From Wallets to Warlords: How AI Agents Are Colonizing Web3
TL;DR for operators The useful reading of this paper is not “AI agents are coming to crypto.” That is already obvious, and in some corners of the market, painfully over-branded. The sharper point is that Web3-AI agents are forming a stack. At the bottom are infrastructure and trust layers: protocols, DePIN systems, verification mechanisms, execution environments, and agent-development platforms. On top sit the applications: DeFi agents, portfolio tools, market-intelligence systems, governance assistants, security auditors, creative agents, and RWA managers. The paper’s dataset of 133 projects shows this stack is not evenly valued. Infrastructure accounts for 67.8% of the analysed $6.92 billion market capitalisation, even though incubation platforms show the most project activity.1 ...