Monad Foundation's Box: The Competitive Edge of Agents Lies in 'Influence + Iteration Speed', Products Easily Replicable

On April 21, during the roundtable discussion ‘Decoding Web 4.0: When AI Agents Take Over On-Chain Permissions’, Box from the Monad Foundation’s Greater China Developer Relations addressed the topic of ‘Agent Moats’. He stated that the current technical threshold for AI Agents is relatively low, and their so-called ‘moat’ does not primarily come from the products themselves, but rather depends more on the founders’ or teams’ understanding of AI, their control capabilities, and external influence. He pointed out that many Agent products at this stage essentially rely on open-source code and existing tools to be quickly assembled, significantly compressing development cycles, with the phenomenon of ‘building a product in just a few hours’ not being uncommon. However, this also means that product forms are easily replicable; once cloud vendors or large model vendors get involved, they can often replicate or even surpass these products in a very short time, causing early-stage startups to rapidly lose their competitive edge. Box further emphasized that in this environment, the survival logic of Agent projects is changing: on one hand, they need to maintain a lead through high-frequency iterations, and on the other hand, they must expand market influence and user awareness as much as possible to establish a first-mover advantage before the industry fully matures. He believes that if the product update speed is insufficient and lacks dissemination capability, once large companies take notice and quickly follow up, its lifecycle could be significantly compressed or even lead to immediate exit.