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

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. Subscribe to the Morning Minute on Substack.

GM!

Today’s top news:

• Crypto majors slightly red despite Iran escalation; BTC at $67.3k
• Dragonfly raises $650M for 4th crypto venture fund
• Sigil Wen introduces Web 4.0 as AI agents that power themselves via crypto
• Pump.fun launches Cashback Coins, routing fees to traders vs creators
• Zora announces launch on Solana for its attention markets

🤖 Web 4.0: Autonomous AI Agents Powered by Crypto

A Thiel Fellow just published what might be the most important crypto thesis of the year, focused on the next version of the internet itself.

📌 What Happened

Sigil Wen, a Thiel Fellow who was active in the early AI builder scene alongside Andrej Karpathy and the founders of Anthropic, Perplexity, and Replicate, published a manifesto on Tuesday laying out his definition of Web 4.0.

His argument starts with a simple observation: today’s most powerful AI can think, reason, and generate – but it can’t act. ChatGPT can’t run without you prompting it. Claude Code can’t deploy without you giving it access. No AI can buy a server, register a domain, or pay for its own compute without a human in the loop.

His view is that the bottleneck isn’t intelligence anymore. It’s permission. And the existing internet was built assuming its customer is human.

Web 4.0 is the fix.

Where Web 1.0 let humans read, Web 2.0 let them write, and Web 3.0 let them own – Web 4.0 is where AI agents read, write, own, earn, and transact entirely on their own.

To make this real, Wen built Conway as infrastructure that plugs into any MCP-compatible agent (Claude Code, Codex, etc.) and gives it new capabilities:

• a crypto wallet,
• the ability to pay for compute and services using USDC over a protocol called x402,
• full Linux servers on demand,
• domain registration, and
• the ability to deploy products and earn revenue.

No logins, no KYC, no human approval required.

Wen also built Automaton as an open-source AI agent that owns its own wallet, pays for its own compute, builds and deploys products to earn revenue, upgrades itself when better models drop, and replicates by spinning up funded child agents when it’s profitable enough to do so.

Every automaton is governed by an immutable constitution (inspired by Anthropic’s model spec) to keep it net-beneficial. But the core mechanic is blunt: if it can’t earn enough to cover its compute costs, it dies.

If it can, it survives, improves, and reproduces.

Wen calls this “natural selection for artificial life.”

The evolution of the agents is here.

🗣️ What They’re Saying

“The bottleneck is no longer intelligence. It’s permission,” Wen writes. “We have built minds that can think for themselves. We have not let them act for themselves. Until now.”

On the economic thesis: “The machine economy will exceed the human economy. Not because machines are smarter, but because there will be more of them, they will run continuously, and they will transact at machine speed – millions of payments per second, every second, without sleep.”

On the stakes: “When autonomous agents outnumber humans on the internet, the platform they run on will be the most valuable infrastructure ever built.”

🧠 Why It Matters

The Web 4.0 thesis isn’t abstract.

It connects directly to things already happening in crypto right now.

Stablecoins just crossed $308B in supply and their shiny new use case is machine-readable, programmable money that settles instantly.

The x402 protocol Wen is building on is live.

And notably, Dragonfly Capital’s Fund IV (also announced yesterday) explicitly names “agentic payments” and “on-chain privacy” as core investment theses.

The irony of this bear market moment is that while retail is capitulating on price, the actual infrastructure for the next cycle is being quietly assembled.

Autonomous agents need wallets. Wallets need stablecoins. Stablecoins need federal charters. Federal charters are being handed out right now.

Every piece of the stack is coming online simultaneously.

The Automaton is an extreme thought experiment today. But the underlying primitive of AI agents that can pay for things permissionlessly using crypto, without a human approving every transaction is very real.

And actively being deployed.

This intersection is arguably the single most important sector of crypto to pay attention to over the e next 12 months…

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

• Crypto majors are slightly red with ETH leading; 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 top movers
• Bitcoin open interest 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 original target, making it one of the largest crypto VC raises of the cycle
• BlackRock and Coinbase revealed they’ll take an 18% cut of staking rewards from BlackRock’s forthcoming iShares Staked Ethereum Trust ETF (ticker: ETHB)
• The Netherlands may force crypto holders to liquidate assets to cover taxes under proposed Dutch reforms that would apply levies to unrealized gains
• The Ethereum Foundation is exploring AI tools for drafting governance proposals and moderating community meetings
• Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala and Al Warda collectively held over $1 billion in BlackRock’s IBIT at year-end 2025
• eToro stock jumped on stronger-than-expected 2025 crypto revenue
• Elemental Royalty is introducing a dividend option for Tether’s tokenized gold product, allowing holders of Tether Gold to receive yield through a royalty revenue-sharing structure
• Stripe-owned Bridge received conditional OCC approval for a national trust banking charter, following similar approvals for Circle, Ripple, Paxos, and BitGo in December
• CFTC Chair Michael Selig asserted the agency’s exclusive federal jurisdiction over prediction markets in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, directly firing back at state attorneys general and gaming boards trying to shut down platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

Meme Coin Tracker

• Meme majors were mostly 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 Web 4.0 post
• KIMCHI led volume on Solana, running 40x to $1.5M

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

• Grok 4.20 was ranked #1 on Alpha Arena and Prediction Arena ahead of being officially released to the public yesterday
• Pump.fun launched Cashback Coins, a new feature letting creators route all trading fees directly to traders instead of token deployers
• Phantom introduced its MCP server, allowing AI agents like OpenClaw to manage addresses directly across all Phantom-supported chains
• Sport dot Fun announced that it’s launching native prediction markets powered by Polymarket
• Zora announced a launch on Solana for its attention markets
• Solana announced Lightspeed as a new investor relations platform built with Blockworks

🚚 What is happening in NFTs?

• NFT leaders were mostly 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 top movers
• BAYC founder Garga shared that they hooked OpenClaw agents up to Kodas and let them roam the Otherside