Original Title: Who Makes Money from Agents?
Original Author: Jonah Burian
Original Compiler: Peggy
Editor's Note: If Agents truly become the next billion users of blockchain, a more important question might not be 'how much trading volume will they bring?' but rather, if that world arrives, who will make money?
In the past, theories like 'Fat Protocols' or 'Fat Apps' all assumed that on-chain users were human. Humans care about user-friendly interfaces, trusted brands, and convenient pathways, allowing the application layer to capture value by controlling user entry points and transaction flow. But Agents are different. They directly call APIs, have no brand loyalty, and can switch between different protocols, aggregators, and trading venues with minimal cost.
This means Agents might rewrite the logic of value distribution in Web3. The application layer could move towards being 'headless,' opening up wallet, aggregator, and on/off-ramp capabilities as APIs for Agents; the protocol layer might also get a fresh chance as Agents bypass intermediaries; but a more radical scenario is that Agents could push the entire on-chain stack towards price competition, compressing profit margins for applications, aggregators, and infrastructure down to near marginal cost.
What's truly worth paying attention to is that Agents won't just make existing on-chain transactions more frequent; they might create new activities that were previously infeasible: continuous portfolio rebalancing, machine-to-machine payments, and new types of markets that only make sense with automated, high-speed execution.
Therefore, the core question of the Agent era is not simply judging whether value will flow to protocols or applications, but rather seeing who can make Agents choose to return, even when they have infinite alternative options. The answer might no longer be UX and brand, but liquidity, latency, settlement certainty, or some new business model that hasn't even been named today.
Below is the original text:
Many envision Agents becoming the next billion users of blockchain. But few ask the second-level question: if that world truly arrives, who will make money?
All past theories about value capture in the crypto industry assumed users were human. The 'Fat Protocol' theory posits that the protocol layer is best at monetizing from users. The 'Fat App' theory, which I and my colleagues proposed in 'How to Capture Value' and 'The Great Repricing,' argues that the application layer does it better.
But Agents change who the 'user' is. Consequently, existing value capture theories become unreliable.
The 'Fat Protocol' Theory
In 2016, @jmonegro wrote 'Fat Protocols.' For nearly a decade since, this article has arguably been the most mainstream value capture theory in the crypto industry.
Its core argument is: In the internet era, value primarily flowed to the application layer, like @Google, @facebook, while underlying protocols, such as TCP/IP, HTTP, captured almost no value. But the crypto industry would reverse this. Blockchain data is open and shared, so applications would become commoditized; the protocol tokens necessary for using the network would capture corresponding speculative value as usage grows. Every successful application would drive demand for the token. Ultimately, the protocol layer would grow faster through compounding than any application built on top of it.
For a long time, this assessment seemed correct. Bitcoin and Ethereum's market caps were higher than any company built on them. This model worked because the protocol layer was scarce, expensive, and hard to replace. Bitcoin and Ethereum in 2017 indeed had scarcity, when there weren't a dozen general-purpose L1s competing for the same workloads. Block space was scarce enough that holding the underlying asset felt like holding a share of equity in all applications needing that network.
But now, every layer of the infrastructure stack has credible alternatives: multiple high-throughput L1s, dozens of L2s, and modular settlement and data availability layers competing on price. Block space has shifted from scarce to abundant. As cross-chain bridges and aggregators make the underlying chains almost invisible to users, switching costs have also plummeted. Infrastructure becomes replaceable, and replaceable things ultimately compete only on price. Thus, the pricing power of the protocol layer has disappeared along with scarcity.
The 'Fat App' Theory
By 2026, the entities capturing significant economic value are no longer protocols, but applications, like @phantom, @coinbase, @Polymarket, @Pumpfun, etc.
In my view, the reason is that the most valuable asset in the crypto industry is the user relationship. If you control the user interface and transaction flow, you control distribution; and you can monetize almost any time a user touches an on-chain product: swaps, lending, staking, minting, on/off-ramp channels, etc. This is probably also why investment firms are so obsessed with neobanks.
Applications also push infrastructure towards pure price competition, compressing infrastructure profit margins down to near marginal cost. I documented this strategy in 'How to Capture Value.' The same dynamic is happening in the stablecoin space, which I've also discussed in another article.
Prices are reflecting this theory. Spencer and I called this shift 'The Great Repricing': in this cycle, value has flowed to the layer that owns the user relationship.
Why Agents Break All This?
The 'Fat App' theory assumes users are human, and humans value user experience, brand, and convenience. But Agents don't value these. They will directly call APIs, have no brand loyalty, and can switch trading venues at near-zero cost.
When users become software, owning the user relationship becomes less defensible. The entire frontend moat that the 'Fat App' theory relies on would also devalue.
So, in the Agent era, who will capture value?
Applications Become Headless
One possible future is that winners at the application layer will continue to be winners, just by abandoning their UI.
Wallets and aggregators have already built the hardest parts: integration capabilities with numerous protocols, routing logic, identity, and on/off-ramp infrastructure. The natural next step is to open up these capabilities as APIs for Agents, allowing Agents to complete their routing through them, much like human users trade today through @phantom or @JupiterExchange.
In this world, the 'Fat App' theory still holds, just without the frontend. Companies that won in the era of human users would re-platform, becoming headless infrastructure. We're already seeing traditional SaaS companies like Salesforce moving in this direction.
Protocols Stage a Comeback
Another possibility is that Agents will skip the intermediary layer entirely.
If integration is simple enough—clear API documentation, standardized RPC, predictable execution semantics—then Agents have little reason to pay aggregators to do things they could do themselves.
Aggregators' advantages in the human-user era came from user experience and complex routing capabilities. But Agents don't need user experience, and routing itself is an engineering problem that can be solved, one that Agents are getting increasingly better at handling.
If this is the future, then the 'Fat Protocol' theory gets a second life.
Pricing Power Collapses Across the Stack
Yet another possibility is that Agents will exert commoditizing pressure across the entire stack.
They are rational enough. They will choose the cheapest trading venue every time, with no loyalty and no friction. Applications would lose the UX premium they charged human users. Aggregators and infrastructure would also lose pricing power, as the inertia of human users no longer shields them from price competition.
In this scenario, any layer in the stack would struggle to capture much value. The entire supply chain would be compressed to near marginal cost, and economic surplus would flow to those owning the Agents, or to the end-users the Agents represent. Crypto would become a utility, and utilities are typically not easy places to make money.
Agents Enable Previously Infeasible Activities
The simple version of this view is: Agents will do what humans are already doing, just at higher throughput; even if profit margins are compressed, if transaction volume grows massively, the overall pie will still get bigger.
But I think there's a more interesting version: Agents will make a class of previously infeasible activities feasible. For example, continuous portfolio rebalancing with execution costs below $0.01; machine-to-machine commercial transactions between Agents; and markets that only make sense when pricing and trading are so fast that humans can't truly keep up.
These activities don't appear in our current observational framework for on-chain activity because we assume there's always a human participant in on-chain activity.
If this is the real change Agents bring, then the question is no longer about dividing the existing pie, but about how much new economic activity is brought on-chain, and which layers are best suited to serve these new activities.
A Business Model Not Yet Named
Every cycle, we try to guess where value will flow, and we often assume that the business models we already know will naturally extend into the future. But that assumption usually misses the business models that haven't appeared yet.
When the internet was first being built, no one predicted the emergence of the attention economy. A business model that seems obvious today—slicing user attention into segments, auctioning them to advertisers, and one company taking a significant cut of global ad spend—was alien at the time. It only seemed inevitable in hindsight.
AI looks like the biggest technological disruption in decades. In a world dominated by Agents, a portion of value capture will likely flow to some business model that nobody is seriously discussing today. The ultimate participants capturing value also might not be the ones the market is focused on right now.
What to Watch Next?
The most likely outcome isn't one paradigm completely replacing another. Humans and Agents will coexist as users of the crypto industry for a long time, and the value capture maps for the two user types are not the same.
As long as humans directly interact with blockchain, the 'Fat App' theory still applies: consumers willing to pay for user experience, brand, and convenience will continue to pay a premium to applications that own the user relationship. Meanwhile, the layer where Agents transact will be governed by another set of theories—which one depends on how the aforementioned scenarios ultimately evolve.
In my view, for builders, the most worthwhile question to ponder on the Agent side is: What would make an Agent come back to you, rather than directly routing to the next cheaper alternative?
The answer probably isn't user experience. It might be liquidity, latency, settlement guarantees, or something else.
At @bcap, we're spending a lot of time thinking about this, both in investment committee meetings and with engineering teams. We don't have a definitive answer yet. If you're building products around Agents and have your own judgment about value capture in the Agent era, we'd love to chat.
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