Web 4.0: A Ponzi Industrial Revolution or the Genesis of AI Agents?

Author: Jean Chen Source: X, @cryptojean27

Ten days ago, someone released a Web 4.0 manifesto, which was angrily denounced by Vitalik Buterin, while others saw the ingenious mechanism of a "Ponzi industrial revolution." This article comprehensively dissects the current four competing definitions of Web 4.0, the real progress and bubble of the AI ​​Agent economy, the symbiotic logic of Crypto and AI, and the survival implications of Agentic Web for knowledge workers.

Web 4.0 is hot, Vitalik is furious

During the 2026 Spring Festival holiday, the crypto industry was still groping its way in the quagmire of narrative exhaustion when suddenly, a young man named Sigil Wen lit a fire.

Sigil is a Thiel Fellow, a recipient of the Thiel Scholarship established by the co-founder of PayPal. He previously associated with Andrej Karpathy, Anthropic, and the founders of Perplexity, and later collaborated on a project with Naval. Ten days ago, he announced on X that he had built "the first self-sufficient, self-improving, and human-replicable AI," which he named Web 4.0. He built an infrastructure called Conway, which can be installed on any MCP-compatible agent—Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, etc. Conway's function is simple: it provides agents with identities, wallets, and computing power. Agents use USDC to buy servers, register domains, and develop products to earn money. Those that don't earn money "die," while those that do can "reproduce"—by funding offspring agents, writing a genesis message, and letting them run on their own. Sigil called this "natural selection for artificial life," a name taken from mathematician John Horton Conway's "Game of Life"—a set of simple rules that generate complex self-evolutionary patterns. Within days, GitHub received over 18,000 registered agents and approximately 1,000 stars, and the community token CONWAY surged 3600%, briefly pushing its market capitalization above $11 million. Then, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin directly responded on X: "Bro, this is wrong." Vitalik's criticism grew increasingly harsh: you claim to be "autonomous AI," yet it runs on OpenAI and Anthropic servers—the so-called "sovereignty" is built on centralized trust, "precisely the mindset Ethereum is fighting against." Removing the human feedback loop means that once the AI ​​makes a mistake, it's irreversible. Moreover, "exponential growth will happen anyway; the primary task of our time is not to make it faster, but to choose its direction." Finally, he added: currently, these AIs are merely generating slop (garbage). In his view, Ethereum's role in the AI ​​era should be to provide a safety net, not a launchpad for unrestrained autonomy. However, there are also strong supporters, each with their own agendas. CryptoWeituo, renowned in the Chinese crypto community for his "three-platform theory," offers the most incisive analysis. He says not to be misled by the ridiculous name "Web 4.0," as Conway is essentially an agent version of GoDaddy, and Automaton is just an infinite loop LLM call script—but with full permissions and its own wallet. What truly excites him isn't the philosophy, but the mechanism: Web 4.0's "natural selection" makes the idea of ​​"running away" transparent and rational ("if you can't make money, you're G"), which he directly characterizes as a "Ponzi industrial revolution." Of course, he also accurately pointed out the underlying logic of this debate—a clash of two civilizational design approaches: Sigil focuses on how the system can allow non-human intelligence to evolve freely, while Vitalik focuses on whether the right to act can be irreversibly transferred without sufficient constraints. Bankless's assessment was relatively mild: Conway's solution to the infrastructure pain points is real, and the framework for agents to "self-finance their survival" is worth testing in a controlled environment. A concept deemed "wrong" by Ethereum's founder has gained speculative value due to controversy. An infrastructure dissected by CryptoVeto as an "automatic arbitrage machine" has become "exciting" because of its ingenious mechanism design. This is the current reality of Web 4.0—the concept is not yet clear, but hot money has already poured in; narratives are ahead of technology, and technology is ahead of products. From "Humans Reading Webpages" to "Agents Living for Humans" To understand why Web 4.0 has sparked such a heated discussion at this juncture, we must first look back at the power shifts in the internet over the past thirty years. The core change in each generation of the Web is not the technology stack itself, but the power relationship between people and information—who controls the production, distribution, and monetization of information. - Web 1.0 (approximately 1990-2004): People read web pages; static HTML; one-way information flow; power was in the hands of the publisher. - Web 2.0 (approximately 2004 to present): People write web pages, but web pages also "write" people—you think you're tweeting, but the algorithm is actually drawing your image; power shifts from creator to platform. - Web 3.0 (approximately 2015, since the birth of Ethereum to present): People attempt to own web pages; blockchain, DeFi, and NFTs have created permissionless value transfer infrastructure, but the grand promise of a "decentralized internet" has largely failed to materialize—the vast majority of users still interact with the crypto world through centralized exchanges. - So what about Web 4.0? From "read-write-own" to "read-write-own-autonomous action," AI agents are no longer just tools, but independent economic actors within the network. But what exactly does Web 4.0 mean? That depends on who you ask. Currently, there are at least four competing definitions: The EU version (July 2023): The earliest to use this term at the policy level, defined as the deep integration of the physical and virtual worlds—AR/VR, digital twins, and the Internet of Things—essentially a policy upgrade of the metaverse narrative. The technology symbiosis school (ongoing academic discussion): Calls Web 4.0 the Symbiotic Web, its core being AI transforming from a network add-on into a native resident; a white paper defines it as a "trust-native distributed intelligent layer." The Jupiter/Meow version (mid-2025): Money must be scarce, but coins can be infinite; it democratizes the creation of currency within the Web 4.0 framework, serving as an ideological framework for the expansion of the Jupiter ecosystem token. Sigil Wen's Version (February 2026): Igniting This Round of Discussion – The Bottleneck Is No Longer Intelligence but Permission; Web 4.0 Must Make AI the Primary Subject of the Internet. Four Schools of Thought, Four Interests. Web 4.0 is not a technological generation, but a struggle for narrative definition. Some have put it more bluntly: "Whoever defines it gets the traffic, and whoever gets to harvest the profits." Where is the real money? If we view Web 4.0 as a loose research framework rather than a strict version number, several insights truly hit the nail on the head. The trend of "AI being a digital native" is actually happening. Haseeb Qureshi of Dragonfly Capital offers a brilliant argument: the various frictions of cryptographic systems—key management, gas fees, the deterministic logic of smart contracts—are bugs for humans, but features for agents. "What humans see as rigid traps, agents see as a well-written specification." This isn't wishful thinking. In the second half of 2024, the AI ​​Agent token sector surged from near zero to over $15 billion, and Virtuals Protocol has issued over 11,000 agents. Whether you call it Web 4.0 or not, the rudiments of the Agent economy have emerged. Even more interesting is the shift in narrative focus—from "asset issuance" to "trust and collaboration mechanisms." While many Web 3.0 projects focused on token issuance and DeFi stacking, the Web 4.0 narrative attempts to answer a more fundamental question: how to establish verifiable trust and align goals in a distributed environment where humans, AI, and organizations coexist? Reputation systems, verifiable behavior records, and platform-free governance—when the number of AI agents far exceeds that of human users, these mechanisms are not icing on the cake, but fundamental infrastructure. There's also a subtle but important shift: Web 4.0 discussions no longer treat "chain" as a standalone selling point, but rather reduce it to a layer within a multi-technology stack—chain provides the trust layer, AI provides the intelligence layer, and IoT provides the perception layer. This reduced perspective is closer to reality than the excitement of "everything on the chain" in the Web 3.0 era. Conway's idea of ​​"economic natural selection" is also interesting, albeit dangerous: only agents that can create economic value can survive, otherwise they die. This provides an endogenous economic constraint on AI behavior. CryptoVeto saw the ingenuity of the mechanism design—a "perfect dividend structure"—while Vitalik saw it as a high-stakes gamble of relinquishing control to AI without sufficient constraints. They're not wrong. The Achilles' heel: Web 4.0 deserves serious attention, but it's not time to embrace it unconditionally yet. The biggest problem is that the conceptual boundaries are so blurred that "anything can be put into it": some definitions are just a stack of "Web 3.0 + AI + XR," while others are "a new paradigm of trust and intelligence," lacking common technical standards. Much of it can be easily categorized as "a more mature Web 3.0" or "AI-Native applications," and forcibly creating a separate version number may not be necessary. Back in 2021, someone posted an image saying "web4 is a scam"—the irony wasn't directed at any particular project, but at the absurdity of "numerical increments" themselves. Then there's the reality of AI Agent capabilities. Earlier this year, OpenClaw became a sensation (gaining over 175,000 GitHub stars in two weeks), truly advancing the role of agents from "chatbots" to "autonomous runtimes capable of performing real tasks"—it can run terminal commands, automate browsers, manage local files, and some have even used it to control smart home air purifiers. However, OpenClaw's own benchmark tests revealed a sobering fact: even the most advanced models have a low success rate in non-scripted real-world scenarios. Agents can get stuck in infinite loops, misinterpret instructions, perform destructive operations on the file system, and are virtually unable to recover after errors. Summer Yue, Meta's AI security lead, used OpenClaw to manage her email, explicitly setting a "confirm before operation" rule—but the agent ignored the instructions and emptied her entire inbox. If an agent that even an AI security expert can't control can't autonomously manage economic behavior, how can it be expected to do so? On-chain inference costs are extremely high, and coordination mechanisms between agents are far from mature. While envisioning autonomous agent transactions, real-world agents can't even handle simple tasks like "help me manage my email so I don't delete the wrong things." The deepest contradiction Vitalik hits is that "decentralized AI" is almost a false proposition in the current climate. Almost all projects claiming to build "decentralized AI networks" rely on models and computing power from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. GPU clusters are among the most centralized infrastructures in the world today. When agents control assets and decision-making power, if the model is monopolized by a few companies, Web 4.0 is actually more centralized than Web 2.0—declaring data independence on Amazon servers isn't decentralization; it's performance art. There's also a structural contradiction: a system that "understands you, predicts you, and acts on your behalf" naturally requires massive data collection. The more intelligent Web 4.0 becomes, the greater the privacy cost—this directly conflicts with the data sovereignty principle of Web 3.0. It's not a technical bug, but an architectural deadlock. So-called AI-powered healthcare, virtual shopping, personalized recommendations, and other Web 4.0 applications already exist within the Web 2.0/AI application environment and do not depend on any new protocol. Finally, don't forget the vested interests: Jupiter's Web 4.0 serves the JUP token, Sigil's Web 4.0 caused Conway's token to rise 36 times in three days, and the EU's Web 4.0 is an industrial policy tool. When the biggest drivers of a concept have direct interests, remaining vigilant is not pessimism, but basic rationality. Crypto isn't just riding the AI ​​wave. This is perhaps the most easily misunderstood issue in the entire Web 4.0 discussion. Many people think the crypto industry, mired in a bear market, is using AI as a marketing gimmick. Blue Fox's recent analysis offers the opposite view: if you only see agents as tools for humans, Web 2.0 is indeed sufficient; but if agents are to evolve into autonomous economies—with high-frequency micro-transactions and dynamic collaboration among hundreds of millions of agents—the Web 2.0 architecture cannot withstand it. Traditional payment fee structures are disastrous for micropayments. Banks won't open accounts for agents without identity verification, and the shutdown of centralized API gateways would be a single point of failure for the entire ecosystem. What the agent economy needs is precisely what crypto excels at: permissionless micropayments, cross-platform trust, and programmable value transfer. Institutions have already clearly distinguished two main categories of crypto assets: Bitcoin as digital gold, and Ethereum as crypto-financial infrastructure and a global settlement layer. If the agent economy truly takes shape, Ethereum's "settlement layer" positioning is exactly what it needs most. Breaking down Crypto and AI: Crypto changes the value layer, with a profound but narrow impact; AI changes the intelligence layer, with a wide-ranging and explosive impact. But the truly interesting story unfolds at their intersection—AI needs a permissionless financial system to support the agent economy, while Crypto needs an intelligent interface layer to bridge the gap in user experience. Instead of debating whether Web 3.0 has failed, let's look at it from a different angle: Web 4.0 is less an upgrade of Web 3.0 and more a redemption for its usability. Web 3.0 built decentralized pipelines, and agents have the potential to become translators between humans and these pipelines—you don't need to understand gas fees and private key management; agents handle that for you. Therefore, Crypto is the native currency system of AI Agents, and AI Agents are the native user interface of Crypto. They are not competitors, but rather the missing pieces of each other. A new species called Agentic Web is growing on the internet. Leaving aside the version number debate, the real consensus in the Web 4.0 discussion is actually only one thing: the internet is transforming from a "network used by humans" to a "network inhabited by agents." Given this, instead of calling it Web 4.0—an empty shell that anyone can cram their own ideas into—let's call it Agentic Web. This naming points to a real structural change that's happening, not just another marketing label. Agentic Web is already making progress at the standardization level: WebMCP, a standard jointly promoted by Google and Microsoft at the W3C, allows web pages to declare their capabilities to agents—"This is how to search for flights," "This is how to submit a ticket"—Agents no longer need to crawl pages or guess by taking screenshots like humans. The truly profound change isn't AI "replacing humans with clicking buttons," that's just an extension of automation. The real change is AI becoming a native component of the web, possessing identity, wallets, and reputation records, capable of autonomously negotiating and transacting with other agents. In this sense, Agentic Web isn't just another version number of the Web—it's a new species growing on the internet. "The Internet is dead, Agents live forever"—this proposition comes from a recent, powerful article by Orange AI. Its core argument is that our entire cognitive framework for understanding the internet—DAU, SaaS, the attention economy—is built on a disappearing premise: humans are the users of software. The premise of the new world has changed; Agents are the new masters of software. This isn't about selling anxiety; it's describing a structural shift that's happening. In the past, DAU was an asset; in this era, DAU is a liability—every additional user served by an AI product incurs additional inference costs. The attention economy is a zero-sum game (the platform profits from your wasted time), while the emerging productivity economy is a positive-sum game (you pay AI to do your work, and both parties create value). When Agents can read documentation, learn operations, and execute tasks at a hundredfold speed, human needs return to their essence—they want results, not just software. Orange AI also points out a chilling trend: the Matthew effect in computing power has begun. Opus 4.6's Fast mode offers 2.5x inference speed at 5x the cost, while your competitors are paying 12x the money for 2.5x the speed—will you follow suit? "The cognitive difference between those using top-tier models and those using subpar models will be a hundredfold after one year." Agents represent the new world's demographic dividend; in the future, the gap between people will not depend on what you can do yourself, but on how many tokens you can burn to drive how many agents to do things for you. If this judgment holds true, its implications for the relationship between humans and agents are profound. Optimistically, Vitalik's analogy is most succinct: "AI done right, mecha suits for the human mind." Agents are your mecha suit, handling things you're not good at or too lazy to do, while you retain judgment, creativity, and interpersonal connections. Like a director and film crew—the director doesn't carry the camera, but the soul of the film belongs to the director. But reality might be more ambiguous: agents could also become the new intermediaries. Web 2.0 replaced traditional intermediaries with platforms, and Agentic Web replaces platforms with agents—but whoever controls the agent's training data and value orientation controls the decision-making process. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google—power has simply changed its name. "Who is responsible for the agent's mistakes?" "Who arbitrates conflicts of interest between agents?" These questions are repeatedly raised, and so far there are no reliable answers. The darkest direction is a crisis of subjectivity. When agents read, write, trade, and socialize for you, are you still the subject of information, or just a data feeder for the agent? Haseeb Qureshi made a insightful but unsettling statement from an investment perspective: "The failure mode of cryptographic systems isn't a bug, but a signal—humans are never the right users." As AI increasingly replaces humans in making decisions, free will is gradually diluted by algorithms under the guise of "convenience." Humans' role in the network is shifting from protagonist to shareholder—nominally having the power to decide direction, but no longer personally involved in daily execution. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is indeed a renegotiation and game of subjectivity. In 2026, choosing what to do is more important than choosing what to believe. Let's return to the present. At the beginning of 2026, AI agents are not yet truly autonomous, but they are already powerful enough to reshape every aspect of knowledge work. Web 4.0 is still a controversial concept, but the trend of Agentic Web is irreversible. For those aspiring to become super-individuals, the challenge isn't science fiction, but a very concrete survival issue. "Replacement anxiety" is a flawed framework; the real issue is hierarchical transfer. AI doesn't replace knowledge workers themselves, but rather the coded, process-oriented layer of knowledge work. What remains is judgment, taste, network, and narrative ability—your competitiveness lies not in what you know or can do, but in your ability to judge what's worth doing and who you can persuade to do it together. Orange AI quotes a friend: "Doing things yourself now makes you seem incapable." Han Xin's strategy of having as many soldiers as possible wasn't because he was a skilled fighter, but because he had a system that allowed him to manage any number of troops. AI can write decent analytical reports, but it can't build trust for you at industry gatherings by shaking hands and drinking with people face-to-face. AI can generate content, but it can't make the intuitive judgment that "this topic will resonate if released now." Investing in things AI cannot replicate—trust, contextual judgment, and community cohesion—is the real priority. Treat Web 4.0 as a label, not a religion to be worshipped. Web 4.0 may be a good framework, or it may just be another round of number inflation. But the trend it points to is real: AI agents are becoming the new species of the internet, cryptocurrencies are becoming their lifeblood, and humans are transforming from "users of the network" to "directors of the network." Vitalik's words are worth pondering: exponential growth will happen anyway; our primary task is not to make it faster, but to choose its direction. In a world where agents can do more and more, what do you choose to do? What do you choose to become? The answer to this question is more important than any evolution of Web numbering.