Agent User Era: Where Does Crypto Value Flow?
- Core Thesis: This article explores how the logic of value capture will be upended when blockchain users transition from humans to AI Agents. It argues that application-layer moats built on brand and UX will become obsolete, while liquidity, latency, settlement finality, or business models yet to be conceived will become the key determinants of where value flows.
- Key Elements:
- Agents interact directly via APIs, exhibiting zero brand loyalty and negligible switching costs, which will dismantle the human-centric user relationships and interface advantages that the "Fat Application" theory relies on.
- Infrastructure (L1/L2) becomes abundant and fungible, eroding the scarcity premium and pricing power of the protocol layer central to the "Fat Protocol" thesis.
- In a "headless" application scenario, Agents could encapsulate the aggregation and routing capabilities of current front-ends into APIs, continuing to capture value.
- Conversely, Agents might bypass intermediary layers like aggregators, directly calling simple, standardized RPCs and APIs, potentially giving the "Fat Protocol" thesis a second life.
- In the most radical scenario, the absolute rationality and zero loyalty of Agents would force the profit margins of applications, aggregators, and infrastructure to be compressed down to near marginal cost.
- The true potential of Agents lies in creating novel activities, such as continuous portfolio rebalancing and machine-to-machine payments, which are impractical within the traditional framework of human participation.
Original Title: Who Makes Money from Agents?
Original Author: Jonah Burian
Translation: Peggy
Editor's Note: If Agents are truly set to become the next billion users on the blockchain, the more important question might not be "how much volume will they bring," but rather, if this reality comes to pass, who stands to profit?
In the past, theories like "Fat Protocols" or "Fat Applications" implicitly assumed that on-chain users are human. Humans care about user interface usability, brand trustworthiness, and convenient pathways. Therefore, the application layer could capture value by controlling the user entry point and transaction flow. However, Agents are different. They call APIs directly, have no brand loyalty, and can switch between different protocols, aggregators, and trading venues at low cost.
This means Agents could rewrite the value distribution logic of Web3. The application layer could shift towards being "headless," exposing wallets, aggregators, and on/off-ramp capabilities as APIs for Agents. The protocol layer might also regain opportunities as Agents bypass intermediate layers. However, a more radical scenario is that Agents push the entire on-chain stack towards price competition, compressing the profit margins of applications, aggregators, and infrastructure to near marginal cost.
What's truly noteworthy is that Agents won't just make existing on-chain transactions more frequent; they could also create entirely new activities that weren't feasible before: continuous portfolio rebalancing, machine-to-machine payments, and novel markets that only become meaningful under automated high-speed execution.
Therefore, the core question of the Agent era isn't simply determining whether value flows to protocols or applications. It's about figuring out who can make an Agent choose to return here when it has infinite alternatives. The answer may no longer be UX and brand, but rather liquidity, latency, settlement finality, or some new business model that hasn't been named yet.
Following is the original text:
Many envision Agents becoming the next billion users for blockchains. But few ask the second-layer question: if this world comes to be, who makes money?
All previous theories about value capture in crypto assumed the user was human. The "Fat Protocols" theory argued that the protocol layer is best at monetizing users. Conversely, the "Fat Applications" theory, which I and my colleagues proposed in "How to Capture Value" and "The Great Repricing," argues the application layer does it better.
But Agents change who the "user" is. Thus, existing value capture theories become unreliable.
The "Fat Protocols" Thesis
In 2016, @jmonegro wrote "Fat Protocols." For nearly a decade, this article became the dominant value capture theory in the crypto industry.
Its core argument: in the internet era, value mainly flows to the application layer, like @Google and @facebook, while underlying protocols like TCP/IP and HTTP captured little value. But crypto would invert this. Blockchain data is open and shared, so applications face commoditization. Protocol tokens, necessary to use the network, would capture speculative value as usage grows. Every successful application would drive demand for the token. Ultimately, the protocol layer would compound faster than any application built on top.
For a long time, this seemed correct. Bitcoin and Ethereum's market caps were higher than any company built upon them. This model worked because the protocol layer was scarce, expensive, and hard to replace. Bitcoin and Ethereum in 2017 indeed possessed scarcity; a dozen general-purpose L1s weren't yet competing for the same workloads. Block space was tight enough that holding the base asset felt like holding a stake in every application needing that network.
Now, every layer of the infrastructure stack has credible alternatives: multiple high-throughput L1s, dozens of L2s, and modular settlement and data availability layers competing on price. Block space has gone from scarce to abundant. Switching costs fell rapidly as bridges and aggregators made the underlying chain nearly invisible to users. Infrastructure becomes fungible, and fungible things eventually compete on price. Consequently, the protocol layer's pricing power has vanished along with its scarcity.
The "Fat Applications" Thesis
By 2026, the entities capturing significant economic value aren't protocols, but applications like @phantom, @coinbase, @Polymarket, @Pumpfun.
In my view, the reason is that the most valuable asset in crypto is user relationships. If you control the user interface and transaction flow, you control distribution. And whenever a user touches an on-chain product, you can monetize it: swapping, lending, staking, minting, on/off-ramps. This is likely why investors are so obsessed with neobanks.
Applications also push infrastructure into pure price competition, compressing infrastructure margins to near zero. I documented this strategy in "How to Capture Value." The same dynamic is playing out in stablecoins, which I discussed in another article.
Prices are reflecting this theory. Spencer and I call this shift "The Great Repricing": in this cycle, value flows to the layer holding user relationships.
Why Agents Break This
The "Fat Applications" thesis defaults to human users who value UX, brand, and convenience. Agents do not. They call APIs directly, have no brand loyalty, and can switch trading venues at zero cost.
When the user becomes software, owning the user relationship is less defensible. The frontend moat that the entire "Fat Applications" thesis relies on gets devalued.
So, who captures value in the Agent era?
Applications Go Headless
One possibility is that application-layer winners continue to win, but they abandon the UI.
Wallets and aggregators have already built the hardest parts: integration with numerous protocols, routing logic, identity, and on/off-ramp infrastructure. The natural next step is to expose this stack as APIs for Agents, allowing Agents to route through them just as human users today trade via @phantom or @JupiterExchange.
In this world, the "Fat Applications" thesis still holds but loses its frontend. Companies that won in the human era could re-platform into headless infrastructure. We already see traditional SaaS companies like Salesforce pivoting in this direction.
Protocols Rise Again
Alternatively, Agents might bypass the middlemen entirely.
If integration is simple enough – clear API docs, standardized RPC, predictable execution semantics – Agents have little reason to pay an aggregator to do what they could do themselves.
Aggregators' edge in the human era came from UX and complex routing. Agents don't need UX, and routing is a solvable engineering problem that Agents are becoming increasingly adept at.
If this future materializes, the "Fat Protocols" thesis gets a second life.
Pricing Power Collapses Across the Stack
Another possibility is that Agents impose commoditization pressure across the entire stack.
They are perfectly rational. They will always choose the cheapest venue, with zero loyalty and no friction. Applications lose the UX premium they charged human users. Aggregators and infrastructure lose pricing power because no human inertia shields them from price competition.
In this scenario, it's tough for any layer to capture much value. The entire supply chain gets compressed to near marginal cost. Economic surplus flows to the entity owning the Agents, or the end-user the Agent represents. Crypto becomes a utility, and utilities are notoriously unprofitable.
Agents Unlock Previously Infeasible Activities
The simple version of this view: Agents do what humans do, just at higher throughput. Even if margins compress, dramatically higher volume still grows the total pie.
But there's a more interesting version: Agents make a class of activities feasible that weren't before. For example, continuous portfolio rebalancing at sub-cent execution cost; machine-to-machine commerce between Agents; markets that only make sense when pricing and trading speed outpace human capability.
These activities don't fit our current framework for on-chain activity because we implicitly assume a human participant.
If this is the real change Agents bring, the question isn't how to divide the existing pie, but how much new economic activity is brought on-chain, and which layers are best suited to serve it.
A Business Model Not Yet Named
Every cycle, we try to guess where value flows, often assuming that known business models will naturally extend into the future. This assumption tends to miss models that haven't emerged yet.
When the internet was built, no one predicted the attention economy. The business model that seems obvious today – slicing user attention into segments, auctioning them to advertisers, with one company vacuuming a significant share of global ad spend – was alien back then. It only seems inevitable in retrospect.
AI looks like one of the biggest technological disruptions in decades. In an Agent-dominated world, some value capture will likely flow to a business model no one is seriously discussing today. The ultimate winner capturing value may not be who the market is focused on right now.
What to Watch Next?
The most likely outcome isn't one paradigm completely replacing another. Humans and Agents will co-exist as crypto users for a long time, and the value capture map for these two user types differs.
As long as humans interact with blockchains directly, the "Fat Applications" thesis applies: consumers willing to pay for UX, brand, and convenience will continue to pay a premium to applications owning user relationships. Meanwhile, the layer where Agents transact will be governed by a different thesis – which one depends on how the scenarios above evolve.
In my view, for builders, the most important question on the Agent side to ponder is: what makes an Agent return to you, rather than routing to the next cheaper alternative?
The answer probably isn't UX. It could be liquidity, latency, settlement guarantees, or something else.
At @bcap, we're investing significant time thinking about this, both in investment committee meetings and discussions with engineering teams. We don't have a definitive answer yet. If you're building for Agents and have a take on value capture in the Agent era, we'd love to talk.
