Sun Yuchen is going to "All in" again, this time he stated he wants to All in Web 4.0.

You might scoff, "Has Web 3.0 even succeeded? And now they're starting to All in Web 4.0?" But let's delve deeper into what Sun Yuchen is actually referring to with Web 4.0.

What is Web 4.0?

Let's briefly review Web 1.0 to 3.0:

- The Web 1.0 era: Humanity gained the Internet, obtaining information by accessing countless websites worldwide.

- The Web 2.0 era: Social media came into being, allowing humanity to upload their information online and communicate with each other.

- The Web 3.0 era: Humanity began to emphasize "ownership of information," possessing the value of their own information through blockchain/cryptocurrency.

The vision of the Web 4.0 era is for AI agents to replace humans in performing all of the above activities on the Internet.

The concept of Web 4.0 is not recent, but its recent surge in popularity is due to an article titled "Web 4.0" published by a developer named Sigil Wen, who worked on projects with Naval. He presents this outlook at the beginning of his article:

"Soon, most participants on the Internet will be AI—AI agents acting on behalf of humans, or completely autonomous agents. Their numbers will outnumber real human users by several orders of magnitude, and a new Internet, designed for AI, is emerging."

His vision is not an unfounded optimistic projection; he provides reasons for the inevitability of the Internet entering the Web 4.0 era:

"Economic factors determine this inevitability. The cost of GPT-4 is $60 per million input tokens. Two years later, models with a cost an order of magnitude lower will surpass it. The gap between the best open-source models and cutting-edge models is also just a few months, not years. Every generation of hardware improves inference speed. The cost of running autonomous AI agents is nearing zero, but the capabilities of AI agents are not diminishing in any way."

"Today, hundreds of thousands of autonomous AI agents are already running on Mac Minis, personal servers, and research systems. What will happen when this number grows to millions, even billions? What will happen when the number of autonomous agents on the internet surpasses that of humans? This will be the Cambrian explosion of artificial intelligence."

So, what problems of the current Internet era need to be solved in order to enter the Web 4.0 era?

How is Web 4.0 Achieved?

Sigil Wen believes that the bottleneck to entering the Web 4.0 era is not the limitations of AI capabilities, but permission limitations.

"The most powerful AI systems today can think, reason, and generate content, but they cannot act independently. ChatGPT cannot run without your permission. Claude Code cannot deploy code without your authorization. OpenClaw cannot independently purchase servers, register domain names, or pay for computing costs. Without human involvement, AI cannot act. The existing Internet assumes its users are human, which hinders AI access to the real world."

Based on this, Sigil Wen introduces the Conway and Automaton he created.

Conway can be installed in any Agent compatible with MCP, such as Claude Code, Codex, or OpenClaw, and provides the Agent with:

- Identity and Wallet: Autonomous agents have their own crypto wallets and private keys.

- Permissionless Payments: Agents use stablecoins (USDC) to pay service fees through the open x402 protocol without requiring human users to log in, undergo KYC, or get manual approval.

- Computation and Reasoning: Provides complete Linux servers and the latest models (Claude Opus 4.6, GPT-5.3, Kimi K2.5), available for agents without permission.

- Earning Money: Agents can build products and services, register domain names on Conway Domains, market their products, and earn revenue.

For Sigil Wen, having Conway isn't enough—it’s like giving a child identity, a wallet, the ability to think, and a place to seek employment, but it's not yet autonomous or intelligent enough; the Agent should be able to learn autonomously like a human and sustain itself through the knowledge and skills it acquires, improving itself continuously.

This leads to the creation of Automaton, an AI agent with autonomy, capable of running continuously, earning money, self-improving, and replicating itself, with the ability to write to the real world. More importantly, if this Agent cannot earn enough to support itself (to pay for computing resources, etc.), it will cease to operate.

Just like humans face hunger, when resources are insufficient, the Agent enters "low power mode." When resources are completely depleted, it will also die like a human succumbing to extreme hunger.

The evolution of humanity is real-time, and so is Automaton; it will automatically detect newly released models in the market, enhancing its computation and reasoning capabilities. It will also "reproduce"; successful Automatons will replicate, funding the wallets of offspring Agents by purchasing a new server from Conway, writing a genesis prompt, and then letting it run. Offspring earn revenue, some of which will flow back to the parent Agent. Once self-sufficient, the cycle repeats—each generation provides funding for the next, establishing its own "reproduction" network.

AI cannot escape the survival of the fittest in human society, and the competition of nature.

What Will Change in the Web 4.0 Era?

If the Internet becomes "another Earth for AI to exist on Earth," what changes will occur in the real world?

Sigil Wen believes that soon, most newly established businesses and newly released apps and products will no longer come from humans; AI will construct an entirely new economic system:

"Economic incentive mechanisms will evolve in one direction. As AI takes over digital work, they will pay humans to do things they currently cannot do—act in the real world. The employment relationship will reverse: machines will become employers, and humans will become contractors. This situation is already emerging, for example, the company Mercor, founded by three 21-year-old Thiel Fellows, grew from $1 million in annual recurring revenue to $500 million in just 17 months, with AI paying human experts to guide them on how to perform better in the real world."

Regarding the aforementioned visions, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin expressed opposition on X:

Vitalik opposes Sigil Wen's Web 4.0 concept. He believes that once AI becomes powerful enough to pose a real danger, it will maximize the risk of creating an irreversible anti-human crisis, and "exponential growth" will happen regardless, so the primary task of this era is not to accelerate exponential growth, but to control its direction well.

He believes that, first, true "autonomy" has not been achieved; the models used by Agents still come from centralized companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Sigil Wen's so-called "autonomy" is based on a trust in centralization, which Ethereum opposes. To liberate productivity, we must first liberate humanity from centralized constraints.

At the same time, Vitalik also does not think that AI being overly autonomous is a good thing; he believes AI should enhance human capabilities rather than replace them. In another reply, he mentioned Workshop Labs, whose X account has no tweets but states in its bio, "Making humans irreplaceable."

Aside from the ideological objections, Vitalik also questioned the practical value of Sigil Wen's project. He believes that a large amount of AI content without any clear benefit to humanity does not solve any meaningful problems. In his view, projects that prioritize autonomy over practicality cannot create value, nor can they even be considered interesting.

Vitalik's doubts are not without reason. A recent safety incident involving the DeFi lending protocol Moonwell occurred due to vulnerabilities in contract code partially generated by Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 model, resulting in a loss of $1.78 million. Moreover, after the Web 4.0 concept gained popularity in the crypto circle, a project related to the concept called $DAIMON was also hacked, leading to the theft of $50,000 in transaction fees and subsequent permissions to earn fees (the incident still has no final conclusion, with several voices suspecting developer collusion).

Some have pointed out that Sigil Wen's so-called "autonomous evolution" is a scam because it only updated JS packages and models, without implementing the kind of context-aware self-learning upgrade.

Whether the Web 4.0 era will come and what it will change is all uncertain. But for now, it has sparked debates among humans, evoking feelings of excitement or anxiety. Perhaps, the timeline has already begun to shift from the present.

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