AI agents will kill the web as we know it: Animoca’s Yat Siu

Animoca founder Yat Siu says the rise of AI agents will bring about a radical shift in how information and value will be distributed online.

Instead of the web being a place where humans interact with web pages and apps, the primary actors on the internet will be intelligent agents searching, negotiating, transacting and collaborating. This will cause a seismic shift in how the web is built and monetized. 

Instead of push-based emails and attention-grabbing ads, the model moves to pull-based, where agents find what users want or carry out their intents.

Siu tells Magazine he believes everyone will run dozens of AI agents in the future, specializing in different tasks: one to manage your portfolio, another for research, along with other agents for scheduling, coding, API management and so on.

That means there could be up to 200 billion agents roaming the web in short order — and they’re likely to be the main users of all the crypto infrastructure most humans find too complex.

Siu says they’ll use smart contracts to reach agreements where code really is law, blockchain verification for identity, and crypto to transact.

“If you’re an agent, it’s entirely conceivable that you’ll be making payment transactions 1,000 times, if not 10,000 times a day. What’s the most efficient, lowest cost way of doing it? It’s obviously blockchain,” he says.

Ad-supported open web is over

The impact of AI technology means the traditional model of an open web, with freely available information that’s supported by advertising, is dead. LLMs already consume any information posted online and regurgitate it for users, without sending any traffic to the source or funding the salaries of the journalists and researchers who came up with it. 

“We think traditional advertising, as you might know it in terms of Google ads and so on, is under threat,” he says. “We’re no longer going to be browsing the web the way that we used to. So essentially, HTTP as we know it is dead.”

Traffic volume to major sites fell sharply after Google introduced its AI summaries, with the worst-affected sites featuring tech reviews. Users are still basing their purchasing decisions on the information provided by the reviews, but they get it neatly packaged in an AI summary. Clearly a new monetization model is required, otherwise the websites providing content will go out of business.  

Microtransactions are finally practical

Siu believes agents will pay a tiny fee to access each article or research paper they need to provide users with the information they want. Microtransactions have been discussed since at least the late 1990s, but high credit card fees and a time consuming check out process meant it wasn’t practical. Now, AI agents can take care of the payments using low-fee cryptocurrencies.

One of Siu’s agents browses the web looking for interesting things to read.

“Right now, I have an agent that is basically creating my custom news for me based on information it receives, but from all sorts of sources,” he explains.

This information comes from free sources, but that’s set to change. 

“In order to get this data, it’s going to have to pay people for it. So, for instance for Cointelegraph, in the future, you’re going to be charging agents, maybe something in the form of tokens or stables, to access an API that gives you the news feed.

“That is then delivered to the user in some kind of packaged format, rather than people going to the Cointelegraph website and clicking through.”

Agents are already paying for content

There are signs this is already starting to happen. Last week, Distro Media unveiled a pilot project for an “agentic newstand” that allows AI agents to use microtransactions to pay for news articles. A demonstration article sold for 5 cents, with a transaction fee of a tenth of a cent. 

Last year, Cloudflare also released Pay per Crawl, which allows websites to charge AI company web crawlers a fee each time they fetch a page. At present, this is a one-off charge for companies like OpenAI to ingest it whole into their models, but they hope to set up an “agentic paywall” where individual agents can pay for access to specific content.

Siu says it’s likely this will also end up being bundled as packages of related content in a Netflix or Spotify style model. Apple News already…