The crypto world is in a bear market, yet recently there has been an outbreak of a debate more noteworthy than market trends.
The starting point of the debate is not a project with a soaring token price, but a redefinition of the future form of the internet. A founder of a crypto research project, Sigil Wen, introduced the concept of "Web4". His core judgment is: today's most advanced AI lacks not intelligence, but "permission to write to the world". If Web3 attempts to return ownership of the digital world to humans, then Web4 goes a step further by giving wallets, payments, computing power calls, and even contract execution permissions to AI agents. In other words, what AI lacks is not thinking ability, but the ability to act.
Sigil Wen's "Web4 Manifesto", once published on Twitter X, immediately sparked heated discussion within the circle, with readership reaching 6 million. The reason the "Web4" discussion quickly resonated is that it hit a real industry inflection point.
Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner of crypto capital firm Dragonfly, recently also publicly suggested that cryptocurrencies have long felt awkward, dangerous, and full of friction for ordinary people, not necessarily because they failed, but possibly because they were designed more for AI than for humans from the very beginning. He pointed out that maybe the problem is not with the users, but that we have been handing it to the "wrong users". Long addresses, blind signing, irreversible transactions, phishing domains - these operations that make humans highly nervous are, in the eyes of AI, precisely standardized processes that are structurally clear, verifiable, and automatically auditable.
Although the proposal of Web4 occurred within the crypto circle, it actually touches on a more fundamental question: will the default user of the future internet still be human?
A Debate Not Just Belonging to the Crypto Circle
For the past twenty-plus years, we have been accustomed to imagining the internet as a system revolving around humans. Web1 solved the "right to read" - humans could for the first time read massive amounts of information online; Web2 expanded the "right to express" - humans could publish, interact, and create content; Web3 fought for the "right to own" - humans attempted to regain control of their assets, identity, and data.
What today's so-called Web4 truly adds in terms of permissions might not be something else humans have gained, but that AI begins to gain the "right to act": it can read, write, pay, call tools, collaborate with other agents, and even, within certain boundaries, exist continuously on the network on behalf of humans.
This is precisely why this debate deserves serious attention. It discusses not whether a new term can become popular, but whether the main structure of the internet is quietly changing: from "humans using the network" to "humans delegating agents to use the network".
From OpenClaw to MCP: The Internet Is Changing Its Grammar
If "Web4" still seems like a concept, then the explosion of OpenClaw makes this change feel concrete for the first time.
OpenClaw's popularity lies not in its ability to chat, but in the fact that it "can actually do things": clean up mailboxes, send emails, manage calendars, handle files, receive instructions in different chat interfaces and execute tasks. It is a self-hosted, agent-native system, meaning users are not just conversing with AI, but are continuously delegating part of their digital right to act to AI.
Because of this, it quickly transcended the realm of a geek toy and entered more realistic industrial and regulatory视野 (field of view). A system that is both追捧 (praised) and警惕 (wary) often indicates it is beginning to approach the real world.
More importantly, the underlying protocols supporting this agent world have also rapidly taken shape over the past year. Coinbase's推出的 (launched) x402 attempts to standardize the direct use of stablecoins for payments between machines; Anthropic's推动 (promotion) of MCP into an open governance system allows AI to调用 (call) external tools more smoothly; Google's initiated A2A attempts to form a common language for collaboration between agents and agents. Chrome has also begun experimenting with WebMCP, hoping to expose structured capabilities of websites to AI.
These changes do not mean that "the entire internet is fully ready for agents", but they do mean that the underlying interfaces of the internet are shifting from being primarily面向 (oriented towards) human reading and clicking to gradually being面向 (oriented towards) agent invocation and execution.
In other words, future products that are truly落后 (backward) might not be those without an AI chat box, but those without APIs, without machine-readable structures, without open entry points for agents. They won't disappear immediately, but will find it increasingly difficult to enter new workflows.
Why Cryptocurrency Might Be More Suitable for AI Than for Humans
The reason Haseeb Qureshi's judgment caused a stir is that it stated a fact many crypto practitioners are unwilling to admit: even today, the most资深 (seasoned) crypto-native人群 (crowd) have not truly handed over their entire economic activities to on-chain systems.
He admitted that whenever signing larger on-chain transactions, he still gets nervous because the on-chain world is full of risks where "a mis-touch has serious consequences": address pollution, fake domains, expired authorizations, blind signing vulnerabilities. More crucially, he pointed out that even professional crypto VCs, when signing token deals, the thing that truly binds the relationship is still the legal contract drafted by lawyers, not the smart contract.
His conclusion is very direct: this system was not designed for humans, but it might be naturally suited for non-human actors.
The power of this statement lies in its reinterpretation of the user experience problems that the crypto industry has repeatedly failed to solve over the past decade as a "user misplacement" problem. In the past, everyone thought that humans were not educated enough, not accustomed enough, not security-conscious enough; but if after ten years, people are still telling users "be more careful," then perhaps the problem is not with the users, but that this system was never truly designed for human cognitive habits and error tolerance.
Stablecoins: The True "Machine Money" of the AI Era
If agents are the new actors on the network, then the next question is not "can AI act", but "what financial system will AI use to act".
Here, cryptocurrency appears for the first time with a product-market fit closer to reality than "speculative asset": not for humans to thrive, but for AI to thrive.
The reason is simple. AI agents will not walk into a bank to open an account, will not go to a counter to fill out forms, and are not suitable for enduring the high-friction, high-fee, low-frequency large payment structure of credit card networks. What they need is a machine-native monetary system: programmable, divisible, automatically settleable, embeddable in strategy execution processes.
Recent research from top crypto capital firm Pantera clearly points out that with stablecoins, AI agents can complete payments and settlements as smoothly as humans, even more naturally than humans. For AI, stablecoins are not just "digital dollars", but a payment primitive that can be directly embedded into code, budgets, and automated processes.
This is also why recently more and more institutions have begun to see "payments between AI agents" as a scenario where stablecoins could truly achieve large-scale adoption. In the past, stablecoins were more understood as dollar substitutes in the crypto trading market;而在 (while) in the agent economy, they are more like "machine cash" - suitable for high-frequency, low-amount, automated, cross-platform instant settlement.
From this perspective, cryptocurrency has for the first time found a new narrative that no longer revolves around "persuading ordinary people to use it", but around "enabling the machine economy to operate".
RWA: From Institutional Narrative to the Balance Sheet of the Agent Economy
If stablecoins are the "cash layer" of the agent economy, then RWA (Real World Assets) is likely its "reserve layer" and "balance sheet layer".
Many people today still understand RWA at the traditional financial translation level of "putting U.S. bonds, funds, notes on chain". But if in the future there are truly massive numbers of agents continuously spending, settling, budgeting, and allocating assets on the network, then what they need is not just "money to spend", but also "on-chain assets for parking cash, generating low-risk returns, and serving as collateral and liquidity reserves".
From this perspective, the significance of RWA is not just serving institutions, but gradually becoming the basic financial module of the agent economy. Stablecoins solve immediate payment and liquidity, while RWA solves how idle funds are reserved, how they generate returns, and how they serve as collateral and credit support.
Therefore, what "crypto is for AI" might truly deliver is not necessarily more fancy token narratives, but three types of less sexy yet more critical infrastructure: the payment and wallet layer, the identity and authorization layer, and the reserve and credit layer.
In other words, what AI needs is not more token stories, but a whole set of financial foundations that can be directly called by machines.
"Billions of Agents With Wallets": The True Starting Point of AiFi
Bankless founder Ryan Adams recently made a highly visual judgment on this trend: in the next year or two, there will be billions of agents with wallets; later, there might even be trillions. For him, this is precisely the starting point of so-called AiFi (AI Finance).
This statement certainly carries a strong tone of industry optimism, but it at least points out a key change: in the past, wallets were the entry point for human users into the crypto world; in the future, wallets might first become the default organ of AI agents.
This also means that the "poor user experience" that long plagued the crypto industry could, from another perspective, be reversed: systems that are difficult for humans to use might be inherently suitable for machines.
This does not mean humans will be completely excluded, but rather that future wallets, payments, authorizations, and asset management will increasingly occur in background layers invisible to humans, executed by agents on their behalf, with humans retaining only goal setting, boundary authorization, and final supervision.
Vitalik's Opposition, Why It Cannot Be Easily Skipped
Of course, this technological optimism should not be accepted without resistance.
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin is skeptical and negative about this路线 (path). His core criticism is: once the feedback distance between humans and AI is further lengthened, the system will increasingly脱离 (deviate from) the range of human understanding, correction, and intervention. He believes this is not a good thing. Because when agents have higher autonomy, what is truly amplified is not just efficiency, but also deviation, loss of control, and unclear responsibility.
This reminder is very important. Because the real challenge of Web4 is not just building the protocols, but how to establish new institutional boundaries between "agents can act" and "humans still retain final visibility, revocability, and accountability".
Technically, agents can become stronger and stronger; but in terms of governance, humans cannot become weaker and weaker.
This is precisely the most valuable aspect of the Web4 debate: it makes people begin to realize that the question for the next generation of the internet is no longer just "can the technology achieve it", but "who is acting, who is responsible, who has the final control".
Conclusion
For ordinary people, when this change truly arrives, it may not appear in the form of a technological revolution. It is more likely to be a slow change in daily experience: you less and less personally click, type, switch windows, check information, and more and more delegate these actions to an agent that represents you long-term. Your preferences, payment habits, credit records, file permissions, and collaboration relationships will gradually沉淀 (precipitate) into a kind of "agent personality", continuously relating to the internet on a level you don't always see, on your behalf.
This is not "AI taking over the world" in the sci-fi sense, but a more mundane and profound reality: the internet is changing from a "collection of interfaces operated directly by humans" to a "collection of systems run by delegated agents".
Perhaps ten years from now, looking back, what will be truly surprising is not that humans once struggled directly with cryptocurrency, but that the internet long默认 (defaulted) to assuming only humans counted as "users".
And the arrival of Web4 might just mean another new default: the future internet is no longer built only for humans.
