Agent用户时代，加密价值流向何方？

Original Title: Who Makes Money from Agents?

Original Author: Jonah Burian

Original Translation by: 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 world becomes a reality, who gets to profit?

In the past, both the "Fat Protocols" and "Fat Applications" theories assumed on-chain users were human. Humans care about interface usability, brand trustworthiness, and convenience of access. Therefore, the application layer could capture value by controlling the user gateway and transaction flow. But Agents are different. They interact directly via APIs, 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 in Web3. The application layer could pivot to being "headless," opening up wallets, aggregators, and fiat on/off ramps as APIs for Agents. The protocol layer might also regain opportunities as Agents skip intermediary 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 down to near marginal cost.

What's truly noteworthy is that Agents won't just make existing on-chain transactions higher frequency; they might create entirely new activities that weren't viable before: continuous portfolio rebalancing, machine-to-machine payments, and novel markets that only make sense with automated, high-speed execution.

Therefore, the core question in the Agent era isn't simply about judging whether value flows to protocols or applications. It's about identifying who can make an Agent choose to return to them when there are infinite alternatives. The answer might no longer be UX and brand, but rather liquidity, latency, settlement finality, or some new business model that hasn't been named yet.

The following is the original text:

Many envision Agents becoming the next billion users of blockchain. But fewer ask the second-order question: if this world arrives, who makes the money?

All previous theories about value capture in crypto assumed users were human. The "Fat Protocols" theory argued the protocol layer was best at monetizing users. The "Fat Applications" theory my colleagues and I proposed in "How to Capture Value" and "The Great Repricing," however, argued the application layer does it better.

But Agents change who the "user" is. Consequently, the established theories of value capture are no longer reliable.

The "Fat Protocols" Thesis

In 2016, @jmonegro wrote "Fat Protocols." For nearly a decade since, this article became the most dominant theory of value capture in the crypto industry.

Its core argument was: In the internet era, value flowed mainly to the application layer (e.g., @Google, @facebook), while underlying protocols like TCP/IP and HTTP captured almost no value. But crypto would be the reverse. Blockchain data is open and shared, so applications get commoditized. Meanwhile, the protocol token needed to use the network would capture speculative value as usage grew. Every successful application would drive demand for the token. Eventually, 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 on them. This model worked because, at the time, the protocol layer was scarce, expensive, and hard to replace. Bitcoin and Ethereum in 2017 were truly scarce. There weren't a dozen general-purpose L1s vying for the same workloads. Block space was tight enough that holding the base asset felt like owning a piece of 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 have plummeted as bridges and aggregators make the underlying chain nearly invisible to users. Infrastructure becomes substitutable, and substitutable things ultimately compete only 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 the user relationship. If you control the user interface and transaction flow, you control distribution. And whenever a user touches an on-chain product, you can almost always monetize it: swaps, lending, staking, minting, fiat on/off ramps. This is likely why investors are so obsessed with neobanks.

Applications also push infrastructure towards pure price competition, compressing its margins towards marginal cost. I documented this strategy in "How to Capture Value." The same dynamic is playing out in stablecoins, as I've discussed in another piece.

Prices are reflecting this theory. Spencer and I call this shift "The Great Repricing": this cycle, value flows to the layer that owns the user relationship.

Why Agents Break This?

The "Fat Applications" theory assumes users are human, and humans value user experience, brand, and convenience. Agents do not value these things. They call APIs directly, have zero brand loyalty, and can switch trading venues at zero cost.

When users become software, owning the user relationship becomes much less defensible. The front-end moat that the entire "Fat Applications" theory relies on gets devalued.

So, in the Agent era, who captures value?

Applications Go Headless

One possibility is that the same application-layer winners continue to win, but they abandon the UI.

Wallets and aggregators have already built the hard parts: integration capabilities across numerous protocols, routing logic, identity, and on/off ramp infrastructure. The natural next step is to expose this capability as an API for Agents, allowing Agents to route through them, just like human users trade through @phantom or @JupiterExchange today.

In this world, the "Fat Applications" theory still holds, only it loses the front end. The companies that won in the human user era would re-platform, becoming headless infrastructure. We already see traditional SaaS companies like Salesforce pivoting in this direction.

Protocols Rise Again

Another possibility is that Agents skip the middle layer entirely.

If integration is simple enough – e.g., clear API docs, standardized RPC, predictable execution semantics – then Agents have little reason to pay an aggregator to do what they could easily do themselves.

The aggregators' advantage in the human era came from user experience and complex routing capability. Agents don't need UX, and routing is an engineering problem that Agents are getting increasingly better at solving.

If this is the future, the "Fat Protocols" thesis gets a second life.

Pricing Power Collapses Across the Stack

There is also a possibility that Agents exert commoditization pressure across the entire stack.

They are hyper-rational. They will choose the cheapest venue every time, with no loyalty and no friction. Applications will lose the UX premium they once charged human users. Aggregators and infrastructure will lose pricing power, as there are no human users' inertia to insulate them from price competition.

In this scenario, capturing significant value is difficult for any single layer in the stack. The entire supply chain gets compressed towards marginal cost, and the economic surplus flows to whoever owns the Agent, or to the end-user the Agent represents. Crypto becomes a utility – and utilities are typically not great places to make money.

Agents Will Enable New Activities Previously Infeasible

The simple version of this view is: Agents will do what humans already do, just at higher throughput. Even if margins are compressed, the massive increase in transaction volume makes the overall pie bigger.

But I think there is a more interesting version: Agents will enable a class of activities that were previously infeasible. For example, continuously rebalancing a portfolio at sub-penny execution costs; machine-to-machine commerce between Agents; and markets that only make sense when pricing and trade execution happen too fast for humans to keep up.

These activities don't appear in our current framework of on-chain activity because we implicitly assume a human is always in the loop.

If this is the real change Agents bring, then the question isn't just about dividing the existing pie, but about how much *new* economic activity gets brought on-chain, and which layers are best suited to serve these new activities.

A Business Model Not Yet Named

Every cycle, we try to guess where value will flow, and we tend to assume the business models we already know will naturally extend into the future. But this assumption often misses the business models that haven't yet emerged.

When the internet was first being built, no one predicted the attention economy. The business model that seems obvious today – slicing user attention into segments, auctioning it to advertisers, with one company capturing a significant portion of global ad spend – was alien at the time. It only seems inevitable in retrospect.

AI looks like one of the biggest technological disruptions in decades. In a world driven by Agents, it's likely that a portion of value capture will go towards *some* business model no one is seriously discussing today. The eventual players capturing value might not even be the ones the market is focused on.

What to Watch For Next?

The most likely outcome isn't one paradigm completely replacing another. Humans and Agents will coexist as users of the crypto industry for a long time, and these two user types have different value capture maps.

As long as humans still interact with blockchains directly, the "Fat Applications" theory applies: consumers willing to pay for user experience, brand, and convenience will continue to pay a premium to the applications that own the user relationship. Meanwhile, on the layer where Agents transact, a different set of theories will govern – which one depends on how the scenarios above play out.

To me, the most important recurring question for builders on the Agent side is: *What makes an Agent come back to you, instead of routing straight to the next cheapest alternative?*

The answer might not be user experience. It could be liquidity, latency, settlement guarantees, or something else entirely.

At @bcap, we're spending a lot of time thinking about this, both in investment committee meetings and in discussions with engineering teams. We don't have a definitive answer yet. If you are building something around Agents and have your own thesis on value capture in the Agent era, we would love to talk to you.

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