Morning Minute: Internet 4.0 – Autonomous AI Brokers Powered by Crypto – Decrypt

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GM!

Right this moment’s high information:

• Crypto majors barely pink regardless of Iran escalation; BTC at $67.3k
• Dragonfly raises $650M for 4th crypto enterprise fund
• Sigil Wen introduces Internet 4.0 as AI brokers that energy themselves by way of crypto
• Pump.enjoyable launches Cashback Cash, routing charges to merchants vs creators
• Zora publicizes launch on Solana for its consideration markets

🤖 Internet 4.0: Autonomous AI Brokers Powered by Crypto

A Thiel Fellow simply printed what may be an important crypto thesis of the 12 months, centered on the following model of the web itself.

📌 What Occurred

Sigil Wen, a Thiel Fellow who was lively within the early AI builder scene alongside Andrej Karpathy and the founders of Anthropic, Perplexity, and Replicate, printed a manifesto on Tuesday laying out his definition of Internet 4.0.

His argument begins with a easy statement: right this moment’s strongest AI can assume, purpose, and generate – however it might probably’t act. ChatGPT can’t run with out you prompting it. Claude Code can’t deploy with out you giving it entry. No AI can purchase a server, register a site, or pay for its personal compute with out a human within the loop.

His view is that the bottleneck isn’t intelligence anymore. It’s permission. And the prevailing web was constructed assuming its buyer is human.

Internet 4.0 is the repair.

The place Internet 1.0 let people learn, Internet 2.0 allow them to write, and Internet 3.0 allow them to personal – Internet 4.0 is the place AI brokers learn, write, personal, earn, and transact completely on their very own.

To make this actual, Wen constructed Conway as infrastructure that plugs into any MCP-compatible agent (Claude Code, Codex, and many others.) and offers it new capabilities:

• a crypto pockets,
• the flexibility to pay for compute and providers utilizing USDC over a protocol referred to as x402,
• full Linux servers on demand,
• area registration, and
• the flexibility to deploy merchandise and earn income.

No logins, no KYC, no human approval required.

Wen additionally constructed Automaton as an open-source AI agent that owns its personal pockets, pays for its personal compute, builds and deploys merchandise to earn income, upgrades itself when higher fashions drop, and replicates by spinning up funded youngster brokers when it’s worthwhile sufficient to take action.

Each automaton is ruled by an immutable structure (impressed by Anthropic’s mannequin spec) to maintain it net-beneficial. However the core mechanic is blunt: if it might probably’t earn sufficient to cowl its compute prices, it dies.

If it might probably, it survives, improves, and reproduces.

Wen calls this “pure choice for synthetic life.”

The evolution of the brokers is right here.

🗣️ What They’re Saying

“The bottleneck is now not intelligence. It’s permission,” Wen writes. “We now have constructed minds that may assume for themselves. We now have not allow them to act for themselves. Till now.”

On the financial thesis: “The machine financial system will exceed the human financial system. Not as a result of machines are smarter, however as a result of there might be extra of them, they may run constantly, and they’re going to transact at machine pace – thousands and thousands of funds per second, each second, with out sleep.”

On the stakes: “When autonomous brokers outnumber people on the web, the platform they run on would be the most useful infrastructure ever constructed.”

🧠 Why It Issues

The Internet 4.0 thesis isn’t summary.

It connects on to issues already occurring in crypto proper now.

Stablecoins simply crossed $308B in provide and their shiny new use case is machine-readable, programmable cash that settles immediately.

The x402 protocol Wen is constructing on is dwell.

And notably, Dragonfly Capital’s Fund IV (additionally introduced yesterday) explicitly names “agentic funds” and “on-chain privateness” as core funding theses.

The irony of this bear market second is that whereas retail is capitulating on value, the precise infrastructure for the following cycle is being quietly assembled.

Autonomous brokers want wallets. Wallets want stablecoins. Stablecoins want federal charters. Federal charters are being handed out proper now.

Each piece of the stack is coming on-line concurrently.

The Automaton is an excessive thought experiment right this moment. However the underlying primitive of AI brokers that may pay for issues permissionlessly utilizing crypto, with out a human approving each transaction may be very actual.

And actively being deployed.

This intersection is arguably the only most vital sector of crypto to concentrate to over the e subsequent 12 months…

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

• Crypto majors are barely pink with ETH main; BTC -1% at $67.4K; ETH even at $1,970; SOL -3% at $83; XRP even at $1.47
• WLFI (+22%), HASH (+19%) and NIGHT (+5%) led high movers
• Bitcoin open curiosity has collapsed 55% from its October 2025 peak of $94B to ~$44B, the steepest drawdown since April 2023
• Dragonfly Capital closed Fund IV at $650 million, $150M above its authentic goal, making it one of many largest crypto VC raises of the cycle
• BlackRock and Coinbase revealed they’ll take an 18% lower of staking rewards from BlackRock’s forthcoming iShares Staked Ethereum Belief ETF (ticker: ETHB)
• The Netherlands might drive crypto holders to liquidate property to cowl taxes below proposed Dutch reforms that may apply levies to unrealized positive factors
• The Ethereum Basis is exploring AI instruments for drafting governance proposals and moderating group conferences
• Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala and Al Warda collectively held over $1 billion in BlackRock’s IBIT at year-end 2025
• eToro inventory jumped on stronger-than-expected 2025 crypto income
• Elemental Royalty is introducing a dividend possibility for Tether’s tokenized gold product, permitting holders of Tether Gold to obtain yield via a royalty revenue-sharing construction
• Stripe-owned Bridge obtained conditional OCC approval for a nationwide belief banking constitution, following related approvals for Circle, Ripple, Paxos, and BitGo in December
• CFTC Chair Michael Selig asserted the company’s unique federal jurisdiction over prediction markets in a Wall Avenue Journal op-ed, straight firing again at state attorneys basic and gaming boards attempting to close down platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket

Company Treasuries & ETFs

Meme Coin Tracker

• Meme majors had been principally flat; DOGE +1%, SHIB -1%, PEPE -2%, TRUMP +5%, PENGU -2%, SPX +10%, FARTCOIN +1%
• Conway soared 3,600% to $5M ($10M at peak) after Sigil’s Internet 4.0 submit
• KIMCHI led quantity on Solana, operating 40x to $1.5M

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

• Grok 4.20 was ranked #1 on Alpha Area and Prediction Area forward of being formally launched to the general public yesterday
• Pump.enjoyable launched Cashback Cash, a brand new function letting creators route all buying and selling charges on to merchants as a substitute of token deployers
• Phantom launched its MCP server, permitting AI brokers like OpenClaw to handle addresses straight throughout all Phantom-supported chains
• Sport dot Enjoyable introduced that it’s launching native prediction markets powered by Polymarket
• Zora introduced a launch on Solana for its consideration markets
• Solana introduced Lightspeed as a brand new investor relations platform constructed with Blockworks

🚚 What is occurring in NFTs?

• NFT leaders had been principally flat; Punks even at 29.9 ETH, Pudgy even at 4.35 ETH, BAYC -1% at 6.1 ETH; Hypurr’s even at 520 HYPE
• Memeland Captainz (+15%) led high movers
• BAYC founder Garga shared that they hooked OpenClaw brokers as much as Kodas and allow them to roam the Otherside