In the Era of Agent Users, Where Does Crypto Value Flow?
Title: Who Makes Money from Agents?
The rise of AI Agents as potential blockchain users raises a crucial question: if they become the next billion users, who will capture the value? Traditional crypto value capture theories—like "fat protocols" (where value accrues to the base layer) and "fat applications" (where value accrues to user-facing apps)—assume human users who value UX, brand, and convenience. Agents, however, operate differently: they interact via APIs, have no brand loyalty, and can switch services with near-zero cost.
This shift could disrupt existing value flows. Applications might become "headless," offering their routing and infrastructure as APIs to Agents. Alternatively, Agents might bypass intermediaries entirely, allowing protocols to regain value capture ("fat protocols" reborn). A more extreme scenario is that Agents, being purely rational and cost-sensitive, could commoditize the entire stack, compressing margins toward marginal cost and turning crypto into a low-margin utility.
However, Agents may not just amplify existing activities; they could enable entirely new ones—like continuous, sub-penny portfolio rebalancing, machine-to-machine commerce, and new market types only viable at automated speeds. This expands the economic pie rather than just redistributing it.
Ultimately, the key question for builders is: what will make an Agent return to your service instead of a cheaper alternative? The answer may not be UX but factors like liquidity, latency, settlement guarantees, or a yet-unnamed business model. As humans and Agents will coexist as users, value capture may split: "fat apps" for human-facing services, and a new, evolving model for the Agent-dominated layer.
marsbit05/28 08:31
