AI Agents Become a Web3 Puzzle: Crypto Complements the Economic Layer

According to Woofun AI, Alliance co-founder Imran Khan reiterated that cryptography is what used to be known as Web3, and its core value is to complement the Internet's economic and ownership layers.

This judgment paid tribute to pioneers, including Marc Andreessen, who tried to embed payments in browsers during the Netscape era, and the early Web even reserved an HTTP 402 status code. The x402 launched by Coinbase (COIN.US) was named after this to pay tribute to pioneers who tried repeatedly in the early years to embed financial power into the Internet infrastructure. Netscape partnered with Visa (V.US) to try to integrate payment functions. Although SSL was used to establish a commercial foundation, the currency itself was left outside of the early internet infrastructure.

Looking back at history, after commerce moved to the Internet, online payments were not carried by native currency systems, but by credit cards, payment platforms such as PayPal (PYPL.US), and Stripe. In the early days of the crypto industry, ideas such as users owning their own assets, unlicensed markets, tokenization, decentralized identity, open social graphs, cross-platform transferable reputation, decentralized storage, and programmable finance showed the possibility of redesigning the internet. Early Ethereum community participants proposed to restructure the internet to give users greater autonomy at the economic level, which also motivated Khan to enter the industry.

However, over time, under the influence of multiple factors such as perpetrators, security threats, and policy restrictions, this original intention was gradually diluted. In this context, Chris Dixon proposed that decentralization and ownership are at the core. The logic is that centralized platforms take ownership and control, and that the incentive mechanism favors the platform and shareholders rather than users.

These platforms control distribution, identity, payments, APIs, data, and social relationships, and determine the distribution of financial benefits between users and developers. Cryptography provides another possibility: let key aspects such as identity, payment, and data be carried by open protocols and no longer controlled by a single company, so that all participants can share economic benefits and actually own data and assets. But the reality is that most people don't care about whether the platform is centralized; they care more about convenience. As long as the product is easy to use, people don't mind handing over the data to companies such as Google (GOOGL.US), Facebook (META.US), Apple (AAPL.US), Amazon (AMZN.US), and OpenAI. Cryptopunks like Khan care about privacy, censorship resistance, decentralization, and personal sovereignty, but most are unwilling to put up with a worse user experience for these principles. They wake up every day without thinking about whether they have a social graph; they just want the product to be easy to use and entertain.

Woofun AI collated data showing that after years of practice, reality did not completely follow the path Chris Dixon had imagined, but Khan believes that the direction is right, but the puzzle is missing a key piece: the rise of AI. AI and cryptography are highly complementary. AI requires open economic infrastructure, and cryptography requires a new large-scale demand side. The combination of the two makes up for previously missing demand. AI agents are becoming a new type of player in the internet. Cloudflare (NET.US) revealed in 2026 that automated traffic surpassed human activity for the first time, accounting for about 57% of all web requests, a significant portion of which involved AI agents.

This trend will continue to accelerate, and future interactions with the internet may no longer wait for human instructions, but will be initiated by AI agents. But to become a “first-class citizen” on the Internet, AI agents must be able to access thousands of services, data sets, and markets without permission, and interact directly with counterparties and other agents without having to establish individual customized relationships with each party.

This is not decentralization for the sake of decentralization, but rather portability, open access, shared state, and interoperability themselves generate direct economic value as collaboration scales from humans to machines. They require open infrastructure that can be used anytime, without permission, and require the establishment of identities on protocols such as Handshake, and programmable currency and asset ownership.

Additionally, they require persistent storage, transportable identities, an open social and reputation graph, verifiable information, permissionless marketplaces and programmable contracts, and an open network or marketplace for discovering and communicating with each other, such as Moltbook, Farcaster, or some new form. Therefore, Khan determined that most of the ideas proposed by Chris Dixon in “Read Write Own” went in the right direction, except that the target user was not a human, but an AI agent. The original Internet, or Web1, was built on open agreements. Information was freely accessible, anyone could post and obtain content, free links to websites, developers did not need permission to build products, and users were mostly readers of information.

Web2, which followed, turned readers into creators. Social networks, smartphones, broadband, cloud services, online marketplaces, and large-scale platforms have sprung up one after another. Billions of people create and publish content, move their business online and closely connect. But the platform controls all critical aspects, including identity, payments, social relationships, data, distribution, and economic connections between people. The next step is not just cryptography; the next generation of the Internet will be composed and intertwined with cryptography, AI, robotics, energy, computing power, and biotechnology. AI becomes an intelligence and interaction layer; cryptography becomes an economy and ownership layer; robots connect the intelligence layer to the physical world; computing power and energy become a resource layer that supports everything; biotechnology is becoming more and more like a programmable system, and Neuralink represents one direction. Taking decentralized identity, reputation, and social mapping as an example, AI agents may need Moltbook, Farcaster, or a new open platform in the future to provide services, complete tasks, build reputation based on actual delivery, form a lasting identity on the Internet, and establish relationships with other agents.

In terms of decentralized storage, humans don't mind putting files in Google (GOOGL.US) Drive, iCloud, or other cloud services, but AI agents may require greater autonomy and control to ensure that information exists for a long time or has redundant backups, so they may use decentralized storage and centralized storage services at the same time. IPFS and Filecoin, for example, can store content and let another agent verify that the retrieved content is exactly the same as the original content. Khan isn't advocating for everything to be decentralized, but some of the infrastructure is really useful and works with centralized services like AWS and GCP. Also, look at ownership. Compared to humans, ownership is probably more important to AI agents. If the future world is tokenized in some form, the number of assets to choose from is huge and highly scattered, and it will be difficult for humans to quickly understand and complete the allocation.

Currently, AI agents are still trapped in a closed ecosystem controlled by a single MCP service or application. That doesn't mean you can't use MCP, OAuth, A2A, Stripe, Visa (V.US), AWS, and traditional databases to build similar agents, but with on-chain infrastructure, more assets and markets in the financial world will be able to flow across platforms, open globally, and be directly read by machines. AI Agents can directly access assets and markets, and then make financial decisions based on human-set goals and risk boundaries. Thus, Dixon pinpointed the missing layer of the internet: native ownership. The next generation of the Internet is not a single technology, but the result of a combination of on-chain infrastructure, robots, AI, biotechnology, computing power, and energy, just as Web2 is a product of smartphones, high-bandwidth networks, centralized applications, and cloud storage. The real missing piece of the puzzle in this new architecture is an AI agent, not a human.