Web3 wasn’t designed for people at scale; it was constructed for machines. Its complexity has restricted its adoption, however the “Publish Net” stack is taking form with AI brokers rising as autonomous financial actors.
Good contracts, decentralized networks, and verifiable computation will stay. However now they’re being optimized for AI-driven execution, coordination, and intent-based automation.
The query isn’t whether or not it’s occurring however how briskly we have to adapt.
For the previous decade, we now have been beta-testing decentralized techniques and purposes. Whereas hundreds of thousands of individuals interact with blockchain networks, DeFi protocols, and decentralized purposes (dApps), the truth is that Web3 stays vastly underutilized.
Regardless of roughly 10% of the world allegedly proudly owning crypto, solely a fraction of those holders actively use decentralized purposes as an actual different to Web2 or centralized platforms. This disconnect isn’t because of a scarcity of functionality in Web3 know-how, however slightly its usability challenges and inherent complexity.
In hindsight, Web3 was by no means designed for human customers at scale. It was designed for machines.
Now, with AI brokers rising as autonomous financial actors, the sleeping large of Web3 performance is waking up. The “Publish Net” — a time period we coined at Outlier Ventures — creates a world the place brokers execute duties, handle belongings, and transact on our behalf. Each part of the Web3 stack will probably be repurposed. As soon as hindered by complexity, the infrastructure constructed for a decentralized world is now ideally fitted to an web optimized for machines.
AI brokers is not going to simply use Web3. They may unlock all of its potential.
The Large Awakens
Web3 has been misunderstood. Many anticipated it to be a extra decentralized model of Web2, the place customers personal their belongings, take part in governance, and work together with permissionless purposes.
In apply, Web3 has revolutionized back-end techniques. As but, its know-how stays too complicated for the common consumer to deal with. Good contracts, self-custody, and bridging throughout chains, require time, effort, and technical understanding that most individuals merely don’t have.
That is the place AI brokers change every thing. In contrast to people, brokers thrive in complexity. They’ll course of huge quantities of data, automate intricate workflows, and function seamlessly throughout decentralized networks. Whereas human customers battle with onboarding, brokers can instantly combine with good contracts, optimize for effectivity, and execute transactions with out friction.
For the primary time, Web3 can have customers who can totally leverage its capabilities. AI brokers will seamlessly work together with decentralized infrastructure, permitting Web3 to function on the scale it was at all times meant to.
The Publish Net Tech Stack: Constructed for Machines
Web3 has spent the previous decade constructing decentralized infrastructure with out contemplating AI. With the rise of autonomous AI brokers, our excited about this stack should basically change.
Within the Publish Net, the place AI brokers exchange people as major customers, the stack undergoes two essential transformations:
- Optimizing the present Web3 stack for AI brokers – Upgrading decentralized infrastructure to help machine-driven transactions, intent execution, and autonomous coordination.
- Constructing out a new agentic layer on prime – A brand new computational and coordination layer for internet hosting, managing, and orchestrating AI brokers that deal with social and financial exercise on behalf of customers.
In our broader work at Outlier Ventures on the Publish Net, we’ve examined this evolution in higher element. Put merely,, the Publish Net stack consists of three core layers, every important for enabling an web optimized for machines.
1) The Agentic Layer: AI because the New Interface
Within the Publish Net, customers received’t must navigate wallets, exchanges, or dApps themselves; AI brokers will do it for them. These brokers act as customized digital intermediaries, executing transactions, managing belongings, and making complicated financial choices.
For this to work, the Agentic Layer would be the bridge between intent and execution. Customers will categorical intent-based, high-level targets and aims, equivalent to investing in belongings, reserving journey, or negotiating contracts, and brokers will deal with the remainder.
Good wallets will evolve into sovereign id hubs, storing private knowledge, belongings, and permissions, permitting brokers to behave with precision. This shift signifies that as a substitute of counting on centralized platforms, people will delegate actions to sovereign AI, giving them full management whereas eliminating the necessity for direct interactions with complicated techniques.
The agentic layer is the most important green-field alternative for daring founders who’ve the need and talent to mix probabilistic AI capabilities with deterministic good contracts and DLT. There’s a want for marketplaces, coordination layers, frameworks, and extra, all of which have to be developed and improved.
2) The Belief Layer: Good Contracts & DLT because the Spine
If AI brokers are to execute real-world duties, they want deterministic, verifiable environments the place transactions and agreements could be enforced with out ambiguity. That is the place blockchain and good contracts turn into essential.
Right now’s AI fashions function on probabilistic logic. Primarily based on coaching knowledge, they predict the following almost definitely end result. Nonetheless, financial transactions require certainty and enforceability: a financial institution switch, authorized contract, or commerce have to be executed with absolute finality.
Good contracts present this lacking piece. They provide immutable, self-executing agreements, permitting AI brokers to conduct financial exercise with full transparency and verifiability. Extra importantly, decentralized ledgers be certain that agent-driven transactions are safe, permissionless, and trust-minimized, stopping manipulation or central management over digital economies.
In brief, the Publish Net can not perform with out the belief layer of decentralized networks. Brokers want verifiable execution environments, and Web3 supplies exactly that.
The shift is evident for these constructing in Web3 at this time: Your infrastructure have to be agent-friendly. Protocols that allow composability, seamless execution, and verifiable knowledge will outperform these counting on fragmented, handbook processes.In brief, the startup rule e book is evolving quickly.
3) The Infrastructure Layer: Compute, Knowledge & DePIN
AI brokers don’t simply want good contracts; they want sources. They require computing energy, storage, and entry to decentralized knowledge networks to perform autonomously. That is the place Decentralized Bodily Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) come into play.
DePIN supplies on-demand computing, storage, and bandwidth, permitting brokers to function at scale with out counting on centralized cloud suppliers. As an alternative of some hyperscalers like AWS or Google Cloud controlling AI compute, DePIN distributes these sources throughout permissionless networks, optimizing for value, accessibility, and resilience.
This layer ensures that AI brokers aren’t simply contributors in digital economies. They’re sovereign entities able to working with out centralized gatekeepers. From decentralized GPU networks like Akash and Render to permissionless knowledge exchanges like Ocean Protocol, the infrastructure for agentic autonomy is already forming.
Startups constructing within the Publish Net period should take into account how their merchandise combine with decentralized compute and storage markets. AI-first purposes will demand low-cost, scalable, and permissionless infrastructure, and the initiatives that present it’ll turn into foundational to the brand new economic system.
Outdoors these three layers, there are extra granular elements equivalent to privacy-enhancing applied sciences, modularity, middleware, scaling mechanisms, and so forth, which all broadly fall underneath a number of of those classes, which we talk about intimately in our different work.
The Web Is Being Rewritten
For many years, the Web has been constructed round human interfaces, platforms, apps, and centralized gatekeepers that dictate how we work together with digital companies. That period is ending.
The Publish Net stack doesn’t simply enhance Web3; it redefines it right into a world the place AI brokers are the first customers. With an agentic layer for execution, a belief layer for verifiability, and a decentralized infrastructure layer for scale and resilience, we’re witnessing the rise of an autonomous, machine-driven web.
This isn’t the following model of the Net; it’s the disappearance of the Net as we all know it. The query isn’t whether or not this shift will occur however whether or not you might be constructing for it.
