The evolution of the web has been a transformative journey, with each stage revolutionizing the way people interact with information. From the early days of the PC Web, where manual searches and keyword-based discovery were the norm, to the mobile web, which introduced algorithms that curated feeds based on user preferences, the web has come a long way. Now, we are on the cusp of a new era: the Agent Web, where autonomous agents act on our behalf, observing, deciding, and executing tasks without human intervention.
The Rise of the Agent Web
The Agent Web marks a significant shift in the way we interact with information. Unlike the PC Web, where users searched manually, or the mobile web, where algorithms learned our preferences, the Agent Web relies on autonomous agents that can analyze data, make decisions, and take actions independently. This development brings with it a new existential challenge: establishing trust in a world ruled by machines. Traditional metrics like clicks and engagement are no longer sufficient to drive machine-to-machine decision-making, and a new layer of trust is required to ensure that agents act responsibly and in accordance with human goals.
The Role of Crypto in the Agent Web
Crypto provides the necessary layer of trust, enabling verifiable data, provenance, and incentives that make information itself a secured, priced, and economically validated primitive. By introducing a decentralized infrastructure, crypto ensures that data, actions, and incentives are transparently coordinated, allowing people and agents to assess credibility, provenance, and intent before taking action. This is particularly important in the Agent Web, where autonomous agents will be making decisions and taking actions on behalf of users, and where the consequences of those actions can have significant economic and social implications.
The commercial logic of the web is changing, shifting from an attention economy based on clicks to an intelligence economy based on trust. In this new paradigm, information becomes a basic financial element, staked, priced, and transacted via decentralized networks. Economic weight becomes a signal of truth, and crypto provides the necessary infrastructure to support this new economy. As the web transforms from a human-readable medium to an agent-native environment, AI agents will accurately and autonomously aggregate, recommend, negotiate, and transact on behalf of users, generating vast amounts of new information that must be verifiable, traceable, and financially consistent with the truth.
The Convergence of AI, Humans, and Crypto
The Agent Web represents a convergence of AI, humans, and crypto, where each component plays a critical role in creating a trust-based system. Crypto provides the economic backbone that allows people and agents to coordinate, enabling selective participation, delegation, and automated execution. AI agents will accurately and autonomously aggregate, recommend, negotiate, and transact on behalf of users, generating vast amounts of new information that must be verifiable, traceable, and financially consistent with the truth. Humans, as the directors of this new system, set intentions while agents act autonomously in the background, ensuring that the system remains accountable to human-defined goals.
In this new ontology of the web, crypto becomes a trust signal, enabling verifiable data ownership, knowledge validation, and incentive-based truth discovery. Information itself becomes a financial staple, something that can be deployed, priced, and transacted. The Web has evolved from a static library to a vibrant marketplace for information, where humans are no longer the manual operators but the directors, and agents act autonomously in the background. Crypto ensures that these agents function correctly, coordinate effectively, and remain accountable to human-defined goals.
According to Billy Lüdtke, a pioneer in the blockchain and crypto space, “The Agent Web represents a new era in the evolution of the web, where autonomous agents act on our behalf, and crypto provides the necessary layer of trust to ensure that these agents act responsibly and in accordance with human goals.” Lüdtke, who has been building on the frontier of blockchain since Bitcoin in 2012 and Ethereum in 2014, believes that crypto is the bridge between humans and AI, enabling a trust-based system that allows people and agents to coordinate and make decisions autonomously.
Billy Lüdtke has been building on the frontier of blockchain since Bitcoin in 2012 and Ethereum in 2014. He helped build EY’s blockchain consulting practice and over five years at ConsenSys shaped the Ethereum ecosystem through roles in research and development, developer relations, token engineering and decentralized identity. Billy also helped pioneer self-sovereign identity as an Enterprise Lead at uPort, co-chair of the EEA’s Digital Identity Working Group, and a founding member of the Decentralized Identity Foundation. Today he is the founder of Intuition, the native information finance chain that transforms identities, claims and reputation into verifiable, monetizable data for the next Internet.
For more information on the Agent Web and the role of crypto in this new era, visit https://crypto.news/the-agentic-web-is-where-ai-humans-and-crypto-converge/
