Why AI Agents and Creators Could Drive the Next Onchain Economy–an editorial

AI is making it cheaper to turn an idea into something real: software, research, media, a storefront, an entire operating workflow. A small team can attempt work that once required a much larger organization.

That changes the opportunity for crypto.

As more people and agents build, they also need to agree on who owns the work, who can act, who gets paid, and what happens when something goes wrong. Those questions become harder when a project crosses platforms, organizations, and borders.

My view is that crypto will remain an important place for invention because it lets builders experiment with those economic relationships directly. In some fields, it could help define how the next generation of businesses operates.

The most interesting companies may begin with a different design altogether: AI woven through production and administration, with onchain payments, commitments, and ownership built into the operating model from day one.

The reason this matters ultimately comes back to people. Technology expands what we can do. Cooperation determines what we can build together.

AI changes what a small business can be

Consider an independent creative studio launching a game, a research product, or a new fictional universe.

Its people set the direction and make the judgments that give the work a point of view. Agents help write code, prepare drafts, test releases, organize customer requests, and reconcile records. Specialists join for specific contributions. A community provides feedback, distribution, and sometimes funding.

The studio now needs an operating system for that collaboration. It must track permissions, accept payments, release budgets, record approvals, and divide revenue according to agreements people can understand.

An AI tool attached to an old workflow only solves part of that problem. A business designed around agents can make its state and rules legible to software: what has been promised, what has been delivered, who approved it, and which action is permitted next.

Onchain infrastructure earns its place when those parties need shared commitments across platforms and cannot simply rely on one trusted operator. A common database may be enough inside a single business. Across independent businesses, a payment can carry a transaction reference, escrow can release after a defined approval, and a revenue split can execute inside the payment system. An agent can operate within a budget assigned by an accountable owner.

Customer information, private negotiations, and unfinished work can remain in ordinary systems. The public or shared layer can hold the narrower commitments that actually benefit from common verification.

This is what I mean by a business rebuilt for onchain operations: the financial and coordination model shapes the workflow from the beginning.

Agents need a way to participate in commerce

An agent that can find a useful dataset still needs permission to buy it. An agent that can hire a service needs a spending limit. An agent that pays another agent needs a record its human owner can inspect.

That creates a practical opening for programmable payments. The x402 protocol, for example, defines a way to request and authorize payment within an HTTP interaction. A service can quote the payment requirements, and a client can respond with a signed payment payload. It is working infrastructure for experiments in software buying services from software; a protocol alone does not establish widespread demand. x402 specification and implementation

Wallet infrastructure also supports spend permissions and account policies. These are important building blocks for giving an agent limited financial authority. Coinbase wallet documentation

The opportunity is especially interesting for cross-border services, small purchases, and marketplaces where providers do not all use the same platform. Each use case still has to beat existing payment methods on total cost, reliability, access, and customer experience.

A wallet signature proves that a key authorized an action. It does not prove the agent understood its instructions, bought something useful, or complied with every obligation. Businesses will still need review, recovery procedures, and clear responsibility. A durable action trail can help establish what happened; liability comes from the surrounding contracts and law.

That combination of execution and accountability is a substantial field for invention.

Creators need more than cheap production

The creator economy makes the change easy to see. When producing acceptable media becomes cheaper, the audience has more to choose from. Attention, taste, authorship, and a trusted relationship become more consequential.

A creator's business also extends beyond the person whose name appears on the work. Artists, editors, developers, moderators, translators, and early supporters may all contribute to its success. Their contribution is often easier to recognize socially than to compensate consistently.

Patreon's State of Create research describes creators' frustration with platform dependence and algorithmic distribution, alongside their interest in direct relationships with fans. It is research sponsored by a platform with its own commercial interest, but the underlying business question is useful: how much control does a creator retain over the relationship that sustains the work? Patreon State of Create

Crypto offers tools worth testing against that question. A membership can be recognized across compatible services. Contributors can receive a share of receipts through a payment contract. A project can preserve signed records of participation and approvals that remain inspectable beyond a single platform.

Those capabilities need careful design. Buying an NFT does not automatically transfer copyright; the US Copyright Office and Patent and Trademark Office discuss that distinction in their joint NFT report. A token does not automatically grant equity. Royalties depend on the relevant contracts, marketplaces, and legal agreements. A permanent record can preserve an inaccurate claim just as faithfully as an accurate one. NFTs and intellectual property report

The stronger creator model combines explicit rights, useful access, reliable payments, and a reason for people to keep participating. The art, product, service, or relationship has to be worth supporting.

The test is whether creators and contributors retain more of the value they help produce, and whether they can leave with meaningful parts of their identity and relationships intact.

Mature businesses provide a second path

There are two overlapping developments here. Established institutions are bringing selected assets and processes onchain. New businesses can build around those capabilities from their first day.

BlackRock's BUIDL fund illustrates the institutional path. Securitize describes a tokenized fund for qualified investors with daily dividend payouts and near real-time transfers around the clock. It remains a restricted private-placement product. Its relevance is that an established financial function can gain a different operating interface through tokenization. Securitize on BUIDL

A new business can go further in its own design. Imagine a professional-services cooperative where agents prepare proposals, people approve delivery, clients pay through an agreed rail, and the system records the invoice, settlement value, transaction, and contributor split together. Exceptions enter a human review queue.

That is a design possibility, rather than a claim that the whole workflow is already mature. Its advantage would have to show up in fewer reconciliation errors, faster payment, clearer obligations, or lower operating costs.

The likely result is a mixture of technologies. AI handles work that benefits from adaptable reasoning. Conventional software enforces deterministic rules. Blockchains coordinate selected assets and commitments across parties. Humans decide what the organization is for and remain responsible for its conduct.

The firms that combine these well could put pressure on incumbents whose systems assume every handoff needs another department, another reconciliation, or another closed account.

Inflation changes the pressure on builders

All of this happens inside a physical economy.

People still pay for housing, food, energy, equipment, and their own time. Cheaper code or media does not automatically make those things cheaper. AI itself requires chips, electricity, cooling, and infrastructure. A fall in some production costs can coexist with rising costs elsewhere.

In September 2026, US consumer prices were 3.7 percent higher than a year earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That describes the change in the consumer price basket; it does not mean every household or business experienced the same increase. BLS September 2026 CPI release

Persistent inflation makes idle balances lose purchasing power and raises the hurdle for earning a living. For a small business, delayed payment becomes more costly when expenses keep arriving. For a creator, an income stream dependent on one platform becomes more fragile when basic costs rise.

AI may help people produce more with the resources they have. More efficient payment and coordination systems may help them keep more of what they earn. Neither automatically resolves shortages in energy, housing, or other essential inputs.

The cause of inflation also matters. Supply disruption, excess demand, and investment in new productive capacity call for different responses. Interest rates and financing conditions affect both the businesses doing the rebuilding and the speculative markets surrounding them.

This is why an inflation argument cannot carry the whole crypto thesis. The lasting case needs useful products and sustainable economics under more than one monetary environment.

Dollar weakening has several meanings

The dollar can lose domestic purchasing power, fall against other currencies, or represent a smaller share of central-bank reserves. These are distinct developments.

The Federal Reserve's broad nominal dollar index averaged 119.2152 in September 2026, compared with 120.1883 in December 2025. That is a modest decline over that interval, roughly 0.8 percent, rather than evidence of a collapse. It was also close to January's average of 119.2298. Federal Reserve broad dollar index

Separately, the IMF's revised COFER series showed the dollar's share of world official foreign exchange reserves declining from 57.18 percent in the first quarter of 2026 to 56.70 percent in the second, while US-dollar-denominated claims were largely unchanged. A smaller share does not by itself mean reserve managers sold a corresponding amount of dollars. IMF second-quarter 2026 COFER brief

These pressures can encourage experimentation with settlement systems, treasury choices, and ways to move value across borders. Dollar network effects, deep financial markets, and institutional demand remain powerful forces in the other direction.

Crypto also contains a revealing tension: dollar stablecoins can extend access to dollar-denominated money. Someone seeking a more usable payment rail may choose a dollar token rather than a different currency. The US Financial Stability Oversight Council has itself identified stablecoins' potential to support the dollar's international role. FSOC 2025 annual report

A dollar stablecoin still carries dollar purchasing-power exposure, alongside issuer, custody, redemption, and network risks. Its attraction can be access and programmability. The future may contain both diversification away from some dollar dependencies and wider use of tokenized dollars.

Crypto's business opportunity therefore does not require betting on the disappearance of the dollar.

Community becomes part of the operating model

An invention becomes economically meaningful when people carry it through testing, funding, production, distribution, and maintenance. Each step depends on cooperation.

AI can help a person explore an idea or help a team execute it. It can also flood that team with plausible proposals, synthetic identities, and work that takes longer to review than to generate. The ability to produce more raises the value of knowing whose contribution deserves attention and who stands behind it.

A community can supply that context. Members build a history together. They learn who follows through, who understands the work, and who helps when the incentives are weak. That accumulated trust can lower the cost of starting the next project.

Onchain records can preserve parts of this history: completed commitments, payments, attestations, and shared ownership under defined terms. They can help people carry evidence across organizational boundaries. The judgment behind an attestation still matters. Sensitive identity mappings, negotiations, and personal histories belong behind appropriate access controls; publishing their hashes can also expose relationships and should be a deliberate choice.

Financial incentives can support a community, but they can also distort it. A reward system may attract people who optimize for the reward while degrading the work. Token voting may concentrate power among large holders. A public treasury may be transparent while its decision-making remains opaque.

Useful governance has to address admission, contribution standards, budgets, disputes, and exit. The people who make a project possible need a credible reason to cooperate again.

That is where the baton metaphor fits. A project advances through handoffs. Each participant receives something built by others, takes responsibility for a stage of the work, and leaves it in a condition the next person can use.

Where crypto could lead

The most credible opportunities are places where independent actors need to transact or maintain commitments without handing every relationship to one platform: agents purchasing services, creators sharing receipts, contributors carrying evidence of their work, and businesses coordinating assets across organizations.

Crypto has room to lead because builders can experiment with payments, access, ownership, and incentives in the same product. That freedom also makes it easy to launch something financially elaborate with little underlying value. The experiments deserve to be judged by what they improve.

Does the customer get a better service? Do contributors get paid more reliably? Can an owner limit an agent's authority and reconstruct its actions? Can participants understand their rights, resolve a dispute, and leave?

Those questions bring the discussion back to the economy people actually live in.

I expect crypto to remain an innovative space as AI expands the number of people capable of building. The strongest businesses will make the connection tangible: useful work, clear agreements, reliable settlement, and communities that can sustain cooperation.

The next economy will take shape through the institutions, products, and relationships people choose to rebuild. AI expands the range of what is possible. What we coordinate around, and who shares in the result, will determine how much of that possibility becomes progress.