Original Author: Imran Khan, Alliance Co-founder
Compiled by: Jiahuan, ChainCatcher
I believe Chris Dixon's judgment is on the right track. Crypto technology, or what people used to call Web3, adds the economic and ownership layer to the Internet.
Marc Andreessen envisioned embedding payment capabilities directly into the browser during the Netscape era. The early Web even reserved the HTTP 402 status code, meaning "Payment Required." Coinbase's x402 is named after this.
This name also pays tribute to the pioneers who repeatedly attempted to embed financial capabilities into Internet infrastructure in the early days. Thanks to Andreessen for fighting this battle for us back in that era.
Netscape once collaborated with Visa to integrate payment functionality directly into the browser, but it never truly materialized. While Netscape laid an important foundation for modern Internet commerce through SSL, money itself was left outside the early Internet infrastructure.
Later, people gradually realized that commerce would inevitably migrate to the Internet, but what ultimately carried online payments were credit cards and payment platforms like PayPal and Stripe, not a native Internet monetary system.
Going back to the early days of the crypto industry, visions like user-owned assets, permissionless markets, tokenization, decentralized identity, open social graphs, portable reputation across platforms, decentralized storage, and programmable finance all showed the potential to redesign the Internet.
An early group of Ethereum community participants proposed that we could restructure parts of the Internet to give users greater economic autonomy. This was one of the reasons I entered the crypto industry.
However, over time, under the influence of bad actors, security threats, policy restrictions, and other factors, this original intent gradually faded in the industry's development.
And it was amidst this wave that Chris Dixon presented his core judgment: decentralization and ownership are the true core of the crypto industry.
His logic is that centralized platforms control fees and power. Over time, the platform's incentive mechanisms gradually shift towards the platform itself and its shareholders, rather than the product's users.
These platforms control distribution, identity, payments, APIs, data, and social graphs, and even decide how economic benefits are distributed between users and developers.
Crypto technology offers another possibility: letting open protocols carry key aspects like identity, payments, and data, no longer controlled by a single company; allowing all participants to share in the economic benefits while truly owning their data and assets.
But reality has proven that most people don't care whether a platform is centralized. They care more about convenience and getting what they want in the simplest way possible.
As long as the product is good enough, people don't mind handing their data to companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, OpenAI, etc.
Cypherpunks like me care deeply about privacy, censorship resistance, decentralization, and personal sovereignty. But most people are not willing to endure a significantly worse user experience for these principles.
Most people don't wake up thinking about whether they own their social graph. They just want a product that works well and provides entertainment.
After years of practice, reality hasn't completely followed the path Chris Dixon initially envisioned. Nevertheless, I still believe he's on the right track; the picture was just missing the most crucial piece: the rise of AI.
AI and crypto technology are highly complementary. AI needs open economic infrastructure, and crypto technology needs a new, large-scale source of demand. Their combination fills the previously missing key piece: demand.
AI Agents Are the True Demanders of Open Infrastructure
AI Agents are becoming new participants in the Internet. Cloudflare disclosed in 2026 that automated traffic exceeded human activity for the first time, accounting for about 57% of all web requests. I believe a significant portion of that is related to AI Agents.
And this trend will only accelerate. In the future, most of our interactions with the Internet may no longer wait for human instructions one by one but will be proactively initiated by AI Agents.
But to become "first-class citizens" of the Internet, AI Agents must be able to access thousands of services, datasets, and markets without permission, and interact directly with counterparties and other Agents, without having to establish customized relationships with each party separately.
This isn't decentralization for decentralization's sake, nor is it retreading old paths. It's just that when the scale of collaboration expands from the order of humans to the order of machines, portability, open access, shared state, and interoperability themselves create direct economic value.
They need a set of open infrastructure that can be used anytime, without permission. They need to be able to establish identities on protocols like Handshake, and they need programmable money and asset ownership.
In addition, they may also need persistent storage, portable identity, open social and reputation graphs, verifiable information, permissionless markets, and programmable contracts, as well as open networks or markets for discovering and communicating with each other, such as Moltbook, Farcaster, or something entirely new.
So my judgment is: most of the ideas Chris Dixon proposed in "Read Write Own" are on the right track, but the target users aren't humans; they are AI Agents.
The Next Generation Internet is More Than Just Crypto
The original Internet, Web1, was built on open protocols. Information was freely accessible, anyone could publish and retrieve content, websites could freely link to each other, and developers could build products without permission. At that time, users were mostly just readers of information.
The subsequent Web2 turned these readers into creators. Social networks, smartphones, broadband, cloud services, online marketplaces, and large platforms emerged. Billions of people began creating and publishing content, moving their businesses online, and connecting more closely with each other.
But platforms also gained control of all the key aspects: identity, payments, social graphs, data, distribution, and the economic ties between people.
So what's the next step?
I don't think Web3, or what I call the "next generation Internet," is just another term for crypto.
I believe the next generation Internet will be composed of crypto, AI, robotics, energy, compute power, and eventually biotechnology, interwoven in some way.
AI will become the intelligence and interaction layer; crypto will become the economic and ownership layer; robotics will connect the intelligence layer to the physical world; compute power and energy will become the resource layer supporting everything; biotechnology will increasingly resemble programmable systems, with Neuralink representing one direction.
Take decentralized identity, reputation, and social graphs as an example. In the future, AI Agents may need platforms like Moltbook, Farcaster, or something entirely new. They can offer services, complete tasks, build reputations based on actual delivery, form persistent identities on the Internet, and establish relationships with other Agents on these open platforms.
The same goes for decentralized storage. Humans typically don't mind storing files on Google Drive, iCloud, or other cloud services. But AI Agents may need greater autonomy and control, and may need to ensure long-term existence or redundancy of information, so they might use both decentralized and centralized storage services.
Take IPFS and Filecoin as examples. They can store content, allowing another Agent to verify if the retrieved content matches the original exactly.
I'm not saying everything will be decentralized. I mean some of this infrastructure might actually be useful and can work in conjunction with centralized services like AWS, GCP.
Let's look at ownership. I believe ownership might be more important for AI Agents than for humans. If the entire world becomes tokenized in some form in the future, the number and variety of assets available will be enormous and highly fragmented, making it difficult for humans to quickly understand and allocate these assets.
Currently, AI Agents are still trapped in closed ecosystems controlled by single MCP services or applications. This doesn't mean similar Agents can't be built using MCP, OAuth, A2A, Stripe, Visa, AWS, and traditional databases.
But with on-chain infrastructure, more assets and markets in the financial world will be able to flow across platforms, be globally accessible, and be directly readable by machines. AI Agents can directly access assets and markets, then make financial decisions based on goals and risk boundaries set by humans.
Therefore, I think Dixon accurately identified the missing layer of the Internet: native ownership.
But the next generation Internet isn't a single technology; it's the combined result of on-chain infrastructure, robotics, AI, biotechnology, compute power, and energy, just as Web2 was the product of smartphones, high-bandwidth networks, centralized apps, cloud storage, etc., working together.
The truly missing piece in this new architecture is AI Agents, not humans.
