Original Title: Who Makes Money from Agents?
Original Author: Jonah Burian
Translation: Peggy

Editor's Note: If Agents are indeed going to be the next billion users of blockchain, then the more important question may not be "how much transaction volume they will bring," but rather who can make money if this world really comes to pass?

In the past, whether it was the "Fat Protocol" or "Fat Application" theory, it was assumed that on-chain users were human. Humans care about the user interface, brand trustworthiness, and user experience, allowing the application layer to capture value by controlling user access and transaction flow. But Agents are different. They directly call APIs, have no brand loyalty, and can switch between different protocols, aggregators, and exchanges at a low cost.

This means that Agents may rewrite the value allocation logic of Web3. The application layer can shift towards "headlessness," opening wallets, aggregators, and the ability to deposit and withdraw funds as API endpoints for Agents; the protocol layer may also have new opportunities as Agents bypass intermediaries; but the more radical scenario is that Agents will drive the entire on-chain stack towards price competition, compressing the profit margins of applications, aggregators, and infrastructure to near marginal cost.

What is truly worth noting is that Agents not only make existing on-chain transactions more frequent, but they may create entirely new activities that were previously infeasible: continuous portfolio rebalancing, machine-to-machine payments, and new types of markets that only make sense in high-speed automated execution.

Therefore, the core question of the Agent era is not simply to judge whether value will flow to the protocol or the application layer, but to see who can make Agents choose to return here when they have unlimited alternative options. The answer may no longer be UX and branding, but liquidity, latency, settlement finality, or some new business model that has not yet been named today.

The following is the original text:

Many are envisioning that Agents will become the next billion users of blockchain. However, few are asking the second-order question: if this world really comes to pass, who can profit?

All past theories on value capture in the crypto industry assumed that users were human. The "Fat Protocol" theory believed that the protocol layer is best at monetizing users. And the "Fat Application" theory proposed by me and my colleagues in "How to Capture Value" and "The Great Repricing" argued that the application layer does it better.

But the Agent changed who the "user" is. As a result, the existing value capture theory is no longer reliable.

The "Fat Protocol" Theory

In 2016, @jmonegro wrote about the "Fat Protocol." Over the next decade, this article became one of the most mainstream value capture theories in the crypto industry.

Its core idea is: in the Internet era, value mainly flows to the application layer, such as @Google, @Facebook, while the underlying protocols, such as TCP/IP, HTTP, have hardly captured any value. But the crypto industry will be different. Blockchain data is openly shared, so applications will be commoditized; and the protocol tokens necessary for network usage will capture corresponding speculative value as usage grows. Every successful application will drive token demand growth. In the end, the protocol layer will compound in value faster than any layer built on top of it.

For a long time, this assessment seemed accurate. The market value of Bitcoin and Ethereum was higher than that of any company built on top of them. This model held true because at that time, the protocol layer was scarce, expensive, and hard to replace. In 2017, Bitcoin and Ethereum were indeed scarce, as there were not yet a dozen general-purpose L1s competing for the same workload. Block space was scarce enough that holding the underlying asset was like holding a stake in all the applications that needed that network.

However, 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 transitioned from scarcity to abundance. As cross-chain bridges and aggregators make the underlying chains almost invisible to users and switching costs drop rapidly. Infrastructure has become interchangeable, and interchangeable things ultimately only compete on price. Therefore, the pricing power of the protocol layer also disappears with the disappearance of scarcity.

The "Fat Application" Theory

By 2026, the entity capturing a significant amount of economic value is no longer the protocol, but applications like @Phantom, @Coinbase, @Polymarket, @Pumpfun, and others.

In my view, the reason for this is that the most valuable asset in the crypto industry is user relationships. If you control the user interface and transaction flow, you control distribution; and as long as users interact with a chain-based product, you can monetize almost everything: exchanges, lending, staking, minting, fiat on/off ramps, and more. This is probably also why investment firms are so obsessed with neobanks.

The application will also push infrastructure toward pure price competition, compressing infrastructure profit margins to near marginal cost. I outlined this strategy in my article "How to Capture Value." The same dynamics are also happening in the stablecoin space, as I discussed in another article.

Prices are reflecting this theory. Spencer and I refer to this shift as the "Great Repricing": during this cycle, value is flowing to the layer that owns user relationships.

Why Will Agents Disrupt Everything?

The "Fat App" theory assumes that users are human, and humans value user experience, brand, and convenience. However, Agents do not value these things. They will directly call APIs, have no brand loyalty, and can switch exchanges at zero cost.

When users become software, owning user relationships is no longer as defensive. The entire moat in the "Fat App" theory that relies on the frontend will also depreciate.

So, in the Agent era, who will capture the value?

Headless Evolution of Applications

One possible future is that winners at the application layer will still be winners, but they will give up their UI.

Wallets and aggregators have already built the most challenging parts: the ability to integrate with a wide range of protocols, routing logic, identity, and on/off-ramp infrastructure. The natural next step is to open up this set of capabilities as an API for Agents, allowing Agents to route through them just as human users do today through @phantom or @JupiterExchange.

In this world, the "Fat App" theory still holds true, but without the frontend. Companies that succeeded in the human user era will re-platformize, becoming headless infrastructure. We have already seen traditional SaaS companies like Salesforce moving in this direction.

Resurgence of Protocols

Another possibility is that Agents will completely bypass the middle layer.

If integration is simple enough, such as clear API documentation, standardized RPC, and predictable execution semantics, then Agents have little reason to pay aggregators, letting aggregators do what Agents could do themselves.

Aggregators had the advantage in the human user era from user experience and complex routing abilities. However, Agents do not need user experience, and routing itself is an engineering problem that can be solved, and Agents are becoming increasingly adept at handling such issues.

If this is the future, then the "Fat Protocol" theory will receive a second life.

The pricing power of the entire stack will collapse

Another possibility is that an Agent will exert commodification pressure across the entire stack.

They are rational enough. They will always choose the cheapest exchange, with no loyalty or friction. Applications will lose the UX premium they used to charge human users. Aggregators and infrastructure will also lose pricing power, as there will no longer be human users' inertia to shield them from price competition.

In this scenario, it will be challenging for any layer in the stack to capture much value. The entire supply chain will be compressed to near marginal cost, and economic surplus will flow to the party with the Agent, or to the end-user represented by the Agent. Cryptography will turn into a utility, and utilities are not usually easy places to make money.

Agents will create new activities that were previously infeasible

A simple version of this view is: Agents will do what humans have been doing, only at higher throughput; even with compressed profit margins, as long as transaction volumes increase significantly, the overall pie will still grow.

But I believe there is a more interesting version: Agents will make a class of previously infeasible activities feasible. For example, continuous portfolio rebalancing at less than $0.01 execution cost; machine-to-machine business transactions between Agents; and some markets that only make sense when pricing and transaction speeds are so fast that humans can't really keep up.

These activities will not appear in our current observation framework of on-chain activities because we assume there is always a human participant in on-chain activity.

If this is the real change brought by Agents, then the question is no longer how to divide the existing pie but how many new economic activities will be brought onto the chain and which layers are best suited to serve these new activities.

An Unnamed Business Model

Every cycle, we try to guess where the value will flow, often assuming that the business models we already know will naturally extend into the future. However, this assumption often overlooks business models that have not yet appeared.

When the Internet was first built, no one predicted the emergence of the attention economy. The business model that seems so natural today—slicing up user attention into different pieces, auctioning it off to advertisers, and having a company take a considerable chunk of global ad spend—was unfamiliar at that time. It only seems inevitable in hindsight.

AI appears to be one of the most significant technological disruptions in decades. In a world dominated by Agents, some of the value capture is likely to flow into a business model that is not yet seriously discussed today. The ultimate beneficiaries of this value capture may not be those currently being recognized by the market.

What Should We Focus on Next?

The most likely outcome is not a complete paradigm shift replacing another. Humans and Agents will coexist as users of the crypto industry for a long time, with each type of user following a different value capture map.

As long as humans still directly interact with the blockchain, the "Fat Application" theory still applies: consumers willing to pay a premium for user experience, brand, and convenience will continue to reward applications with user relationships. At the same time, a different theory will govern the layer where Agents transact — which specific theory depends on how the above scenarios ultimately evolve.

In my opinion, for builders, the most critical question regarding Agent-side is: what will make an Agent come back to you instead of routing directly to a cheaper alternative?

The answer may not be user experience. It could be liquidity, latency, settlement assurances, or something else.

At @bcap, we are dedicating a significant amount of time to pondering this question, whether in investment committee meetings or discussions with the engineering team. We do not yet have a definitive answer. If you are building products around Agents and have your own insights into value capture in the Agent era, we would love to chat with you.

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