In 2014, before "Web3" became exclusively associated with blockchain and crypto assets, blockchain was simply blockchain itself. People were deeply fascinated by the future potential unlocked by smart contracts.
Our early vision of the on-chain economy eventually crystallized into the concept of the Smart Economy. We envisioned a decentralized network capable of autonomously managing task completion, with smart contracts serving as the key, unlocking unprecedented possibilities for economic collaboration.
As we rapidly move into the third decade of the 21st century, the current Web3 ecosystem is booming, with decentralized finance (DeFi) as its core driver. Stablecoins have become a mainstream global settlement solution, breaking geographical barriers; payment finance (PayFi) is permeating daily life. Regardless of the depth of public understanding, crypto assets have profoundly reshaped mass financial perception.
Beneath the surface of these developments, the most profound structural progress is the leap in financial efficiency.
Meanwhile, artificial intelligence, a long-familiar technology that remained largely conceptual, has finally materialized into everyday reality over the past two years. Powered by the continuous emergence and iteration of large language models, it has deeply integrated into our work and lives.
For most people, AI is a productivity tool: designers save time, content creators automate copy polishing, and programmers significantly increase coding efficiency.
But in our view, AI is far more than a productivity booster; it is a new paradigm of financial efficiency.
Human labor always incurs costs, and human attention is inherently limited. As AI increases productivity per unit of time, it simultaneously raises the value of attention during non-working hours. Therefore, we believe AI is naturally compatible with blockchain and should become a core component of the next generation on-chain economy.
Three Core Characteristics of the Next Generation On-Chain Economy
- Minimized Human Participation: In on-chain economic activities, humans will primarily act as intent providers, while the system autonomously completes the analysis, execution, and feedback loop based on intent. Taking decentralized finance (DeFi) as an example: the so-called "composability" initially required users to invest significant effort in validating strategy combinations; in the new on-chain economy, AI will autonomously handle reasoning and planning.
- Fully Trustless: Asset security is the foundation of usability. In the Web3 space, security issues have always loomed like a sword of Damocles. The next-generation economy must completely eliminate user security concerns, creating a truly trustless system.
- Extremely Efficient: As mentioned earlier, every technological revolution is accompanied by a leap in efficiency. Web3 has already significantly surpassed traditional finance in transaction and settlement efficiency, but there remains huge potential in capital utilization. The deep integration of AI will elevate capital efficiency to unprecedented heights.
Core Components Supporting These Structural Features
- Rapidly iterating AI foundation models (new architectures and open-source models emerge almost daily)
- Intent-centric AI agents that accurately interpret and execute user intent
- An AI agent network enabling communication and collaboration between agents, forming synergistic clusters
- Privacy-preserving computation technologies (e.g., Zero-Knowledge Proofs ZKP / Fully Homomorphic Encryption FHE) to ensure data security without a centralized trust mechanism
- Foundational security components providing maximum asset protection (e.g., Trusted Execution Environments TEE and retrospective verification)
- Sustainable monitoring systems that continuously supervise economic activity, possessing self-diagnostic and self-correcting capabilities
The synergy of these elements will give birth to a truly organic, evolvable, and self-driven on-chain economy—we define this as the true Intelligent-Sensing Economy.
All of this is far more than just building a faster system or rearranging a set of instruments.
The on-chain economy has never been merely a stacking of technologies. More accurately, it is a collective narrative about value creation, distribution, and perception, concerning collaboration, order, and consensus.
With the deep integration of AI agents, AI is no longer just an external efficiency tool but becomes an intrinsic structural component—possessing intent, logic, preferences, and even goals.
This structural change is far more profound than the technological progress itself. We are moving from a human-activity-centric on-chain system towards a collaborative intelligence-driven network architecture.
Consequently, the economy begins to exhibit coherent, life-like characteristics beyond just a combination of rules and incentives: perceiving external data, responding internally, adjusting parameters, and reorganizing iteratively under pressure.
The Intelligent-Sensing Economy we speak of does not refer to the birth of emotion or consciousness, but rather the gradual perfection of the internal information-action feedback loop. This means synergy no longer relies on external scheduling but can emerge naturally from within the system. This marks a directional shift in the infrastructure of human civilization—from simply "governing an economy" to "embedding intelligence into the economy".
We often discuss the on-chain economy from the perspectives of structural design and financial efficiency, but perhaps what is truly worth rethinking is: when a system possesses the ability for continuous autonomous learning, adaptation, and self-coordination, should we still simply define it as an "economy"? Or is it evolving into a new form of life?
