The Agent Uprising: Your Next User Isn’t Human

Welcome to the Agentic Era

For years, Web3 builders have been laser-focused on human adoption. UX upgrades, wallet integrations, DAO tooling, all designed for people. But a new class of users is now rapidly emerging, and they don’t read your whitepaper or care about your community engagement metrics.

This user is autonomous, programmatic, and highly efficient.

They’re not investors. They’re not degens.

They’re AI agents, and they’re already using your protocols.

AI Agents Are Becoming Real Consumers of Web3

It’s no longer theoretical. AI agents are actively transacting, querying data, making decisions, and executing tasks across chains. We’re entering the Agentic Era, where software interacts with software, and agents become both participants and power users in decentralized networks.

This isn’t a future prediction. It’s happening right now:

• AI systems are evolving beyond backend automation. They're stepping into roles traditionally held by human users.
  
  
• Autonomous systems are parsing smart contract activity to front-run trends faster than any human.
  
  
• On-chain agents are acting on real-time market signals with no frontend involved.
  
  

The result? A shift in how Web3 usage is measured, designed, and optimized.

Your dashboard might still track MAUs or transaction volume. But beneath the surface, a growing share of activity is being driven by agents, not users.

The Rise of the Agentic Layer

Just as Ethereum gave rise to the application layer, we're now seeing the emergence of the agentic layer, a new stack where intelligent agents interact not just with blockchains, but with each other.

This shift introduces entirely new design considerations:

• APIs > UI: Agents don’t care about how your dApp looks. They care about how efficiently it communicates.
  
  
• Data liquidity matters: AI agents thrive on real-time, structured, permissionless access to data. Delay or restrict that, and they’ll route around you.
  
  
• Protocol composability wins: Agents are more likely than humans to discover and exploit composable opportunities across chains and protocols.
  
  

Founders who recognize this shift early will gain a massive edge. They’ll build infrastructure that scales with machine-native users, not just community-driven ones.

Why Founders Need to Start Building for Agents, Not Just People

Let’s be clear: human users aren't disappearing. But the next wave of adoption won't look like what came before. It won't only be measured in Telegram members or MetaMask pop-ups. It’ll be measured in autonomous agent activity, silently compounding value across your protocol without a single click.

This demands a rethinking of what "user experience" means in Web3.

If your protocol is designed solely for human interaction:

• You're likely under-optimizing for throughput and automation.
  
  
• You're missing out on a new class of users who operate 24/7.
  
  
• You’re leaving surface area unaccounted for, both in opportunity and risk.
  
  

Some of the most forward-thinking projects in the space are already leaning into this shift.

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Datai Network: Teaching AI to Speak Web3

AI agents are poised to become integral users of Web3, but a significant hurdle remains: the complexity and fragmentation of on-chain data. Datai Network addresses this challenge by transforming raw blockchain data into structured, AI-ready insights, enabling seamless interaction between AI models and decentralized systems.

At its core, Datai Network offers a decentralized data infrastructure that:

• Aggregates and indexes data across multiple blockchains, providing a unified view of on-chain activities.
  
  
• Refines complex smart contract interactions into human-readable formats, such as:
  
  
  
  • "Wallet A deposited 1,000 USDT into Protocol X at a 4.2% APY."
    
    
  • "User B swapped 500 BNB for DOGE on DEX Y with a 1.5% slippage."
    
    
• Employs machine learning algorithms to label and categorize smart contracts, facilitating easier data interpretation for AI models.
  
  
• Provides accessible APIs and tools, allowing developers to build AI-powered applications without the need for extensive data preprocessing.

By bridging the gap between blockchain data and AI, Datai Network empowers developers to create intelligent agents capable of:

• Real-time monitoring of DeFi positions and executing automated strategies.
  
  
• Analyzing user behavior for personalized insight recommendations.
  
  
• Detecting anomalies and potential security threats within decentralized ecosystems.

In essence, Datai Network is not just a data provider; it's a foundational layer that enables AI agents to understand and interact with Web3 environments effectively.

DePINed: Powering the Agentic Layer with Decentralized Compute

If AI agents are going to take center stage in Web3, they’ll need more than protocols and APIs, they’ll need compute. Lots of it.

But centralized clouds like AWS and Google Cloud are cracking under the pressure of the AI arms race. Compute is scarce. Costs are inflated. Queues are long. And for autonomous agents needing real-time, scalable execution? That model simply doesn’t work.

DePINed offers an alternative: a decentralized AI supercloud built for the next generation of intelligent systems.

AI-First Infrastructure, Decentralized by Design

At its core, DePINed enables idle computing resources, from GPUs to bandwidth, to be pooled, monetized, and accessed by AI agents in real time. Whether you're a developer, a researcher, or an autonomous agent running logic 24/7, DePINed provides what legacy cloud cannot:

• Permissionless access to compute, without gatekeeping or provisioning delays.
  
  
• Scalable, edge-distributed infrastructure, ideal for agents running asynchronous tasks.
  
  
• Cost-effective alternatives to big tech clouds, reducing friction for AI deployment at scale.
  
  

What Makes It Agentic?

AI agents require compute infrastructure that is just as autonomous and programmable as they are. DePINed delivers this by:

• Offering on-demand GPU power for training and inference without manual orchestration.
  
  
• Enabling agents to trigger rendering and compute tasks based on pre-defined conditions.
  
  
• Powering use cases like LLM fine-tuning, 3D rendering, and data scraping, all through a decentralized backend that agents can call directly.
  
  

This turns DePINed into more than just a passive marketplace. It becomes an active compute substrate, one where agents can self-serve infrastructure as they operate across chains and datasets.

What Comes Next: Designing the Agent UX

So how do we build for this new class of users?

Start with these three principles:

1. Make your data accessible and structured: Agents don't "explore", they query. If your protocol requires a dozen calls to extract value, agents will deprioritize you.
   
   
2. Minimize friction in automation: AI agents flourish in low-latency, high-composability environments. Think modular, gas-efficient, permissionless.
   
   
3. Design with agents as integrations, not interruptions: Consider how agents might interface with your product as active collaborators, consuming APIs, reacting to events, and contributing liquidity or governance activity.
   
   

Just like the early dApp era rewarded those who built composable, tokenized systems, the agentic wave will reward those who build machine-compatible ones.

Final Thought: Build for What’s Coming, Not Just What You See

The Web3 user base is no longer just human. If you're only optimizing for humans, you're optimizing for the past.

The agent uprising isn’t a disruption, it’s an evolution. And like all evolution in tech, it rewards those who adapt early.

If you’re a founder building the next generation of protocols, ask yourself:

“Is your product ready for a user who never logs out?”

If not, it might be time to rethink how, and for whom, you’re building.

Building for the Agentic Future? Let’s Build It Together.

If you're building infrastructure, intelligence, or applications designed for AI agents, this is your moment.

At ChainGPT Labs, we work with early-stage teams shaping the next wave of Web3: from AI-native protocols to agent-optimized infrastructure. Through our accelerator, we provide strategic funding, technical mentorship, growth support, and access to a network of VCs, exchanges, and partners who understand what’s next.

Whether you're building for agents, or building with them, let's talk.

Apply to our incubation program

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