Aethir Co-founder: AI agents do not need blockchain, but blockchain cannot do without AI

Original Title: "Agents don't need the blockchain, but the blockchain needs agents."

Author: Mark

Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow

Unpopular Opinion: AI agents do not need the blockchain, but the blockchain cannot do without agents.

Today, agents have emerged, and in my view, we may only need a few months to enter an era of "de-complexification" in the crypto space. In this era, AI agents will seamlessly solve the long-standing user experience (UX) challenges that have hindered the mainstream adoption of blockchain. However, before reaching this stage, the entire industry will undergo a period of chaos.

No pain, no gain—if we want agents to become truly practical in the crypto space, the entire industry may have to experience a "self-collapse" beforehand. Just as the democratization of meme coins (such as pump.fun) triggered a supercycle of meme coins, significantly altering market liquidity distribution and leading to months of market stagnation. A similar phenomenon will occur in the field of agents. As the cost of developing agents decreases and the barriers lower, thousands of agents will come online one after another.

Initially, these agents will primarily connect to social media, serving as tools for one-way dissemination of tokens, sharing, promoting, enticing, or mocking. However, this model will soon become tedious. Subsequently, agents will begin executing simple transactions on-chain. While this sounds like a positive development, teaching agents how to identify a "good transaction" is quite challenging (you can ask anand iyer for his thoughts on this).

Therefore, we are entering a "chaotic phase." During this phase, low-value or low-complexity agents will frequently trade low-value assets in low-cost block space. These agents will manipulate some superficial metrics, interfering with our ability to discern real data on-chain. Crypto Twitter will be flooded with agent-generated content, and cheap block space will be heavily occupied. The entire industry may fall into chaos.

Many people will begin to feel fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) towards agents. But this is not necessarily a bad thing, as developing truly excellent agents takes time. Twelve months ago, developers of agents in the crypto space found it difficult to attract venture capital attention—I can relate to this deeply, as I supported many teams at that time. Back then, everyone's interest was focused on infrastructure (for example, AethirCloud was one of the beneficiaries), and the potential of agents had not been widely recognized.

Now, we stand at the early peak of a new technology that is transformative for the entire industry. So what will happen next? If low-cost block space is occupied by numerous agents, what does that mean for established blockchains like ETH? Will "luxury block space" become a trend again? Will agents differ based on the blockchains they use? How will the user interface (UI) in the crypto space evolve when agents can both aggregate information and serve as tools to transfer assets from point A to point B? What are the differences between paid and free agents? How can we scale the reasoning capabilities of agents cost-effectively? From the perspective of agent applications, how can we design appropriate business models to cover these costs?

For me, the most interesting part of these new trends is the unexpected surprises. Who would have thought that a platform for crowdsourcing the launch of DAOs—Daos.fun (daos.fun, baoskee)—would become an opportunity to drive the development of asset management agents? In hindsight, this seems obvious, although it may have been slightly ahead of its time, but it indeed injected much-needed momentum into this trend (ai16z.ai and Shaw also contributed to this). So, what do agents need next?

Nevertheless, I remain firmly supportive of "building more things that people will actually use," rather than continuing to pile up more infrastructure. This is also why I like the trend of agents—they are user-centric. 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 agents—despite facing fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD), that’s okay, because this is the starting point of a whole new Web3. In this Web3, user experience (UX) is no longer an obstacle to creating great things. Do your own research (DYOR), but stay optimistic—the future will be very exciting.