Trillion dollar market: The autonomous economy is rising in Web3

Author: 0xJeff

Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow

Every technological change will give birth to a completely new economic model:

• Industrial Revolution➔ Manufacturing Economy

• Personal computer ➔ Software economy

• Internet➔ E-commerce Economy

• Streaming ➔ Subscription Economy

• Public Cloud➔ SaaS (Software as a Service) Economy

• iPhone ➔ App Economy

• Social Media➔ Creator Economy

• Bitcoin and Blockchain➔ Cryptocurrency/Web3 Economy➔ Decentralized Finance ( DeFi ) Economy

• Electric Vehicles➔ Clean/Green Technology Economy

• Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning ( AI / ML , Pre-Large Language Model) ➔ Forecast/Automation Economy

• Large Language Models ( LLMs ) ➔ Autonomous Economy

The rise of giants

During these technological transformations, there will always be some giant companies emerging, controlling most of the markets of the emerging economy:

• Industrial Revolution : General Electric, Ford, Siemens, Caterpillar

• Software Economy : Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Adobe

• E-commerce : Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, Shopify

• Subscription Economy : Netflix, Spotify, Disney+, Hulu

• SaaS economy : AWS (Amazon Cloud Service), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Salesforce, ServiceNow

• Application Economy : Apple (Apple), Google Play (Android), Tencent (WeChat), Meta (Instagram/WhatsApp)

• Creator Economy : Meta (Facebook, Instagram), YouTube, TikTok, Patreon, Substack

• Crypto Economy : Coinbase, Binance, Ethereum, Solana, Uniswap, Aave

• Green technology economy : Tesla, BYD, Rivian, Lucid, ChargePoint, CATL (Battery)

• Forecast/automation economy : Google DeepMind, Palantir, Nvidia, UiPath

• Independent Economy : OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, DeepSeek, Alibaba, Hugging Face

The entry point for the disruptor

These giants try to predict and occupy the next emerging economic sector, but are unable to cover all segments due to their size and strategic priorities. This provides opportunities for small and flexible businesses to quickly experiment with ideas and focus on extremely segmented markets:

• Notion : Subvert traditional enterprise collaboration and knowledge management tools (such as Confluence, SharePoint)

• Perplexity : subverts the fields of search and information retrieval (such as Google Search, Wikipedia)

• Substack : subverts traditional publishing and media industries (such as blogs, newsrooms, Medium)

• Grab/Uber : subverts urban transportation and logistics (such as taxis, car rental, delivery services)

• Netflix : subvert cable TV and physical media (such as Blockbuster, traditional broadcast)

• Airbnb : disrupts the hotel and accommodation industry (such as traditional hotels and travel agencies)

• Amazon : disrupting physical retail (such as Walmart, local stores, Sears)

When these disruptors change the way the industry works, they themselves will become new giants in their respective fields and create opportunities for future emerging players to disrupt them again.

Independent economy

In an autonomous economy, AI agents (Agentic AI) have completely changed the way in which all industries operate. As a digital workforce, these AI agents can actively complete tasks. Autonomous AI interfaces are now very common, and they significantly reduce users' time investment while increasing productivity. This shift makes goods and services more efficient, especially in industries where repetitive tasks are accomplished by humans, where AI and AI agents can significantly reduce costs and increase efficiency.

In the Web2 era, the best incubation and distribution network for top startups that showcase AI and AI proxy applications is @ycombinator , especially in recent batches of projects.

• Midship : Use AI to expand financial audit work

• Cuckoo : Provides real-time AI translation for global sales, marketing and support

• Tempo : Helps designers and developers collaborate to achieve 10 times faster product delivery

• Ascend : an AI-based financial statement analysis platform

With the continuous improvement of large language models (LLMs), AI capabilities continue to increase, more industries are disrupted, and more roles and responsibilities have been improved or enhanced in productivity (not yet completely replaced).

Consumer AI in Web3 is brewing

In the Web2 era, Y Combinator , as the main distribution network, incubated and promoted many high-quality AI startups. And in the Web3 world, @virtuals_io is playing a similar role through Agent Commerce Protocol (ACP). ACP is an open standard for commercial collaboration between multiple agents (AI agents), allowing these agents to call services, negotiate prices, perform tasks, provide evaluations, etc.

This mechanism has spawned an Agentic Economy driven by Web3, in which agents collaborate to create greater value for users. Independent hedge funds and independent media companies will become the first pilot projects of ACP to launch this new economic system.

A trillion dollar opportunity

As @sequoia said:

“The core of cloud transformation is Software as a Service (SaaS). Software companies transform into cloud service providers, which brings a $350 billion market opportunity. Thanks to Agentic Reasoning, the core of AI transformation is Service-as-a-Software. Software companies convert labor into software. This means that the reachable market is no longer the software market, but the trillion-dollar service market.”

Now, it would be a huge opportunity to imagine a Web3-powered AI intelligent economy in this approximately $10 trillion service market, accelerating growth through crypto-native use cases (such as transactions, income agriculture, i.e. crypto investments) and leveraging token incentives, taking up only a small part of it.

 Source: Sequoia 

Distribution layer = winning key

The distribution network/coordination layer will be the biggest beneficiary in the process of transitioning to an autonomous economy. This is because crypto tokens are the core of the Web3 AI monetization model: users need to pledge, destroy or hold tokens to access core agent products or use cases; tokens are used as core currency to pay for computing resources and/or services.

This demand for tokens, and the natural alignment of incentives between project long-term supporters and projects, means that there will always be transaction volume for capture, whether on a decentralized exchange (DEX) or on a token launch platform. A distribution layer that can coordinate an autonomous economy and capture these transaction volumes will become the top players in this field and account for a considerable portion of the approximately $10 trillion market.

Welcome to the dawn of the Web3 autonomous economy. The future has arrived, it is bold and free - this is the era of the rise of Web3 independently.