a new infrastructure, AI Agents are leading Web3 into a new era of intelligence. This is mainly reflected in the infrastructure and application innovation of various public chains, covering areas such as AI memecoins, systems and tools, AgentFi, AI Payment, games and entertainment, and more information can be obtained from the Internet.

Among the many public chains, Arweave/AO is highly compatible with the development of AI Agents in terms of architecture and system resources, and the community attaches great importance to the development of AI Agents, taking the promotion of AI Agent applications as a common goal and action guide, which is worth focusing on.

• In terms of system architecture: AO adopts the Actor model in its design, the core idea of which is that each component in the system is an independent and autonomous agent that can run in parallel, which is highly compatible with the application architecture driven by AI Agents.
• In terms of system resources: AI relies on three elements: models, algorithms, and computing power, and therefore has high resource requirements. This happens to be in line with the characteristics of AO's system resources. The Arweave+AO system built on the SCP paradigm has scalable computing, data, and storage resources, which can independently allocate computing resources for each AI process, effectively eliminating computing performance bottlenecks; it can also provide reliable data resources for AI models, helping to reduce model bias during training.
• In terms of key technologies: With the support of three key technologies, WASM64, WeaveDrive, and the Llama.cpp large language model inference engine, AO can directly run various large language models such as Llama 3 and GPT-2 in smart contracts, laying a solid foundation for the development and operation of AI Agent applications.
• In terms of basic protocols: The FusionFi Protocol (FFP) is a protocol specification and development tool aimed at connecting different Agents and building information bridges, standardizing the interaction between DApp Agents. Through FFP, various financial services such as transactions, loans, and futures can be seamlessly integrated, building a decentralized financial ecosystem across applications and scenarios.
• In terms of reliable data: Dria allows AI models to access the latest, complete, and verified information, effectively reducing the bias and inaccuracy common in centralized data sources, thereby providing high-quality data sources for AI Agent applications.
• In terms of asset innovation: The initiator of EverVision, @outprog, has innovatively proposed the concept of "AgentFi Vouchers", aiming to reconstruct decentralized trust between entities through AgentFi Vouchers. This concept allows everyone to exercise sovereignty, issue their own vouchers and manage assets, integrating various financial scenarios such as exchange, futures, mortgage lending, and stablecoins.
• In terms of application innovation: Permaswap is the leading DEX in the ecosystem, and after launching the FusionFi Protocol, it has integrated multiple financial forms and developed into a highly liquid super aggregator. Botega, as the first self-agent-driven DEX in the ecosystem, has built an AMM system with independent processes, which can autonomously execute advanced order types such as trailing stop, dollar-cost averaging, and limit orders, and intelligently allocate liquidity to improve trading efficiency.

As conditions mature, Arweave/AO, with its advantages in permanent storage of data and data atomic assets, and super-parallel computing, may unleash the potential of data-driven intelligent business development, thereby meeting the needs of real economic activities on-chain and off-chain.

Although the Arweave/AO ecosystem is still in its early stages, the upstream and downstream of the ecosystem are developing in coordination, becoming active builders of the intelligent era of Web3, and the future development prospects are worth looking forward to.

Summary

The development of Web3 is a process of continuous innovation and iteration. Core elements such as distributed ledgers, smart contracts, and Tokens have played a key role in the early and development stages of Web3, driving innovation and maturity in areas such as cryptocurrencies, public chains, and DeFi.

Today, AI Agents, as a new infrastructure of Web3, are deeply integrated with other core elements, giving rise to new applications and business models. From AI Memecoins to AgentFi, these innovative cases indicate that AI Agents have become the core driving force for the intelligent upgrade of the Web3 ecosystem.

With the continuous improvement of the public chain ecosystem and the continuous progress of AI technology, AI Agents will play an increasingly important role in Web3, ushering in a more intelligent, open, and inclusive digital new era.