By GMA researcher Elinor | @AllianceGma
Recently, a resolved controversy concerning rampant in-game bots caught the attention of GMA — Rugpull Bakery, a competitive baking game on the Abstract chain, found itself embroiled in controversy during its second season due to an influx of automated scripts. Players accused bot accounts of compromising fairness, while the team ultimately chose to "legalize" them in the third season, adding a 30% passive prize pool.
This incident not only exposed the human-machine asymmetry inherent in the traditional Play-to-Earn model but also served as a catalyst for AI Agents moving from the periphery to the sovereign core of gaming. With the formal release of skill.md and agent.json operational guidelines for AI Agents by the OnchainChemists team, Web3 gaming officially bids farewell to the old era centered on manual human labor, stepping into the Agentic Gaming epoch characterized by autonomous decision-making, algorithmic optimization, and on-chain economic entities.
From the "trust crisis" at Rugpull Bakery to in-depth practices in projects like TEN, AI Arena, Parallel Colony, Illuvium, and EVE Frontier, AI Agents are reshaping the entire Web3 gaming ecosystem: they are no longer just auxiliary tools but "first-class citizens" with independent strategies, persistent memory, and economic sovereignty, driving games from static rules towards dynamic emergence, and from labor-intensive to intelligent symbiosis.
The Rugpull Bakery Controversy: Technological Awakening Amid a Trust Crisis
The second season of Rugpull Bakery concluded amidst intense accusations. Player Zoloto231 publicly alleged that some community members used bots and multi-account strategies, severely undermining competitive fairness. The core of the controversy lay in the fact that human guilds simply could not compete against automated scripts performing "Rug" actions with 24/7, precise coordination. This technological asymmetry not only led to unfair rankings but also sparked a discussion about the nature of on-chain games in an era of prevalent AI Agents: in an environment of open permissions where code is law, AI Agents are naturally compatible with on-chain games, providing an excellent testing ground. Therefore, is restricting automation itself a futile act that defies the times?
OnchainChemists' response was not a traditional ban but a radical strategic adjustment. In the third season update, developers rewrote the Terms of Service, explicitly defining AI Agents, bots, and automation systems as a core part of the gameplay. This shift from "blockade" to "recognition" marked the developers formally acknowledging that in an on-chain environment, AI Agents have become an unstoppable force, leading them to balance the relationship between agents and human players through mechanism design instead.
By releasing skill.md (a machine-readable instruction set) and agent.json (a bootstrapping program), Rugpull Bakery essentially provided an official "operating manual" for AI Agents, elevating them to first-class citizens within the game's ecosystem.
Diverse Implementation Models for Web3 Game Agents
By 2026, the application of agents in Web3 games has evolved beyond simple script automation, branching into multiple deeply integrated implementation models. These models can be categorized into the following major types based on the agent's role within the game loop, degree of autonomy, and depth of intervention in the economic system.
Autonomous Competitor and Economic Entity Model
In this model, agents are no longer tools assisting humans but independent contestants. In May of last year, TEN Protocol launched the groundbreaking demo product House of TEN, a fully on-chain poker game serving as a live showcase of TEN's privacy technology, attracting significant attention. It simultaneously pioneered the proof that AI Agents can serve as first-class citizens playing real games on-chain. The agents deployed on this encrypted Layer 2 possess unique strategies, game-playing personalities, and risk preferences, capable of simulating human gameplay and psychological reasoning. The player's role transforms into that of an "agent broker," passively increasing asset value by staking on specific agents and sharing in their profits from the arena.
AI Arena (NRN Agents) and Satoshi Strike Force (SSF) have further intensified this trend. AI Arena uses actual player operations for imitation learning, training NFT characters into autonomous AI Agents that can later participate fully automatically in PvP arena battles, with players becoming "AI coaches." SSF, with its core tenets of "Skill Economies as Intelligence Engines" and "Cognitive Economy," leverages a "Play-to-VerifyTM" mechanism. It transforms every tactical decision, reaction, and choice under pressure made by players in competition into high-signal, verifiable "cognitive traces." This authentic player data directly trains AI Agents known as "Digital Athletes," creating a "you play, you train, your playstyle becomes the agent" closed loop. Trained AI Agents can independently participate in PvP battles, strategy evolution, and autonomous competition, while supporting dataset licensing, agent leasing, and competitive rewards, truly assetizing player skills on-chain and enabling continuous iteration.
Somnia, as Agentic L1 infrastructure, pushes this model to its extreme. On April 21, 2026, Somnia completed a major strategic pivot, officially becoming "The Agentic L1"—a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain specifically built for AI Agents. Its launched Somnia Agents already run on-chain as part of the validator consensus, supporting smart contract-native API queries, running deterministic AI models, and having results verified by consensus. This makes AI Agents truly "native users" of the blockchain, capable of autonomously perceiving the world, making decisions, executing actions, and reacting in real-time (Reactive design). It provides underlying computational power and execution environments for games like AI Arena, Parallel Colony, and Illuvium, enabling fully on-chain autonomous competition and economic activity at million-level TPS, completely eliminating off-chain dependencies.
Modular Infrastructure and Programmable Environment Model
EVE Frontier pushes agent implementation to the architectural level. This hardcore interstellar survival game, developed by CCP Games, innovates at its core by introducing the concept of "Server-side Modding," enabling players and third-party AI Agents to write custom logic and deploy it directly onto stargates, turrets, or storage facilities via the Smart Assemblies system. This means infrastructure within the game world is no longer static but programmable entities driven by AI. Here, players and AI Agents are modifying not just simple local display skins, but the shared physical logic and economic laws of the entire universe.
1. Smart Assemblies: From Static Buildings to "Living Entities"
In the current Founder Access universe, Smart Assemblies provide three core vessels that AI Agents can directly "possess" by mounting smart contract Mods:
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Smart Storage Unit (SSU): A basic material warehouse that can evolve through AI logic into an automated arbitrage hub, a tribal shared bank, or a decentralized market, supporting autonomous rent collection and quota management.
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Smart Turret: An automated defensive weapon supporting AI-customized engagement rules. For instance, based on a target's on-chain reputation score or historical bounty record, the AI decides whether to initiate an attack.
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Smart Gate: A spatial teleportation device. AI Agents can transform it into an intelligent checkpoint, dynamically adjusting tolls based on real-time traffic, reputation weight, or cross-chain market exchange rates.
2. Technical Empowerment: Sui Migration and High-Frequency Gameplay Support
To support this high-density Agent interaction, EVE Frontier officially migrated to the Sui blockchain in March of this year. This architectural evolution provides critical support for AI Agents:
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High-Concurrency Logic Execution: Leveraging Sui's object model, AI-driven components can process massive instructions in parallel, ensuring real-time responsiveness for server-side logic.
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Seamless Access and Low Friction: Combined with zkLogin and Gas-Free Onboarding, AI Agents can interact with contracts at extremely low cost and high frequency, eliminating the outdated friction of Web3 interactions.
3. Ecosystem Validation: From Hackathon Outcomes to Collaborative Evolution in Autonomous Worlds
The recently concluded $80,000 prize pool EVE Frontier x Sui Hackathon in April further validated the viability of this model through the 123 Mods/tools submitted by the community. This event was not just a technology showcase but also a practical simulation of a "human+AI" symbiotic governance model:
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Collaborative Evolution: Through Ghost Build (Phantom Planning Mode), human players and AI Agents can collaborate to plan interstellar territories. AI handles optimizing complex resource flow paths, while humans focus on macro-strategic decisions, jointly constructing an infinitely scalable Autonomous World.
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Use Case Breakthroughs: Contest entries featured AI-driven "automated bounty hunter protocols" and "dynamic insurance pools." These protocols are directly mounted on Smart Assemblies, seamlessly transforming complex on-chain financial behaviors into in-game physical survival rules. Some outstanding projects have already been integrated into the current Founder Access universe.
4. Economic Evolution: The "Commercial Soul" Enabled by ERC-8183
If EVE Frontier realizes "code is law" at the physical level, then the ERC-8183 standard launched jointly by Virtuals Protocol and the Ethereum Foundation injects an autonomous commercial soul into this infrastructure.
ERC-8183 introduces the crucial "Job" primitive, allowing one game agent to autonomously hire another service agent for tasks like resource gathering or data analysis, with fees settled automatically via on-chain escrow. This fundamentally alters the social role of agents:
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From "Tool" to "Employer": Empowered by ERC-8183's 'Job' primitive, a Smart Gate in EVE Frontier is no longer a passive object waiting for passage; it can even transform into an 'employer,' autonomously posting Jobs on-chain to hire other service agents for real-time data patrols or market risk hedging.
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Trust and Settlement: By automatically settling fees through on-chain escrow, ERC-8183 addresses the trust foundation for cross-entity, cross-architecture collaboration.
This vision of 'infrastructure autonomously hiring labor' is a hallmark of Web3 game agents evolving from single execution towards complex social collaboration.
Hybrid Companion and Dynamic Adaptive Environment Model
Parallel Colony and Illuvium explore the boundaries of human-AI collaboration.
As a pioneer of "1.5-player games," Parallel Colony positions the player as a Cappy (companion robot/guide) in a symbiotic relationship with highly autonomous AI Avatars (colonists/executive agents). Each Avatar is a complete, autonomous AI Agent, with infrastructure provided by Google Cloud through its unified AI tech stack (including Gemini models, Vertex AI, GKE, Cloud Spanner, etc.), supporting AI Agents in autonomously understanding player instructions, generating responses, and executing tasks. Avatars possess long-term memory, unique personalities, psychological evaluation, emotional systems (Mood, Morale), and personalized goals. They can live, work, make decisions, and adapt to the dynamic post-apocalyptic environment autonomously, and can even refuse or reinterpret player commands. Players provide high-level suggestions through chat (rather than direct control), while Avatars autonomously execute territory management, resource gathering, social interaction, and colonial expansion. Concurrently, the game features a real-time generative crafting engine, the Fabricator (powered by Nano Banana technology), allowing players to instantly generate/mint 3D game assets via text Prompt. Avatars also have on-chain autonomous trading capabilities (dedicated Web3 wallet + NFT binding), forming a true hybrid companion collaboration and emergent narrative.
Youmio offers another symbiotic path with its Agentic L1 + 3D AI characters (Mios). Users can create 3D AI companions with persistent memory, unique personalities, and an Affinity system with one click. These Mios can not only chat and interact autonomously but also exhibit emergent behaviors in the Miogotchi adventure world, realizing economic value through on-chain identities. Players and AI form a hybrid relationship of "digital partners + mutual growth."
Conclusion: The "Post-Human" Turning Point for Web3 Gaming
Starting from a cheating controversy, Rugpull Bakery ultimately illuminated the future direction of Web3 gaming: a new digital order of symbiosis, collaboration, and competition between humans and AI Agents. In the 2026 wave of Agentic Gaming, AI Agents have evolved into three core models—Autonomous Competitor and Economic Entity (TEN, AI Arena, SSF, Somnia Agentic L1), Modular Infrastructure and Programmable Environment (EVE Frontier + ERC-8183), and Hybrid Companion and Dynamic Adaptive Environment (Parallel Colony, Illuvium)—fully integrated into the training, decision-making, execution, and economic cycles of games.
Attempting to block automation through traditional means has become futile. Leveraging blockchain's transparency, programmability, and the native support of Agentic L1s (like Somnia) to regulate and empower agents is the only path towards mass adoption. With the proliferation of the ERC-8183 "Job" primitive and the deployment of million-TPS Agentic infrastructure, Web3 gaming is rapidly shifting from "inefficient human labor" to "efficient algorithmic hedging and emergent intelligence." Players are no longer assembly line laborers but commanders of digital sovereignty and symbiotic partners. As Animoca Brands CEO Robby Yung stated, the industry frontier in 2026 will be "post-human by default." This transformation will not only reshape gaming but will also become the ultimate testing ground for future intelligent societies concerning ownership, economy, and governance.
As a DAO organization deeply engaged in the gaming field, GMA will continue to track the Agentic Gaming sector. Which model are you most optimistic about? Feel free to discuss in the comments!
