Morning Minute: Web 4.0 - Autonomous AI Agents Powered by Crypto

Morning Minute is simply a regular newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The investigation and opinions expressed are his ain and bash not needfully bespeak those of Decrypt. Subscribe to the Morning Minute on Substack.

GM!

Today’s apical news:

• Crypto majors somewhat reddish contempt Iran escalation; BTC astatine $67.3k

• Dragonfly raises $650M for 4th crypto task fund

• Sigil Wen introduces Web 4.0 arsenic AI agents that powerfulness themselves via crypto

• Pump.fun launches Cashback Coins, routing fees to traders vs creators

• Zora announces motorboat connected Solana for its attraction markets

A Thiel Fellow conscionable published what mightiness beryllium the astir important crypto thesis of the year, focused connected the adjacent mentation of the net itself.

Sigil Wen, a Thiel Fellow who was progressive successful the aboriginal AI builder country alongside Andrej Karpathy and the founders of Anthropic, Perplexity, and Replicate, published a manifesto on Tuesday laying retired his explanation of Web 4.0.

His statement starts with a elemental observation: today’s astir almighty AI tin think, reason, and make - but it can’t act. ChatGPT can’t tally without you prompting it. Claude Code can’t deploy without you giving it access. No AI tin bargain a server, registry a domain, oregon wage for its ain compute without a quality successful the loop.

His presumption is that the bottleneck isn’t quality anymore. It’s permission. And the existing net was built assuming its lawsuit is human.

Web 4.0 is the fix.

Where Web 1.0 fto humans read, Web 2.0 fto them write, and Web 3.0 fto them ain - Web 4.0 is wherever AI agents read, write, own, earn, and transact wholly connected their own.

To marque this real, Wen built Conway as infrastructure that plugs into immoderate MCP-compatible cause (Claude Code, Codex, etc.) and gives it caller capabilities:

• a crypto wallet,

• the quality to wage for compute and services utilizing USDC implicit a protocol called x402,

• full Linux servers connected demand,

• domain registration, and

• the quality to deploy products and gain revenue.

No logins, nary KYC, nary quality support required.

Wen besides built Automaton as an open-source AI cause that owns its ain wallet, pays for its ain compute, builds and deploys products to gain revenue, upgrades itself erstwhile amended models drop, and replicates by spinning up funded kid agents erstwhile it’s profitable capable to bash so.

Every automaton is governed by an immutable constitution (inspired by Anthropic’s exemplary spec) to support it net-beneficial. But the halfway mechanic is blunt: if it can’t gain capable to screen its compute costs, it dies.