Author: Ping Shuo Blockchain
"New infrastructure" refers to the underlying technical elements and architectures that have innovation-driven forces, such as cryptography, tokens, distributed ledgers, and smart contracts. These technologies constitute the core pillars of Web3 development. The development process of Web3 is essentially a process of continuous iteration, integration, and promotion of innovation and change in these new infrastructures.
This article will divide the current development of Web3 into three stages from the perspective of "core elements", revealing how the core elements of each stage serve as driving forces, and how their innovation, iteration, and integration drive the evolution of Web3.
The emergence of Bitcoin blockchain has laid a basic structural paradigm for the development of the Web3 industry, as shown in Figure 1-1.
Figure 1-1 shows the three-layer structure of the Bitcoin blockchain system, from which we can extract two core elements:
Encrypted digital currency ($BTC): As a carrier of value, it provides the underlying value exchange foundation for Web3.
Distributed ledger (blockchain): As a decentralized trust mechanism and innovative data structure, it provides the possibility for building various decentralized applications.
From the subsequent development, we gradually realized that the structural paradigm and basic elements of Bitcoin blockchain have had a profound impact on the fields of currency and finance, value exchange and social collaboration, and the development of the Internet, which are specifically reflected in the following aspects:
Give birth to global digital currency: Bitcoin has pioneered the global circulation of currency without permission, bringing new possibilities to cross-border payments, financial inclusion and other fields.
Build a decentralized trust mechanism: The openness, transparency and tamper-proof characteristics of distributed ledgers have built a decentralized trust mechanism and promoted efficient value exchange and collaboration on a global scale.
Opened the Web3 era: The success of blockchain has verified the feasibility of blockchain technology, provided an effective means of value carrying and transmission, and laid the foundation for the development of Web3 value Internet.
As a pioneer of blockchain technology, Bitcoin has brought revolutionary changes and paved the way for the arrival of the Web3 era. However, Bitcoin has limited scalability and is difficult to support complex applications such as smart contracts. In this context, Ethereum's innovation has pushed the industry into the next stage of development.
Ethereum introduced Turing-complete smart contracts on the basis of Bitcoin, making blockchain not only a digital currency system, but a programmable blockchain platform. The structural paradigm of the Ethereum blockchain is shown in Figure 2-1.
Smart contracts, tokens and distributed ledgers play an important role in the structural paradigm of Ethereum:
Distributed ledger (blockchain): Ensures data security and transparency. Builds a diversified public chain ecosystem. Public chains are the cornerstone of ecological development, and their prosperity directly affects the overall development of Web3.
Smart Contracts: Smart contracts provide programmability for blockchains and promote the vigorous development of DeFi. According to @0xmiddle's analysis, DeFi 1.0 laid the foundation, DeFi 2.0 improved capital efficiency, DeFi 3.0 emphasized composability, and DeFi 4.0 focused on AI intelligence.
Tokens: As a value carrier and incentive mechanism, Tokens provide an effective means of value capture for protocols, innovate value distribution methods, give birth to innovative models such as ICO and DeFi, and accelerate industry development.
In summary, distributed ledgers, smart contracts, and Tokens complement each other and together constitute the infrastructure of this stage of the Web3 world. Ethereum's innovation organically combines these three, producing a powerful synergistic effect, promoting the prosperity of the ecosystem and the total market value of the industry to record highs, marking that the Web3 industry has entered a new stage of development.
However, after experiencing the initial stage of rapid development, the Web3 industry is also facing many challenges, such as the decline in the popularity of VC projects, the failure of the Bitcoin ecosystem to meet expectations, and the deep FUD dilemma of Ethereum, which adds uncertainty to the market.
At present, the industry has reached a critical turning point and needs new forces to break through bottlenecks and bring innovation and change.
At present, it is the "super Memecoin cycle", and tens of thousands of memecoins have emerged. Memecoin, as a cryptocurrency derived from Internet culture, has set off waves of enthusiasm in the cryptocurrency market with its strong community effect and viral transmission ability. But each wave of enthusiasm has different core driving factors. As shown in Figure 3-1.
The development history of Memecoin is like a microcosm of the cryptocurrency market. Memecoin has always kept pace with the times. In the first five stages of Memecoin, its core driving force mainly came from the crypto community and was closely linked to Web3 infrastructure such as blockchain, smart contracts and tokens. However, the arrival of the sixth stage marks that Memecoin has entered a new stage of development. As an external force, AI Agent has successfully broken through the circle, injected new vitality into Memecoin, and become the new engine of Memecoin.
The addition of AI Agent has brought a qualitative leap for Memecoin:
Narrative Upgrade: AI Agent has upgraded Memecoin from a simple "stalk" to a digital asset with profound cultural heritage by generating personalized and high-frequency content. For example, the AI-generated religious content of $GOAT not only attracted a large number of users, but also built a unique community culture.
Value Support: AI Agent can monitor market dynamics in real time and conduct data analysis to provide Memecoin with more accurate market strategies. For example, $LUNA's AI can automatically adjust the token repurchase plan according to market conditions, thereby stabilizing the currency price.
Community building: AI Agent can interact with community members in a personalized way and improve user stickiness. For example, through natural language processing technology, AI Agent can understand user emotions and provide corresponding responses, which enhances the cohesion of the community.
The addition of AI Agent has pushed Memecoin to a new level with its autonomy, creativity and social ability, bringing unprecedented development opportunities. However, the potential of AI Agent is far more than Memecoin. It is becoming the new infrastructure of Web3, bringing new changes to the entire Web3 ecosystem, and continuously promoting industry innovation and development.
As an intelligent entity that can learn, make decisions and perform tasks autonomously, AI Agent is gradually becoming the new infrastructure of the Web3 world. Its unique position in Web3 stems from its outstanding performance in economic independence, deep integration with smart contracts, and promotion of Web3 innovation.
1. Economically independent intelligent individuals
In the traditional Internet, AI Agents are limited in their functions due to the lack of legal digital identity and asset ownership. In Web3, with the help of technologies such as wallets, decentralized identities (DIDs), public and private keys, AI Agents can obtain independent digital identities and accounts, own and manage assets, and have the ability to perform verification and signing. In this way, AI Agents become an independent economic entity - a digital citizen of the Web3 world. This ability enables AI Agents to actively participate in various financial and economic activities of Web3.
2. The best partner of smart contracts
Smart contracts and AI Agents, two seemingly independent concepts, are deeply integrated and become each other's best partners under the promotion of blockchain and artificial intelligence.
We compare the characteristics of smart contracts and AI Agents, as shown in Figure 4-1.
The combination of AI Agent and smart contracts can give full play to the advantages of both and unleash their potential:
Combination of determinism and flexibility:Smart contracts provide a reliable execution environment, and AI Agents can make dynamic adjustments based on real-time data and environmental changes to achieve more flexible applications.
Combination of decision-making capabilities and automated execution: As an intelligent brain, AI Agent can analyze complex problems and make decisions, and then automatically execute the decision results through smart contracts to improve efficiency.
Integration of on-chain data and off-chain data: Smart contracts mainly process on-chain data, while AI Agent can use on-chain data and off-chain data (such as sensor data, social media and market data, etc.) for more comprehensive analysis and decision-making.
Combination of decentralization and intelligence: Smart contracts ensure the decentralization and transparency of the system, while AI Agent brings intelligence to the system, helping to realize the vision of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and decentralized applications (DApps).
Through deep integration with smart contracts, AI Agent will play a more important role in Web3 and promote innovation and change in Web3.
As a new infrastructure, AI Agent is leading Web3 into a new era of intelligence. This is mainly reflected in the infrastructure and application innovation of various public chains, covering areas such as AI memecoin, systems and tools, AgentFi, AI Payment, games and entertainment, etc. More information can be obtained from the Internet.
Among many public chains, Arweave/AO is very compatible with the development of AI in terms of architecture and system resources, and the community attaches great importance to the development of AI Agent, and will promote the implementation of AI Agent applications as a common goal and action guide, which deserves special attention.
In terms of system architecture: AO is designed with the Actor model. The core idea is that each component in the system is an independent agent that can operate in parallel, which is highly consistent with the AI Agent-driven application architecture.
In terms of system resources: AI relies on three elements: models, algorithms, and computing power, so it has a high demand for resources. This happens to coincide with the system resource characteristics of AO. The Arweave+AO system, built on the SCP paradigm, has scalable computing, data, and storage resources. It can independently allocate computing resources to each AI process, effectively eliminating computing performance bottlenecks; it can provide trusted data resources for AI models to help learning and training reduce model deviations.
In terms of key technologies: With the support of three key technologies, WASM64, WeaveDrive and Llama.cpp large language model inference engine, AO can directly run a variety of large language models in smart contracts, such as Llama 3 and GPT-2, laying a solid foundation for the development and operation of AI Agent applications.
In terms of basic protocols: FusionFi Protocol (FFP) is a protocol specification and development tool designed to connect different agents, build information bridges, and standardize interactions between DApp Agents. Through FFP, seamless integration of various financial businesses such as transactions, loans, and futures can be achieved, building a cross-application, cross-scenario decentralized financial ecosystem.
In terms of trusted data: Dria enables AI models to access the latest, complete and verified information, effectively reducing the bias and inaccuracy common in centralized data sources, thereby providing high-quality data sources for AI Agent applications.
In terms of asset innovation: @outprog, the founder of EverVision, innovatively proposed the concept of "AgentFi Notes", aiming to reconstruct decentralized trust between subjects through AgentFi Notes. The concept enables everyone to exercise sovereignty, issue their own notes and manage assets, integrating multiple financial scenarios such as exchange, futures, mortgage lending and stablecoins.
In terms of application innovation: Permaswap is the DEX leader in the ecosystem. After launching FusionFi Protocol, it has integrated multiple financial forms and developed into a super-aggregate of liquidity. As the first autonomous agent-driven DEX in the ecosystem, Botega has built an AMM system with independent processes, which can autonomously execute advanced order types such as trailing stop loss, fixed investment, and price limit, and intelligently allocate liquidity to improve transaction efficiency.
As conditions mature, Arweave/AO, with its advantages in permanent storage of data and data atomic assets and hyper-parallel computing, may stimulate the development potential of data-driven intelligent business, thereby meeting the needs of real economic activities on/off the chain.
Although the Arweave/AO ecosystem is still in its infancy, the upstream and downstream of the ecosystem have been able to develop in a coordinated manner and become an active builder of the Web3 intelligent era. The future development prospects are worth looking forward to.
The development of Web3 is a process of continuous innovation and iteration. Core elements such as distributed ledgers, smart contracts and tokens played a key role in the early and development stages of Web3, promoting innovation and maturity in areas such as encrypted digital currencies, public chains, and DeFi.
Today, AI Agent, as a new infrastructure of Web3, is deeply integrated with other core elements and can play a role in various fields such as Crypto, GameFi, Gaming, Social, and the Metaverse, which will surely give birth to new applications and business models. From AI Memecoin to AgentFi, these innovative cases show that AI Agent has become the core driving force for the intelligent upgrade of the Web3 ecosystem.
With the continuous improvement of the public chain ecosystem and the continuous advancement of AI technology, AI Agent will play an increasingly important role in Web3, ushering in a new digital era that is more intelligent, open and inclusive.
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