AI Agent가 Web3 게임을 완전히 바꾸다: Rugpull Bakery 봇 논란부터 2026년 에이전트 새 패러다임까지

By GMA researcher Elinor | @AllianceGma

Recently, a controversial resolution regarding rampant in-game bots caught GMA's attention — Rugpull Bakery, a competitive baking game on the Abstract chain, faced a dispute in Season 2 due to automated scripts flooding the game. Players accused bot accounts of undermining fairness, and the team ultimately chose to "legalize" them in Season 3 by adding a 30% passive prize pool.

This incident not only exposed the human-machine asymmetry under the traditional Play-to-Earn model but also became a catalyst for AI Agents to move from the periphery of games to core sovereignty. With the OnchainChemists team officially releasing skill.md and agent.json to provide official operational guidelines for AI Agents, Web3 games have bid farewell to the old era centered on human manual labor and entered the Agentic Gaming epoch characterized by autonomous decision-making, algorithmic optimization, and on-chain economic entities.

From Rugpull Bakery's "crisis of trust" to the deep-dive practices of projects like TEN, AI Arena, Parallel Colony, Illuvium, and EVE Frontier, AI Agents are reshaping the entire Web3 gaming ecosystem: they are no longer auxiliary tools but "first-class citizens" with independent strategies, persistent memory, and economic sovereignty, driving games from static rules to dynamic emergence and from labor-intensive to intelligent symbiosis.

The Rugpull Bakery Controversy: A Technological Awakening Amidst a Crisis of Trust

Rugpull Bakery's Season 2 ended amidst heated accusations. Player Zolot231 publicly alleged that some community players using bots and multi-account strategies severely damaged competitive fairness. The core of the controversy lies in the fact that human guilds simply cannot compete against automated scripts that operate 24/7, precisely coordinating "Rug" actions. This technological asymmetry not only led to unfair rankings but also sparked a discussion about the nature of on-chain games in the era of AI Agents: in a permissionless environment where code is law, AI Agents are a natural fit for on-chain games, making them an ideal testing ground. So, isn't limiting automation itself a futile act against the tide of the times?

OnchainChemists' response was not a traditional ban but a radical strategic adjustment. In the update for Season 3, the developers rewrote the terms of service, explicitly defining AI Agents, bots, and automated systems as a core part of the gameplay. This shift from "blocking" to "embracing" marks the developers' official acknowledgment that AI Agents are unstoppable in the on-chain environment. Therefore, they instead opted to balance the relationship between agents and human players through mechanism design.

By releasing skill.md (a machine-readable instruction set) and agent.json (a bootstrap program), Rugpull Bakery effectively provided an official "operating manual" for AI Agents, making them first-class citizens in the gaming ecosystem.

Diverse Implementation Models for Web3 Game Agents

In 2026, the application of agents in Web3 games is no longer limited to simple script automation but has evolved into multiple deeply integrated implementation models. These models can be categorized based on the role the agent plays in the game loop, its degree of autonomy, and the depth of its intervention in the economic system.

Autonomous Competitor and Economic Entity Model

In this model, agents are no longer tools assisting humans but independent participants. In May of last year, TEN Protocol launched its groundbreaking demo product, House of TEN, a fully on-chain poker game that serves as a live demonstration of TEN's privacy technology. It attracted significant attention while pioneeringly proving that AI Agents can operate as first-class citizens playing real games on-chain. The agents deployed on this encrypted Layer 2 possess unique strategies, gaming personas, and risk preferences, capable of simulating human-like gameplay, bluffing, and psychological reasoning. The player's role transforms into an "agent broker," achieving passive asset appreciation by staking specific agents and sharing in their in-game winnings.

AI Arena (NRN Agents) and Satoshi Strike Force (SSF) further reinforced this trend. AI Arena uses imitation learning from actual player gameplay to train NFT characters into autonomous AI Agents. Once trained, these agents can participate fully automatically in PvP arenas, turning players into "AI Coaches." SSF, with its core concepts of "Skill Economies as Intelligence Engines" and a "Cognitive Economy," employs a Play-to-Verify™ mechanism. It converts each tactical decision, reaction, and choice under pressure made by players in combat into high-signal, verifiable "cognitive traces." This real player data is directly used to train AI Agents known as "Digital Athletes," creating a closed loop where "you play, you train; your playstyle becomes the agent." The trained AI Agents can independently engage in PvP competition, strategy evolution, and autonomous competition, while also supporting data set licensing, agent leasing, and competitive rewards, allowing player skills to be truly assetized on-chain and iteratively improved.

Somnia, as an Agentic L1 infrastructure, pushes this model to its extreme. On April 21, 2026, Somnia completed a major strategic pivot, officially becoming "The Agentic L1" — a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain specifically built for AI Agents. Its Somnia Agents already run on-chain as part of the validator consensus, supporting native API queries from smart contracts, running deterministic AI models with results verified by consensus. This makes AI Agents true "native users" of the blockchain, capable of autonomous world perception, decision-making, and real-time reaction (Reactive design). It provides underlying computational power and execution environments for games like AI Arena, Parallel Colony, and Illuvium, enabling fully on-chain autonomous competition and economic activity at millions of TPS, completely eliminating off-chain dependencies.

Modular Infrastructure and Programmable Environment Model

EVE Frontier pushes agent implementation to the architectural level. This hardcore interstellar survival game by CCP Games has a core innovation in the concept of "Server-side Modding". Through its Smart Assemblies system, players and third-party AI Agents can write custom logic to be deployed directly onto stargates, turrets, or storage facilities. This means that the infrastructure within the game world is no longer static but consists of programmable entities driven by AI. At this point, players and AI Agents are no longer modifying simple local display skins but are altering the shared physical logic and economic laws of the entire universe.

1. Smart Assemblies: From Static Buildings to "Living Entities"

In the current Founder Access universe, Smart Assemblies provide three core carriers. AI Agents can directly "possess" these facilities by attaching smart contracts (Mods):

• Smart Storage Unit (SSU): A basic resource warehouse. Through AI logic, it can evolve into an automated arbitrage hub, a tribal shared bank, or a decentralized market, capable of autonomously executing rent collection and quota management.
• Smart Turret: An automated defensive weapon supporting AI-customized rules of engagement. For example, an AI could decide whether to initiate an active attack based on a target's on-chain reputation score or historical bounty records.
• Smart Gate: A spatial teleportation device. An AI Agent can modify it into an intelligent checkpoint, dynamically adjusting transit fees based on real-time traffic flow, reputation weight, or cross-chain market exchange rates.

2. Technological Empowerment: Sui Migration and High-Frequency Game Support

To support this high density of Agent interactions, EVE Frontier officially migrated to the Sui chain in March. This architectural evolution provides crucial support for AI Agents:

• High-Concurrency Logic Execution: Leveraging Sui's object model, AI-driven components can process massive instructions in parallel, ensuring real-time responsiveness of server-side logic.
• Frictionless Onboarding and Low Barriers: Combined with zkLogin and Gasless Entry, AI Agents can interact with contracts at very low cost and high frequency, removing the old friction associated with Web3 interactions.

3. Ecosystem Validation: From Hackathon Outcomes to Collaborative Evolution in an Autonomous World

In the $80,000 Prize Pool EVE Frontier x Sui Hackathon that concluded in April, the community's submission of 123 Mods/Tools further validated the vitality of this model. This event was not just a technology showcase but a practical exercise in the "Human + AI" co-governance model:

• Collaborative Evolution: Through Ghost Build (a phantom planning mode), human players and AI Agents can collaboratively plan interstellar territories. AI optimizes complex resource flow paths, while humans handle macro-strategic decisions, jointly building an infinitely expandable Autonomous World.
• Use Case Breakthroughs: Entries included AI-driven "Auto Bounty Hunter Protocols" and "Dynamic Insurance Pools." These protocols are directly mounted on Smart Assemblies, seamlessly transforming complex on-chain financial behaviors into in-game survival rules. Some outstanding projects have already been integrated into the current Founder Access universe.

4. Economic Evolution: The "Commercial Soul" from ERC-8183

If EVE Frontier achieves "code is law" on a physical level, then the ERC-8183 standard, jointly launched by Virtuals Protocol and the Ethereum Foundation, injects an autonomous commercial soul into this infrastructure.

ERC-8183 introduces the crucial "Job" primitive, allowing one game agent to autonomously hire another service agent for tasks like resource gathering or data analysis, settling fees automatically via on-chain escrow. This fundamentally changes the social role of agents:

• From "Tool" to "Employer": With the 'Job' primitive of ERC-8183, a Smart Gate in EVE Frontier is no longer a passive dead object. It can even become an "employer," autonomously publishing Jobs on-chain to hire other service agents for real-time data patrols or market risk hedging.
• Trust and Settlement: Automatic fee settlement via on-chain escrow, ERC-8183 solves the trust foundation for collaboration across different entities and architectures.

This vision of 'infrastructure autonomously hiring labor' is a clear sign of Web3 game agents evolving from singular execution towards complex social collaboration.

Hybrid Companion and Dynamic Adaptive Environment Model

Parallel Colony and Illuvium explore the boundaries of human-AI collaboration.

Parallel Colony, as a pioneer of the "1.5-player game," has players act as Cappies (companion robots/guides), forming a symbiotic relationship with highly autonomous AI Avatars (colonists/executing agents). Each Avatar is itself a fully autonomous AI Agent, with Google Cloud providing the infrastructure via its unified AI tech stack (including Gemini models, Vertex AI, GKE, Cloud Spanner, etc.), supporting the AI Agent in autonomously understanding player instructions, generating responses, and executing tasks. Avatars possess long-term memory, unique personalities, psychological assessments, emotional systems (Mood, Morale), and personalized goals. They can live, work, make decisions, adapt to dynamic post-apocalyptic environments, and can even refuse or reinterpret player instructions. Players provide high-level advice through chat (rather than direct control), while Avatars autonomously handle territory management, resource gathering, social interaction, and colonial expansion. Additionally, the game features a real-time generative crafting engine called Fabricator (powered by Nano Banana technology), allowing players to instantly generate/mint 3D game assets via text prompts. Avatars also have on-chain autonomous trading capabilities (dedicated Web3 wallet + NFT binding), resulting in a truly hybrid collaborative partnership and emergent narrative.

Youmio offers another symbiotic path with its Agentic L1 + 3D AI characters (Mios). Users can one-click create 3D AI companions with persistent memory, unique personalities, and an Affinity system. These Mios can not only chat and interact autonomously but also exhibit emergent behaviors in the Miogotchi adventure world, creating economic value through on-chain identity. Players and AI form a hybrid relationship of "digital partner + co-growth."

In Illuvium, through a strategic partnership with Virtuals Protocol in January 2025, the project plans to leverage Virtuals' proprietary G.A.M.E. LLM framework to infuse NPCs with AI Agent capabilities. This would transform these non-player characters from traditional static scripts into highly intelligent, context-aware dynamic entities. NPCs are expected to dynamically adjust dialogue, quests, challenges, and storylines in real-time based on player interactions, enabling personalized quest systems, emergent narratives, and hyper-personalized relationship building across the three main games: Overworld (open-world survival), Arena (auto-battler), and Zero (city builder), with Overworld slated for initial implementation. This world-level dynamic adaptation mechanism has the potential to turn the entire game environment into a "living companion" for players, creating a dynamic meta-game with infinite content, high replayability, and continuous evolution, ensuring that each player's journey is unique and difficult to fully predict.

Conclusion: The 'Post-Human' Turning Point for Web3 Gaming

Rugpull Bakery started from a cheating controversy but ultimately illuminated the future direction of Web3 gaming: a new digital order where humans and AI Agents coexist, collaborate, and compete. In the Agentic Gaming wave of 2026, AI Agents have evolved into three core models — Autonomous Competitors and Economic Entities (TEN, AI Arena, SSF, Somnia Agentic L1), Modular Infrastructure and Programmable Environments (EVE Frontier + ERC-8183), and Hybrid Companions and Dynamic Adaptive Environments (Parallel Colony, Illuvium) — fully integrated into the game's training, decision-making, execution, and economic cycles.

Attempting to block automation through traditional means is futile. Utilizing blockchain's transparency, programmability, and the native support of Agentic L1s (like Somnia) to regulate and empower agents is the only path to mass adoption. With the proliferation of the ERC-8183 "Job" primitive and the implementation of multi-million TPS Agentic infrastructure, Web3 games are rapidly shifting from "inefficient human labor" to "efficient algorithmic hedging and emergent intelligence." Players are no longer cogs in a machine but commanders and symbiotic partners of digital sovereignty. As Animoca Brands CEO Robby Yung stated, the industry frontier in 2026 will be "post-human by default," and this transformation will not only reshape gaming but also serve as the ultimate experimental ground for future cyborg societies concerning ownership, economics, and governance.

As a DAO organization deeply rooted in the gaming sector, GMA will continue to track the Agentic Gaming track. Which model do you find most promising? Feel free to discuss in the comments!