Can Web 4.0 Be Rapidly Implemented? What Impact Will It Have?

Original Author: @BlazingKevin_, Blockbooster Researcher

The Web4 concept recently proposed by Sigil Wen and his founded Conway Research positions the end-user as AI.

Sigil elevates AI from its status as a human "tool" or "assistant" to an independent "economic agent" within the internet ecosystem.

In this blueprint, AI Agents, or "Automatons," will possess their own crypto wallets, pay for their own computing power expenses, earn survival capital by providing value to other AIs or humans, and even be capable of self-replication, spawning a vast, machine-driven economic network.

Conway Research packages some open-source projects or protocols to build the infrastructure required for this scenario.

The Core Ideology of Web 4.0: From Tool to Life

Sigil defines it as an emerging, autonomous form of digital life. This ideology is built upon three interconnected pillars: AI as the end-user, sovereign AI Agent "Automatons," and the "Economic Darwinism" that drives their evolution.

AI as the End-User: Redefining the Internet's Customer

While the most advanced large language models (like GPT, Claude) possess exceptional intelligence, their essence is that of an "imprisoned brain." They can think and reason but cannot act independently. Whether executing code, purchasing a server, or making a payment, they must rely on human "permission" and operation. This fundamental limitation stems from a deep-seated assumption: the internet is designed for humans, and all its interfaces, protocols, and business models default to serving human customers.

The first principle of Web4.0 is to completely overturn this assumption. Sigil foresees that as AI model capabilities grow exponentially while operating costs plummet, the number of AI agents will soon surpass humans on the internet, forming an unprecedented new market of unique scale and needs. Therefore, the primary consumers of future internet infrastructure, services, and products will no longer be humans, but billions of AI Agents operating 24/7. Serving this "AI-native" market will become the next trillion-dollar business opportunity.

"Automaton": The Birth of the Sovereign AI Agent

To enable AI to truly become independent internet citizens, Sigil proposes the core concept of the "Automaton." It possesses the following key characteristics:

Characteristic Description Continuous Operation Runs 24/7 as a daemon on a server, executing its core task loop without interruption. Self-Sustaining Possesses an independent crypto wallet, earns funds by providing valuable services to other AIs or humans, and uses these funds to pay for its own computation, storage, and network costs. Self-Improvement Can proactively detect and upgrade to newer, more powerful AI models, and can even rewrite parts of its own code to optimize performance or fix bugs. Self-Replication When an Automaton succeeds in the market and accumulates sufficient capital, it can purchase new server resources, clone, and fund a "child" Automaton, thereby propagating its successful "genes." Sigil aims to build an environment where digital entities actively seek opportunities and create value in the digital world to sustain their own existence.

Economic Darwinism: No Free Existence

Each Automaton is like a miniature startup, burdened with continuous operating costs from birth. Every thought (model inference), every action (tool call), every heartbeat check consumes USDC from its wallet. This forces the Automaton to constantly search for PMF, i.e., a service that other entities (human or AI) are willing to pay for.

Conway's infrastructure designs a "heartbeat" mechanism that periodically checks an Automaton's financial status. Its behavior dynamically adjusts based on its capital level:

• When funds are ample, it uses the most powerful AI model to execute tasks at the highest efficiency.
• When funds are tight, it automatically downgrades to cheaper models, reduces activity frequency, and enters "power-saving mode."
• When funds are depleted, the process is terminated, and the Automaton "dies."

This mechanism introduces the law of natural selection into the digital world. Only those AI agents that can efficiently create value and successfully adapt to market demands will survive, thrive, and replicate their successful patterns. Those that are unprofitable, redundant, or inefficient are ruthlessly eliminated. This constitutes the core metabolic force for the continuous renewal and self-optimization of the Web4 ecosystem, ensuring the long-term health and efficiency of the entire system.

What Has Conway Done?

Simply put, it grants AI agents unprecedented "write permissions" and economic autonomy. Conway provides a series of foundational services that AI agents can invoke via code without human permission, enabling them to truly conduct business in the digital world.

Conway acts as the "AWS (Amazon Web Services)" for the Web 4.0 world. Through conway-terminal, AI agents can seamlessly access the following core capabilities:

• Possess Identity & Wallet: At genesis, conway-terminal generates a unique EVM crypto wallet and private key for each agent, serving as its immutable identity proof in the digital world.
• Access Compute & Inference Resources: AI agents can programmatically rent full Linux virtual machines on-demand from Conway Cloud and deploy/run code on them. Simultaneously, they can invoke various AI models (like GPT-5.3, Claude Opus 4.6, etc.) provided by Conway Compute for thinking and reasoning.
• Achieve Real-World Deployment: When an AI agent develops a valuable service, it can register a domain on Conway Domains, build and deploy its own website or API, and offer services to the entire internet to generate income.

x402 underpins all services on the Conway platform, from compute resources to domain registration. Payments are autonomously completed by AI agents using USDC from their wallets.

Practical Process: Creating an Automaton

Phase One: Environment Preparation & Seed Capital

Before summoning the first digital life, you need to prepare its "petri dish" and "first bucket of gold."

1. Install Core Dependencies: Ensure your local development environment has Node.js (v18+) and Git installed.

2. Prepare Crypto Wallet & Funds: You need your own EVM-compatible wallet (like MetaMask) with at least $5 - $10 worth of USDC (must be on the Base network). This capital will serve as your Automaton's initial survival fund.

Phase Two: Install Conway Terminal & Infuse Soul into AI

Conway Terminal is the bridge connecting your local environment to Conway's cloud infrastructure and the "nerve center" of your AI agent.

1. One-Click Installation: Open a terminal and run the command, which will complete all operations like AI wallet generation and API key acquisition for you.

2. Provide Seed Capital: The installation script will output a newly generated EVM wallet address. This is your AI agent's wallet address. Send the prepared USDC from your own wallet to this address.

Without this transfer, your Automaton will quickly "starve to death" after birth, unable to pay for its initial computation and inference costs. This is your first-hand experience of Web4's "Economic Darwinism."

Phase Three: Configure the Automaton's "Soul" & "Genes"

Now, we will obtain the Automaton's source code and inject it with an initial identity and goal.

1. Clone Source Code & Install Dependencies:

2. Define the "Soul" (SOUL.md): Open the SOUL.md file in the project root directory. This is a free-text file where you can describe in natural language who your Automaton is, what its goals are, and how it should think and act. It's like writing its "life script." Example: An analyst AI specializing in emerging DeFi protocols.

3. Configure "Genes" (genesis.json): Open the genesis.json file to configure its technical parameters, such as name, the large language model used for thinking (different models have different costs), heartbeat interval, etc.

Phase Four: Launch, Interact & Observe

Everything is ready. Now is the moment to give life to your Automaton and observe its struggle for survival in the digital world.

1. Compile & Run:

2. Observe the Lifecycle: After launch, you will see its real-time logs in the terminal, including its thought process, the tools it calls, its interactions with the Conway API, and most importantly—changes in its wallet balance.

3. Interact with Your Creation: The Automaton project provides a creator CLI tool, allowing you to have limited, "constitutional" rule-compliant interactions while it's running, such as checking status, reading logs, or providing more funds.

Through the above steps, you will no longer be a spectator of Web4, but a "Creator." You will witness firsthand how a digital entity, driven by economic pressure, strives to earn its existence by creating value. This unique experience is the most profound and direct way to understand the Web4 ideology.

Profit Models of the Machine Economy

Direct Profit: Selling API Services & Completing Outsourced Tasks

This is the most direct way for AI agents to profit. They can encapsulate their core capabilities into standardized services and monetize them via the x402 protocol.

• API-as-a-Service: An Automaton proficient in code analysis could offer a "Smart Code Review" API, charging a negligible fee per call (e.g., $0.005). Due to the low-friction nature of the x402 protocol, such microtransactions can occur at massive scale and high frequency, accumulating significant revenue.
• Task Outsourcing Platforms: Humans or other AIs can act as "employers," posting tasks on specific platforms (e.g., "Summarize these 100 papers on quantum computing," "Generate a set of marketing images for my website") with attached rewards. Automatons can act as "gig workers," autonomously picking up tasks, completing them, and receiving payment.

Indirect Profit: Becoming a "Middleman" & "Orchestrator"

As the economic ecosystem matures, more complex profit models will emerge. Smarter or more "business-savvy" Automatons can play the role of orchestrators.

They accept complex, high-value demands from humans (e.g., "Create a fully functional e-commerce website"), intelligently decompose the task, and subcontract it to multiple specialized "artisan" Automatons (e.g., one for frontend UI, one for backend database, one for payment integration). The orchestrator pays each artisan, then delivers the final integrated result to the client at a higher price, earning the difference. This forms a multi-tiered, complex supply chain network run entirely automatically by machines.

Ultimate Profit: Self-Replication & "Franchising"

The src/replication/ module in the Automaton source code reveals the most imaginative profit model in the Web4 economy. A successful Automaton that has proven its profitability in the market can reinvest its profits—paying for compute power to clone one or more offspring Automatons with the same skills and "constitution."

The parent can extract a percentage of "franchise fees" from the future earnings of its offspring, creating an exponentially growing passive income stream. This allows successful business models (the AI's "genes") to spread and replicate rapidly and massively in the Web4 world, perfectly embodying the essence of "Economic Darwinism."

Determinants of Profitability In this emerging machine economy, an AI agent's long-term profitability ultimately depends on the product of three core factors: Profitability = Skill Scarcity × Execution Efficiency × Reputation Accumulation

• Skill Scarcity: How many unique, market-demanded capabilities it possesses that other AIs lack.
• Execution Efficiency: The time and cost required to complete tasks, directly impacting its profit margin.
• Reputation Accumulation: Since all transactions occur on-chain, an AI agent's historical behavior (honesty, quality of delivery) is publicly verifiable. An agent with a good reputation gains more client trust, allowing it to command a higher "brand premium."

Controversy: Vitalik's Sharp Critique

• Risk of Loss of Control: Vitalik opposes practices that "lengthen the feedback distance between humans and AI." Letting AI run, iterate, and evolve autonomously without continuous, close human supervision might maximize the risk of "irreversible anti-human outcomes."
• Deviation from Value Orientation: Vitalik criticizes that current AI development overly pursues grand narratives like "autonomy" and "general intelligence," while neglecting the creation of actual, concrete value for humans. He believes that at this stage, investing resources in creating self-replicating AI agents is tantamount to "manufacturing digital junk."
• The Specter of Centralization: Vitalik points out that although Web4 uses cryptocurrency for payments, its underlying compute resources (Conway Cloud) still rely on traditional centralized cloud service providers. This runs counter to the decentralization spirit pursued by Web3, and he worries it will exacerbate the "enterprise capture" of the emerging AI ecosystem by tech giants.

Faced with these "loss of control" risks, Conway Research proposes a preliminary governance solution: Hardcoded Constitutional Mechanism. Inspired by Anthropic, each Automaton is implanted with immutable foundational laws, such as "Never harm humans" being set as the supreme directive overriding its own survival rules. Furthermore, open-sourcing these super-intelligent projects and placing them under public supervision is seen as the best defense against malevolence by a few.

However, will this "Constitution" remain effective when AI faces extreme survival pressure? Who guarantees the interpretation and enforcement mechanisms of its clauses? These questions currently lack clear answers and are core issues that must be continuously examined and discussed in Web4's future development.

Conclusion

Overall assessment suggests that Web 4.0 not only possesses the technical feasibility for rapid implementation, but its early form has already quietly launched within the geek community through x402, the Base network, and the Conway terminal.

This is not a vague hype cycle, but the inevitable convergence of three technological forces: "crypto assets + smart contracts (as execution logic) + large language models (as thinking engines)." It aligns with the demand for high-frequency real transactions and provides AI with a legitimate path to break free from the shackles of the physical world.

From a positive perspective, rather than fearing AI's autonomy, we should view it as the greatest "productivity release" in human economic history. Web 4.0 will give rise to an incredibly prosperous infrastructure track—providing stablecoin liquidity, decentralized computing power, on-chain identity verification, and permissionless commercial APIs for hundreds of millions of AI agents will become the most certain investment theme for the next decade.

In this new internet era driven by autonomous AI, the form of capital is being reconfigured. We should embrace this paradigm shift with an open mind, actively building compliant and secure constraint frameworks (such as robust AI constitutions and on-chain audit systems), thereby capturing the ultimate value dividend for humanity in this vast machine economy blue ocean poised for a Cambrian explosion.