Odaily Explores the Past, Present, and Future of the On-Chain Economy

In 2014, before "Web3" became exclusively associated with blockchain and crypto assets, blockchain was simply blockchain. People were deeply fascinated by the future potential unlocked by smart contracts.

Our early vision of on-chain economics ultimately crystallized into the concept of the Smart Economy. We envisioned a decentralized network capable of autonomously managing tasks, with smart contracts serving as the key to unlocking unprecedented possibilities for economic collaboration.

As we rapidly enter the third decade of the 21st century, the Web3 ecosystem is thriving, with decentralized finance (DeFi) serving as its core driver. Stablecoins have become a global mainstream settlement solution, breaking down geographical barriers, while payment finance (PayFi) is integrating into everyday life. Regardless of people’s level of understanding, crypto assets have profoundly reshaped public perceptions of finance.

Beneath these surface developments, the most profound structural advancement is the quantum leap in financial efficiency.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence—a technology long familiar but long confined to abstract concepts—has finally become a daily reality over the past two years, deeply integrated into our work and lives through the continuous emergence and iteration of large language models.

For most people, AI is a productivity tool: designers save time, content creators automate copy refinement, and programmers significantly boost coding efficiency.

But in our view, AI is far more than just a productivity booster—it is an entirely new paradigm of financial efficiency.

Human resources always come with costs, and human attention is inherently limited. As AI enhances productivity per unit of time, it simultaneously increases the value of attention outside working hours. Therefore, we believe AI and blockchain are naturally aligned and should become core components of the next-generation on-chain economy.

1. Minimized human involvement: In on-chain economic activities, humans will primarily serve as intent providers, while the system autonomously completes intent-based analysis, execution, and feedback loops. For example, in decentralized finance (DeFi): what was once called "composability" required users to invest significant effort verifying strategy combinations; in the new on-chain economy, AI will autonomously handle reasoning and planning.
2. Trustless by design: Asset security is the foundation of usability. In the Web3 space, security concerns always hang like the Sword of Damocles. The next-generation economy must eliminate user security concerns entirely and build truly trustless systems.
3. Ultimate Efficiency: As mentioned earlier, every technological revolution has been accompanied by a leap in efficiency. Web3 has already significantly outperformed traditional finance in transaction and settlement efficiency, yet there remains tremendous potential for improving capital utilization. The deep integration of AI will elevate capital efficiency to unprecedented levels.

1. Rapidly evolving AI large model foundations (new architectures and open-source models emerge almost daily)
2. Intent-driven AI agents that accurately interpret and execute user intentions.
3. AI agent network enabling communication and collaboration among agents to form coordinated clusters
4. Privacy-preserving computing technologies, such as zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), ensure data security without requiring a centralized trust mechanism.
5. Core security components that provide maximum protection for assets (such as Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) and backtracking verification)
6. Sustainable monitoring system that continuously regulates economic activities with self-diagnosis and self-correction capabilities.

The synergy between the two will give rise to a truly organic, evolvable, self-driven on-chain economy—which we define as the true intelligent economy.

All of this is much more than simply building a faster system or rearranging a set of tools.

On-chain economics has never been merely a pile of technologies. More accurately, it is a collective narrative about the creation, distribution, and perception of value—centered on collaboration, order, and consensus.

As AI agents become deeply integrated, AI is no longer just an external tool for efficiency gains, but an intrinsic structural component—with intentions, logic, preferences, and even goals.

This structural transformation is far more profound than technological advancement itself. We are moving from on-chain systems centered on human activity toward networked systems driven by collaborative intelligence.

Thus, the economy is no longer merely a combination of rules and incentives; it begins to exhibit coherent, life-like characteristics: perceiving external data, responding internally, adjusting parameters, and reorganizing and iterating under pressure.

The intelligent sensing economy we refer to does not mean the emergence of emotion or consciousness, but rather the gradual refinement of an internal information-action feedback loop within the system. This means collaboration no longer relies on external coordination, but can naturally emerge from within the system itself. This marks a directional shift in the infrastructure of human civilization—from a mere “governance economy” toward an “economy embedded with intelligence.”

We often discuss on-chain economies from the perspectives of structural design and financial efficiency, but perhaps what truly warrants rethinking is this: when a system possesses the abilities to continuously learn autonomously, adapt, and self-coordinate, should we still simply define it as an “economy”? Or is it evolving into an entirely new form of life?