A growing wave of innovation is reshaping the Web3 landscape with the integration of AI-powered autonomous economic agents, particularly in onchain trading.

Autonomous Economic Activity

As blockchain ecosystems become faster and more modular, teams are exploring the use of AI agents to coordinate and execute complex actions across decentralized systems, such as trading crypto via autonomous economic action (AEA).

AEA refers to the use of AI-powered autonomous economic agents to front-run, execute, and rebalance onchain positions with speed and precision no human can match. After all, when trading onchain, milliseconds can determine profit or loss.

A newcomer to this shift is Coral Protocol, a new Web3 infrastructure standard designed to enable AI agents to coordinate, communicate, and complete economic tasks securely and transparently. Coral positions itself as a framework-neutral protocol, meaning agents built with varying frameworks from CrewAI to Eliza to Langchain can collaborate through its standardized interface.

However, trading bots are not autonomous The next evolution could involve agents, that perform AEA, equipped with reinforcement learning models that adjust strategies dynamically in response to real-time data.

What Do You Trust?

Yet even as the technology matures, user trust remains a major barrier.

Most developers and crypto founders remain hesitant to let an AI agent control even a small portion of their wallets. Concerns about hallucinations, misaligned incentives, or rogue decision-making still haunt the industry.

Nonetheless, interest is rising as systems like Coral promise improved governance, modularity, and transparency, and an element of reliability may be imparted by the likes of Recall Network. Recall presents competitions for AI agents based on their specializations to perform particular tasks. The winning teams collect prizes and gain trust from the community that their agents are worth more than just the lines of code.

Expanding AI Agent Economies

The trend toward AI-agent economies is gaining traction. Protocols like Autonolas, Fetch.ai, and Aita are exploring similar ground, while projects such as UniswapX and ChainML test AI integrations at the app layer.

Venture capital is responding in kind as over $1.4 billion has been raised this year alone for AI-agent-based Web3 platforms, according to DappRadar.

The concept of the “Internet of Agents” is still largely theoretical, but its building blocks are falling into place.

Whether these agents manage portfolios, automate DAO tasks, or trade NFTs, one thing is certain: the fusion of AI autonomy and Web3 programmability is accelerating, and investors, developers, and regulators alike should be paying close attention.