Written by: "Ping Shuo" Blockchain
"New Infrastructure" refers to those 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", revealing 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 1-1.
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 profound 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 created a permissionless global currency circulation, bringing new possibilities to cross-border payments, financial inclusion, and other fields.
Constructed a decentralized trust mechanism: The transparency and immutability of the distributed ledger have built a decentralized trust mechanism, promoting efficient value exchange and collaboration worldwide.
Opened the Web3 era: The success of the blockchain has verified the feasibility of blockchain technology, providing an effective means of carrying and transmitting value, 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 limited scalability makes it difficult to support complex smart contract applications. In this case, Ethereum's innovation has driven 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 2-1.
Smart contracts, Tokens, and distributed ledgers play important roles 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 Contract: 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 value carriers and incentive mechanisms, provide effective value capture means for protocols, innovate value distribution methods, and give birth to innovative models such as ICO and DeFi, accelerating industry development.
In summary, the distributed ledger, smart contracts, and Tokens are interdependent and constitute the infrastructure of this stage of the Web3 world. Ethereum's innovation 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 to meet expectations in the Bitcoin ecosystem, 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 AI Agent, as an intelligent entity capable of autonomous learning, decision-making, and task execution, 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 Intelligent Entities
In the traditional internet, the AI Agent's function 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, the 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, the AI Agent becomes an independent economic entity—a digital citizen of the Web3 world. This capability allows the 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 under the push of blockchain and artificial intelligence, becoming the best partners for each other.
We will compare the characteristics of smart contracts and AI Agents, as shown in Figure 4-1.
The combination of AI Agents and smart contracts can fully unleash the advantages of both and release their potential:
Combining determinism 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.
Combining decision-making ability and automated execution: As the intelligent brain, AI Agents can analyze complex problems and make decisions, and then automatically execute the decision results through smart contracts, improving efficiency.
Integrating 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, and market data) for more comprehensive analysis and decision-making.
Combining 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 in Web3.
V. AI Agents Usher in a New Era of Intelligent 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 found on 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, where the core idea is that each component in the system is an independent and autonomous agent that can perform parallel computation, 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 is exactly 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 Llama.cpp large language model inference engine, AO can directly run various large-scale 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 trusted 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 Voucher", 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, collateral 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 evolved into a highly liquid super aggregator. Botega, as the first self-agent-driven DEX in the ecosystem, has built an independent process-based AMM system that 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 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/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 of the Whole Text
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 for Web3, deeply integrate with other core elements, and can play a role in various fields such as Crypto, GameFi, Gaming, Social, and Metaverse, which will inevitably spawn 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.
