Original Author: Imran Khan, Co-founder of Alliance

Translation: Jiahua, ChainCatcher

I believe Chris Dixon's judgment is correct. Cryptography, or the Web3 that people used to refer to, fills the economic and ownership layers of the internet.

Marc Andreessen hoped to directly embed payment capabilities into browsers back in the Netscape era. The early Web even reserved the HTTP 402 status code, meaning "Payment Required," and the name of the x402 launched by Coinbase is derived from this.

This name also pays tribute to the early pioneers who repeatedly tried to embed financial capabilities into the internet infrastructure. Thanks to Andreessen, who fought this battle for us long ago.

Netscape collaborated with Visa to attempt integrating payment functionality directly into the browser but never truly realized it. Although Netscape laid an important foundation for modern internet commerce through SSL, currency itself was left outside the early internet infrastructure.

Later, people gradually realized that commerce would inevitably migrate to the internet, but the mechanisms carrying online payments remained credit cards, PayPal, Stripe, and other payment platforms, rather than internet-native currency systems.

A group of early Ethereum community participants proposed that we could restructure parts of the internet to give users greater autonomy in the economic layer. This was also one of the reasons I entered the crypto industry.

However, over time, the original intentions were gradually diluted in the process of industry development due to various influences, including bad actors, security threats, and regulatory restrictions.

It was also amidst this tide that Chris Dixon made his core judgment: decentralization and ownership are truly the essence of the crypto industry.

His logic is that centralized platforms hold the power of profit sharing and control. Over time, the incentives of the platforms will gradually skew towards the platforms themselves and their shareholders, rather than the product users.

These platforms control distribution, identity, payments, APIs, data, and social relationships, even dictating how economic benefits are allocated between users and developers.

Cryptographic technology offers an alternative possibility: to have key elements like identity, payments, and data carried by open protocols, no longer controlled by a single company; allowing all participants to share in the economic benefits while truly owning their data and assets.

But the reality has shown that most people do not care whether a platform is centralized. They are more concerned about convenience and whether they can obtain what they want in the simplest way.

As long as the product is good enough, people do not mind handing their data over to companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and OpenAI.

Password punks like me are very concerned about privacy, anti-censorship, decentralization, and personal sovereignty. But most people are unwilling to sacrifice significantly worse user experiences for these principles.

Most people do not wake up every day wondering whether they own a social graph. They simply want products to work well and to be entertained.

After years of practice, reality has not evolved entirely along the path initially envisioned by Chris Dixon. Nevertheless, I still believe his direction is correct; it just lacks the most crucial piece of the puzzle: the rise of AI.

AI and cryptographic technology are highly complementary. AI requires open economic infrastructure, and cryptographic technology needs new large-scale demand. The combination fills the key gap that was previously missing: demand.

AI Agents are the true demand side for open infrastructure

AI Agents are becoming a new type of participant in the internet. Cloudflare revealed in 2026 that automated traffic surpassed human activity for the first time, accounting for about 57% of all web requests. I believe a significant portion of this is related to AI Agents.

Moreover, this trend will continue to accelerate. In the future, most of our interactions with the internet may no longer wait for humans to issue commands one by one but rather be initiated proactively by AI Agents.

To become "first-class citizens" of the internet, AI Agents must be able to connect to thousands of services, datasets, and markets without permission and interact directly with counterparts and other Agents without needing to establish customized relationships with each party.

This is not decentralization for the sake of decentralization, nor is it retracing old paths. It's simply that when the scale of collaboration expands from the human level to the machine level, portability, open access, shared state, and interoperability will inherently generate direct economic value.

What they need is a set of open infrastructure that can be used at any time without permission. They require the ability to establish identity on protocols like Handshake and will also need programmable currencies and ownership of assets.

Additionally, they may need persistent storage, portable identities, open social and reputation graphs, verifiable information, permissionless markets, and programmable contracts, as well as open networks or markets for discovery and communication, such as Moltbook, Farcaster, or some entirely new form.

Therefore, my judgment is that most of the concepts Chris Dixon proposed in Read Write Own are correct directionally, but the target users are not humans but AI Agents.

The next generation of the internet is not just about cryptographic technology

The original internet, namely Web1, was built on open protocols. Information could be freely accessed; anyone could publish and acquire content, websites could link freely, and developers could build products without obtaining permission. At that time, users were mostly just readers of information.

Then came Web2, which transformed these readers into creators. Social networks, smartphones, broadband, cloud services, online markets, and large platforms emerged one after another. Billions of people began to create and publish content, move their businesses online, and connect more closely with one another.

However, platforms also controlled all the key elements, including identity, payments, social relationships, data, distribution, and economic ties between people.

So what will the next step be?

I do not believe that Web3, or what I refer to as the "next generation of the internet," is merely another term for cryptographic technology.

I believe the next generation of the internet will be composed of cryptographic technology, AI, robotics, energy, computing power, and ultimately biotechnology, intertwined in some way.

AI will become the layer of intelligence and interaction; cryptographic technology will become the layer of economy and ownership; robotics will connect the intelligent layer to the physical world; computing power and energy will be the resource layer that supports everything; and biotechnology will increasingly resemble a programmable system, with Neuralink representing one direction of this.

Take decentralized identity, reputation, and social graphs as an example. AI Agents in the future may require Moltbook, Farcaster, or some entirely new open platform. They can provide services on these platforms, complete tasks, establish reputations based on actual deliveries, form persistent identities on the internet, and build relationships with other Agents.

Decentralized storage works similarly. Humans typically do not mind placing files in Google Drive, iCloud, or other cloud services. However, AI Agents may need greater autonomy and control, needing to ensure the long-term existence of information or having redundant backups, and thus might use both decentralized storage and centralized storage services concurrently.

For example, with IPFS and Filecoin, they can store content, allowing another Agent to verify whether the retrieved content matches the original content exactly.

I am not saying that everything will be decentralized. What I mean is that part of the infrastructure may indeed be useful and can cooperate with centralized services like AWS and GCP.

Looking at ownership, I believe that ownership may be even more important to AI Agents than to humans. If the entire world becomes tokenized in some form in the future, the available assets will be numerous and highly dispersed, making it difficult for humans to quickly understand and configure these assets.

Currently, AI Agents are still trapped in closed ecosystems controlled by individual MCP services or applications. This does not mean that it's impossible to build similar Agents using MCPs, OAuth, A2A, Stripe, Visa, AWS, and traditional databases.

However, thanks to on-chain infrastructure, more assets and markets in the financial world will be able to flow across platforms, be open globally, and be read directly by machines. AI Agents can access assets and markets directly and make financial decisions based on the goals and risk boundaries set by humans.

Therefore, I believe Dixon accurately identified the missing layer of the internet: native ownership.

But the next generation of the internet is not a single technology; it is the result of the interplay of on-chain infrastructure, robotics, AI, biotechnology, computing power, and energy, just as Web2 was born from smartphones, high-bandwidth networks, centralized applications, and cloud storage.

The truly missing piece of this new architecture is the AI Agent, not humans.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。