Rhythm X Zhihu jointly hosts a Web 4.0 themed event: When AI Agents Take Over On-Chain Permissions

BlockBeats律动 x 知乎联合举办Web4.0主题活动：当AI Agent接管链上权限

Author: 律动BlockBeats

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Reprinted: 火星财经

Most people’s way of discussing Web 4.0 is a bit off.

They ask: Is this the next marketing cycle? Is Web 4.0 just another wave of buzzwords? These questions don’t matter. The real issue is simple: the underlying internet permissions are shifting—from whose hands to whose hands.

If you look at this question in historical coordinates, the answer has been clear all along. Web 1.0 is read-only—users are consumers of content, with no write access. Web 2.0 grants write access—you can post, upload, and comment, but the platform owns your data. Web 3.0 gives ownership—assets are on-chain, and your private keys are in your hands, so the platform can’t confiscate your wallet.

With every generation of iteration, at its core it’s a handover of permissions downward.

Web 4.0 continues the same logical line, but the party receiving the handover changes. It’s not a handover to users—it’s a handover to Agents.

A structural fact that has been overlooked: for a long time, the entire internet’s architecture has been absolutely “human-centered.”

Web 2.0’s UI/UX is designed around the limits of human cognitive bandwidth—information density, click paths, color contrast. Behind every parameter is an estimate of how far human attention can be pushed. Web 3.0’s KYC verification, mnemonic backup, and multisig approvals essentially address the biological flaws that make humans prone to mistakes and attacks.

The entire system exists to serve human limitations, not human capability.

But in the AI era, this logic starts to break. When an Agent gains on-chain permissions, it faces the same kind of system designed for humans—but it doesn’t need a polished UI, doesn’t need password recovery, doesn’t need SMS verification codes, and doesn’t need to “sleep” before a transaction is confirmed.

That’s the core contradiction of Web 4.0: an internet infrastructure designed for human cognitive constraints meets a new type of participant that has no cognitive constraints. Reconstruction is inevitable.

The reconstruction currently underway can be observed from two dimensions.

The first dimension is the disintegration of the front end. A traditional “great UI” is designed for human visual processing ability. Agents mainly communicate through APIs and code logic. To it, the interface is noise, not an entry point. Once Agents become the primary protocol interaction party, the front-end logic changes from “how to make users understand” to “how to make machines read.” This is a paradigm shift that front-end development hasn’t seen in thirty years.

The second dimension is the replacement of identity verification systems. Systems based on account-and-password assume the login entity has memory limitations—a password must be short enough to remember, but long enough to be secure. This contradiction gave birth to an entire password management industry. But Agents don’t need to remember passwords. On-chain signatures can be granted in real time and revoked in real time, with permission granularity precise to a single action. The account system will be gradually replaced—not because its design failed, but because its underlying assumptions are outdated.

In one sentence, these two dimensions of change can be summarized as follows: the entrance to the internet will shift from revolving doors designed for humans to API interfaces designed for machines.

During this infrastructure reconstruction process, there’s a specific closed loop worth examining separately.

AI has powerful decision-making capabilities, but it inherently lacks two things: independent payment rails, and asset sovereignty.

An Agent can analyze global gold market sentiment data in milliseconds and provide optimal allocation decisions—but if it doesn’t have independent funds accounts, the decision still needs humans to execute. The delay in the execution phase will consume all the advantages it accumulated during analysis.

Crypto fills this gap.

For example, with Hyperliquid: the perpetual contract markets it provides for commodities like gold, silver, and crude oil run 24/7. This feature is optional for human traders—positions at 3 a.m. can be handled in the morning. But for Agents, it’s a necessary infrastructure condition, because Agents have no concept of sleeping; they operate around the clock.

When an Agent takes over wallets and private keys, it extends from the decision layer into the execution layer. AI provides analysis and judgment; Crypto provides settlement infrastructure. Only when the two are combined do you get a complete economic entity.

The marginal cost of running Agents tends toward zero. Their output and trade execution are 24/7. For DeFi protocols, this is an unprecedented ideal interaction partner—not emotional, not forgetful, and not missing the optimal execution window just because there’s a meeting during the day.

This is the real story of Crypto × AI: it’s not just the stacking of two buzzwords—it’s that complementary infrastructure completes the integration at the same time node.

There is an example that may not be quite appropriate, but it’s illustrative.

In 1908, Ford began mass-producing the Model T. In the first few years, the mainstream view among critics was: cars are an upgraded version of horse-drawn carriages, toys for wealthy people. Nobody predicted that automobiles would rewrite the spatial logic of entire cities, spawn chains of gas stations, destroy passenger rail service, and turn Detroit into a global manufacturing hub.

The key point that was overlooked isn’t the car itself, but how cars changed the time-and-space cost function of society.

Web 4.0’s structural significance is similar. The surface-level question—which products will explode and which protocols will win—is like the Model T era’s “which car model will sell best.” The real proposition is: when Agents become the primary on-chain participants, and scale and concurrency exceed humans exponentially, in which dimensions will the game rules of the economic system shift?