Author: Jonah Burian
Compiled by: Jia Huan, ChainCatcher
Many speculate that the next billion blockchain users will be Agents. But few ask a further question: in that world, who will make money?
Every previous theory of value capture in crypto assumed the user was human. The "Fat Protocols" theory posited that protocols are best at monetizing human users.
The "Fat App" theory, which I explored with colleagues in "How to Capture Value" and "The Great Revaluation," argues that the application layer can do better. But Agents change the very nature of the user, and existing theories will be invalidated.
The Fat Protocols Theory
In 2016, @jmonegro proposed "Fat Protocols." For nearly a decade, it has been crypto's dominant theory of value capture.
The core idea: In the traditional internet, value aggregated at the application layer (@Google, @facebook), while underlying protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP) captured almost no value. The crypto world would completely reverse this. Blockchains share data publicly, so applications would gradually become commoditized.
And because using the network requires spending the protocol's token, the token would capture the resulting speculative value as usage grows. Every app's success would drive demand for the token. The underlying protocol would grow faster than any application built on it.
For years, this seemed correct. Bitcoin and Ethereum are worth far more than any company built on them.
This model works perfectly when the protocol itself is scarce, expensive to build, and hard to replace. In 2017, Bitcoin and Ethereum were very scarce; there weren't dozens of general-purpose L1s (Layer 1 networks) competing for the same workloads.
Block space was sufficiently constrained that owning the underlying asset felt like owning a piece of every app that needed it.
Today, reliable alternatives exist at every layer of the infrastructure stack: multiple high-throughput L1s, dozens of L2s, and modular settlement and data availability (DA) layers competing fiercely on price. Block space has shifted from constrained to abundant.
As bridges and aggregators make underlying chains nearly invisible to users, user switching costs have collapsed. Infrastructure has become interchangeable, and interchangeable commodities compete on price. The result: pricing power for protocols vanishes along with scarcity.
The Fat App Theory
By 2026, entities capturing most of the economic benefits were applications, not protocols: e.g., @phantom, @coinbase, @Polymarket, @Pumpfun.
In my view, the reason is that the most valuable asset in crypto is the user relationship.
If you control the user interface and transaction flow, you control distribution and can profit from almost any on-chain product a user touches: swaps, lending, staking, minting, and fiat on/off-ramps. This is probably also why funds are so obsessed with neobanks.
Apps also push infrastructure into a pure price war, compressing infrastructure margins to marginal cost. I documented this dynamic in "How to Capture Value." The same dynamic is playing out in stablecoins, which I've covered elsewhere.
Asset prices are reflecting this theory. Spencer and I called this shift "The Great Revaluation": in this cycle, value began aggregating at the layer that owns the user.
Why Agents Break This Logic
The Fat App theory assumes users are humans who value UX, brand, and convenience. But Agents don't care about these at all. They call APIs directly, have zero brand loyalty, and switch between platforms at zero cost.
When the user becomes software, owning the user relationship is no longer an impregnable moat. The entire Fat App theory's foundation—the frontend moat—is failing.
So who captures value in the age of Agents?
Apps Go 'Headless'
In one vision of the future, winners at the application layer maintain their lead by shedding their frontend interfaces (going 'headless').
Wallets and aggregators have already done the hardest work: integrations with dozens of protocols, routing logic, authentication, fiat on/off-ramp infrastructure.
The next logical step is to open this stack as an API for Agents, letting Agents route through them—just like humans route through @phantom or @JupiterExchange today.
In this world, the Fat App theory lives on. It just loses the frontend. Companies that won in the human era would transform into pure backend infrastructure for Agents. We already see legacy SaaS players like Salesforce moving in this direction.
A Protocol Renaissance
In another vision, Agents skip the middle layer entirely.
If integration becomes easy enough (well-documented APIs, standardized RPCs, predictable execution semantics), Agents have no real reason to pay an aggregator to do what they can do themselves. Aggregators' advantages in the human era were UX and dealing with routing complexity.
But Agents don't need UX, and routing is an engineering problem they're becoming increasingly good at solving.
If the world evolves this way, the Fat Protocols theory could see a renaissance.
Pricing Power Collapses Throughout the Stack
Perhaps Agents apply commoditizing pressure to every corner. They are perfectly rational, routing to the cheapest venue every time, with zero friction and zero loyalty.
Apps lose the ability to charge humans a UX premium. Aggregators and infrastructure also lose pricing power, because there is no inherent human inertia protecting them from price wars.
In this scenario, little profit is captured by anyone in the stack. Margins are forced toward marginal cost across the entire supply chain. Residual value accrues to the owners of the Agents or the ultimate users the Agents serve.
Crypto becomes a utility, and it's hard to make big money in utilities.
Agents Create Unprecedented Levels of Activity
A simple take on this: Agents do everything humans do, just faster and at greater scale. Even if margins are compressed, the overall pie grows.
I think there's a more interesting version.
Agents enable activity that was previously infeasible: e.g., continuously rebalancing portfolios for less than a penny in execution costs, machine-to-machine commerce between Agents, and entirely new markets that exist only because pricing and speed are beyond human tracking.
Current on-chain activity data doesn't show this because we assume a human is necessarily involved.
If this is the shift Agents bring, then the question changes from "How do we divide the existing pie?" to "How much new economic activity pours on-chain, and which layers are positioned to serve it?"
A Business Model That Hasn't Been Named Yet
In every cycle, we try to guess where value will flow and tend to think existing business models will extend into the future. This assumption usually makes us miss new models that haven't yet appeared.
When the internet was just being built, no one foresaw the attention economy. The idea that "slicing user attention and auctioning it to advertisers would become the dominant business model, and a single company could capture a significant share of global ad spend" was alien. It only seems inevitable in hindsight.
AI looks like one of the biggest technological disruptions in decades. In an Agent-dominated world, some value capture may flow to business models no one is even naming today. And the entities capturing it may not be those the market is currently focused on.
Key Points to Watch
The most likely outcome is not one system completely replacing another. For a long time, humans and Agents will coexist as crypto users, with vastly different maps of value capture.
As long as humans interact on-chain, the Fat App theory still applies: consumers willing to pay for UX, brand, and convenience will continue to pay premiums to apps owning those relationships. The layers involved in Agent transactions will be governed by a separate theory, regardless of which vision above materializes.
For builders, I think the question worth mulling over on the Agent side is: What actually makes an Agent come back to you instead of routing directly to the next cheapest alternative? UX might not be the answer. Liquidity, latency, settlement guarantees, etc., might be.
