According to Woofun AI, Alliance co-founder Imran Khan has reiterated that cryptocurrency is essentially what was previously known as Web3, with its core value lying in completing the economic and ownership layer of the internet. This assessment pays tribute to pioneers including Marc Andreessen, who attempted to embed payments into browsers during the Netscape era, with the early web even reserving HTTP status code 402. Coinbase (COIN.US) launched x402, named after this very code, as a nod to those early visionaries who repeatedly tried to integrate financial capabilities into internet infrastructure. Netscape partnered with Visa (V.US) to integrate payment functionality, and while SSL laid the commercial foundation, currency itself remained outside early internet infrastructure.
Looking back at history, when commerce migrated to the internet, it wasn't a native monetary system that powered online payments, but rather credit cards and payment platforms like PayPal (PYPL.US) and Stripe. In the early days of the crypto industry, concepts such as self-custody of assets, permissionless markets, tokenization, decentralized identity, open social graphs, portable reputation across platforms, decentralized storage, and programmable finance presented the possibility of redesigning the internet. Early participants in the Ethereum community proposed restructuring internet architecture to give users greater economic autonomy, which was Khan's motivation for entering the industry. However, over time, under the influence of malicious actors, security threats, policy restrictions, and other factors, this original intention gradually faded.
Against this backdrop, Chris Dixon argued that decentralization and ownership are the core principles, with the logic being that centralized platforms control fees and power, with incentive structures favoring platforms and shareholders rather than users. These platforms control distribution, identity, payments, APIs, data, and social relationships, determining the economic distribution between users and developers. Crypto technology offers an alternative: allowing identity, payments, data, and other critical components to be carried by open protocols rather than controlled by a single company, enabling all participants to share economic benefits and truly own their data and assets. But the reality is that most people don't care whether platforms are centralized, they care more about convenience. As long as products work well, people don't mind handing their data to Google (GOOGL.US), Facebook (META.US), Apple (AAPL.US), Amazon (AMZN.US), OpenAI, and other companies. Cypherpunks like Khan care about privacy, censorship resistance, decentralization, and individual sovereignty, but most people aren't willing to endure worse user experiences for these principles. They don't wake up thinking about whether they own their social graph; they just want products that work well and provide entertainment.
Woofun AI compiled data showing that after years of practice, reality hasn't fully followed the path Chris Dixon envisioned, but Khan believes the direction is correct, just with a crucial piece missing from the puzzle: the rise of AI. AI and crypto technology are highly complementary. AI needs open economic infrastructure, crypto technology needs a new large-scale source of demand, and their combination fills the previously missing demand side. AI Agents are becoming new participants on the internet. Cloudflare (NET.US) disclosed in 2026 that automated traffic surpassed human activity for the first time, accounting for approximately 57% of all web requests, with a significant portion related to AI Agents. This trend will continue to accelerate, and future internet interactions may no longer wait for human commands but be initiated proactively by AI Agents.
But to become "first-class citizens" of the internet, AI Agents must be able to access thousands of services, datasets, and markets without permission, and interact directly with counterparties and other Agents without having to establish customized relationships with each party individually. This isn't decentralization for its own sake, but rather because when collaboration scales from humans to machines, portability, open access, shared state, and interoperability generate direct economic value. They need open infrastructure that's always available and permissionless, identities established on protocols like Handshake, and programmable money and asset ownership. Additionally, they need persistent storage, portable identities, open social and reputation graphs, verifiable information, permissionless markets, and programmable contracts, as well as open networks or marketplaces where they can discover and communicate with each other, such as Moltbook, Farcaster, or some entirely new form.
Therefore, Khan concludes that most of the ideas Chris Dixon proposed in "Read Write Own" are directionally correct, except the target users aren't humans, but AI Agents. The original internet, or Web1, was built on open protocols with free access to information, where anyone could publish and consume content, websites could freely link to each other, developers could build products without permission, and users were primarily information readers. Then came Web2, which transformed readers into creators. Social networks, smartphones, broadband, cloud services, online marketplaces, and large platforms emerged one after another, allowing billions of people to create and publish content, move their businesses online, and become tightly connected. But platforms took control of all critical components, including identity, payments, social relationships, data, distribution, and economic connections between people.
The next step isn't just crypto technology. The next generation of the internet will be composed of and interwoven by crypto technology, AI, robotics, energy, computing power, and biotechnology. AI becomes the intelligence and interaction layer; crypto technology becomes the economic and ownership layer; robotics connects the intelligence layer to the physical world; computing power and energy become the resource layer supporting everything; and biotechnology increasingly resembles programmable systems, with Neuralink representing one direction. Taking decentralized identity, reputation, and social graphs as examples, AI Agents may need Moltbook, Farcaster, or new open platforms in the future, where they can offer services, complete tasks, build reputations based on actual delivery, form persistent identities on the internet, and establish relationships with other Agents.
Regarding decentralized storage, humans don't mind storing files on Google (GOOGL.US) Drive, iCloud, or other cloud services, but AI Agents may require greater autonomy and control, ensuring information persists long-term or has redundant backups, and therefore may use both decentralized and centralized storage services. Taking IPFS and Filecoin as examples, they can store content and allow another Agent to verify that retrieved content is identical to the original. Khan isn't advocating that everything be decentralized, but rather that certain infrastructure is genuinely useful and can work alongside centralized services like AWS and GCP. Looking at ownership, ownership may matter even more to AI Agents than to humans. If the future world is tokenized in some form, the number of available assets would be enormous and highly fragmented, making it difficult for humans to quickly understand and configure them.
Currently, AI Agents remain trapped in closed ecosystems controlled by a single MCP service or application. This doesn't mean it's impossible to build similar Agents using MCP, OAuth, A2A, Stripe, Visa (V.US), AWS, and traditional databases, but with on-chain infrastructure, more assets and markets in the financial world can flow across platforms, open globally, and be directly readable by machines. AI Agents can directly access assets and markets, then make financial decisions based on human-defined goals and risk boundaries. Therefore, Dixon accurately identified the missing layer of the internet: native ownership. The next-generation internet isn't a single technology, but the combined result of on-chain infrastructure, robotics, AI, biotechnology, computing power, and energy, just as Web2 was born from the convergence of smartphones, high-bandwidth networks, centralized applications, and cloud storage. The truly missing piece of this new architecture is the AI Agent, not humans.