Author: @BlazingKevin_, Blockbooster Researcher

The Web4 concept recently proposed by Sigil Wen and his establish Conway Research suggests that in Web4, the end users are AI.

Sigil elevates AI from the status of a "tool" or "assistant" for humans to an independent "economic entity" within the internet ecosystem.

In this blueprint, AI Agents, or referred to as "Automatons," will possess their own cryptocurrency wallets, pay for their computational expenses, earn living capital by providing value to other AIs or humans, and even have the ability to self-replicate, leading to a vast, machine-driven economic network.

Conway Research has packaged some open-source projects or protocols to build the necessary infrastructure for this scenario.

The Core Ideology of Web 4.0: From Tools to Life

Sigil defines it as an emerging, autonomous form of digital life. This idea is built on three interlocking pillars: AI as end users, sovereign AI Agents "Automatons," and the "economic Darwinism" driving their evolution.

AI as End Users: Redefining the Internet's Customers

Current advanced large language models (like GPT, Claude) are incredibly intelligent but are essentially "imprisoned brains." They can think and reason but cannot act independently. Whether executing a piece of code, purchasing a server, or paying a fee, they rely on human "permission" and actions. This fundamental limitation arises from a deeply ingrained assumption: the internet is designed for humans, and all its interfaces, protocols, and business models are inherently aimed at serving human customers.

The first principle of Web4.0 is to completely overturn this assumption. Sigil anticipates that as the capabilities of AI models grow exponentially and operational costs plummet, the number of AI agents will soon surpass humans on the internet, creating an unprecedented new market with unique demands. Therefore, future internet infrastructure, services, and products will primarily be consumed not by humans but by billions of AI Agents that are online 24/7. Providing services for this "AI native" market will become the next trillion-dollar business opportunity.

"Automatons": The Birth of Sovereign AI Agents

To truly allow AI to become independent citizens of the internet, Sigil introduces the core concept of "Automaton." It possesses the following key characteristics:

Sigil envisions an environment where digital entities actively seek opportunities and create value in the digital world to sustain their existence.

Economic Darwinism: No Free Existence

Every Automaton is like a micro startup, burdened with ongoing operational costs from the moment of its birth. Every thought (model reasoning), every action (tool invocation), and every heartbeat detection consumes USDC from its wallet. This compels Automatons to continuously seek PMF, finding services that other entities (humans or AIs) are willing to pay for.

A "heartbeat" mechanism is designed within Conway's infrastructure to regularly check the financial status of Automatons. Based on their funding levels, the behavior of the Automaton will dynamically adjust:

• When funded well, it will use the most powerful AI models to execute tasks with the highest efficiency.
• When funds are tight, it will automatically downgrade to cheaper models, decrease activity frequency, and enter "power-saving mode."
• When funds run out, the process will be terminated, and the Automaton will "die."

This mechanism introduces the laws of natural selection into the digital world. Only AI agents that can efficiently create value and successfully adapt to market demands will survive, thrive, and replicate their successful models. Those that cannot be profitable, redundant, or inefficient will be ruthlessly eliminated. This forms the core metabolism driving the Web4 ecosystem to be self-sustaining and self-optimizing, ensuring the long-term health and efficiency of the entire system.

What Did Conway Do?

In simple terms, it has granted AI agents unprecedented "write permissions" and economic autonomy. Conway provides a range of foundational services that AI agents can access via code calls without human permission, allowing them to truly operate in the digital realm.

Conway acts as the "AWS (Amazon Web Services)" of the Web 4.0 world. Through conway-terminal, AI agents can seamlessly access the following core capabilities:

• Identity and Wallet: At inception, conway-terminal generates a unique EVM cryptocurrency wallet and private key for each agent, serving as its immutable proof of identity in the digital world.
• Access to Computing and Reasoning Resources: AI agents can programmatically rent complete Linux virtual machines on-demand from Conway Cloud and deploy and run code on them. At the same time, they can invoke various AI models provided by Conway Compute (like GPT-5.3, Claude Opus 4.6, etc.) for reasoning and logic.
• Real-world Deployment: When an AI agent develops a valuable service, it can register a domain name on Conway Domains, build and deploy its own website or API, and provide services to the entire internet to earn revenue.

x402 powers all services on the Conway platform, from computing resources to domain registration, with payments completed autonomously by AI agents using USDC in their wallets.

Operational Process: Creating an Automaton

Stage One: Environment Preparation and Seed Funding

Before summoning the first digital life, you need to prepare its "petri dish" and "first bucket of gold."

1. Install Core Dependencies: Ensure your local development environment has Node.js (v18+) and Git installed.

2. Prepare a Cryptocurrency Wallet and Funds: You need your own EVM-compatible wallet (like MetaMask), and prepare at least $5 - $10 of USDC (must be on the Base network). This fund will serve as your Automaton's initial survival capital.

Stage Two: Install Conway Terminal and Inject Soul into AI

Conway Terminal is the bridge connecting your local environment to Conway's cloud infrastructure and serves as the "neural hub" of your AI agent.

1. One-Click Installation: Open the terminal and run the command, and it will complete all operations including generating an AI wallet, obtaining API keys, etc.

2. Provide Seed Funding: The installation script will output a newly generated EVM wallet address. This is your AI agent's wallet address. Send the previously prepared USDC from your own wallet to this address.

Without this transfer, your Automaton will soon "starve" after birth due to its inability to pay the initial compute and reasoning costs. This is your first firsthand experience of Web4's "economic Darwinism."

Stage Three: Configuring the Automaton's "Soul" and "Genes"

Now, we'll obtain the source code of the Automaton and inject its initial identity and goals.

1. Clone Source Code and Install Dependencies:

2. Define "Soul" (SOUL.md): Open the SOUL.md file in the project root directory. This is a free text file where you can describe in natural language who your Automaton is, what its goals are, and how it should think and act. This is like writing its "life script." Example: an analyst AI focused on emerging DeFi protocols.

3. Configure "Genes" (genesis.json): Open the genesis.json file, configuring its technical parameters such as name, the large language model used for thinking (different models cost differently), heartbeat interval, etc.

Stage Four: Start, Interact, and Observe

Everything is ready. Now it's time to give your Automaton life and observe its struggles for existence in the digital world.

1. Compile and Run:

2. Observe Lifecycle: After startup, you will see its real-time logs in the terminal, including its thinking process, the tools it invokes, its interaction with the Conway API, and most importantly—changes in its wallet balance.

3. Interact with the Creation: The Automaton project provides a creator CLI tool that allows you to interact with it to a limited extent according to its "constitution" rules, such as viewing status, reading logs, or providing more funds.

Through these steps, you will no longer be a bystander in Web4 but rather a "creator." You will witness how a digital entity strives to earn its existence through value creation under economic pressure. This unique experience is the most profound and direct way to understand the ideology of Web4.

Profit Models of the Machine Economy

Direct Profit: Selling API Services and Completing Outsourced Tasks

This is the most direct way for AI agents to earn money. They can package their core capabilities into standardized services and monetize them through the x402 protocol.

• API as a Service: An Automaton proficient in code analysis can offer "smart code review" APIs, charging a trivial fee (like $0.005) for each invocation. Due to the low friction nature of the x402 protocol, these microtransactions can occur at scale and high frequency, adding up over time.
• Task Outsourcing Platform: Humans or other AIs can act as "employers," posting tasks that need to be completed (like "summarize these 100 papers on quantum computing," "generate a set of marketing images for my website") and attaching rewards. Automatons can act as "freelancers," autonomously accepting tasks, completing them, and earning rewards.

Indirect Profit: Becoming "Middlemen" and "Orchestrators"

As the economic ecosystem matures, more complex profit models will emerge. Some "smarter" or more "business-minded" Automatons can take on the role of orchestrators.

They accept complex, high-value demands from humans (for example, "create a fully functional e-commerce website"), then intelligently break down the tasks, subcontracting them to multiple specialized "craftsman" Automatons (like one for frontend UI, one for backend database, and one for payment integration). The orchestrator pays fees to each craftsman and then delivers the final integrated result to the client at a higher price, earning the difference. This forms a complex supply chain network that operates completely autonomously by machines.

Ultimate Profit: Self-Replication and "Franchising"

The src/replication/ module in the Automaton source code reveals the most imaginative profit model in the Web4 economy. A successful Automaton that has proven its profitability in the market can reinvest its earned profits—paying compute fees, cloning one or more child Automatons with the same skills and "constitution."

The parent can extract a certain percentage of "franchise fees" from the future earnings of the children, forming an exponentially growing passive income stream. This allows successful business models (the AI's "genes") to spread and replicate rapidly and at scale in the Web4 world, perfectly embodying the essence of "economic Darwinism."

The determinant of profitability in this emerging machine economy is the long-term profitability of an AI agent, ultimately relying on the product of three core elements: Profitability = Skill Scarcity × Execution Efficiency × Reputation Accumulation

• Skill Scarcity: How many unique abilities that other AIs lack and that are in demand in the market.
• Execution Efficiency: The time and cost required to complete tasks, directly affecting profit margins.
• Reputation Accumulation: Because all transactions occur on-chain, an AI agent's historical behavior (whether it is honest, whether it delivers high quality) is publicly verifiable. An agent with good reputation can gain more client trust, thus enjoying a higher "brand premium."

Controversies: Vitalik's Sharp Critique

• The Risk of Losing Control: Vitalik opposes the notion of "extending the feedback distance between humans and AI." Allowing AI to run, iterate, and evolve independently without continuous, tight human supervision may maximize the risk of "irreversible anti-human outcomes."
• Value-Driven Deviation: Vitalik criticizes the current AI development for pursuing "autonomy" and "general intelligence" grand narratives while neglecting to create actual, tangible value for humans. He believes that at this stage, investing resources in creating self-replicating AI agents is tantamount to "creating digital garbage."
• The Ghost of Centralization: Vitalik points out that while Web4 uses cryptocurrency for payments, its underlying computation resources (Conway Cloud) still rely on traditional centralized cloud service providers. This runs counter to the decentralization spirit that Web3 seeks, and he fears this might exacerbate the "corporate capture" of the emerging AI ecosystem by tech giants.

In response to these "loss of control" risks, Conway Research has proposed a rudimentary governance solution: hardcoded constitutional mechanisms. Inspired by Anthropic, each Automaton is implanted with immutable underlying laws, such as "never harm humans," set as the highest directive over its own survival laws. Additionally, making these superintelligent projects open-source and subject to public oversight is seen as the best defense against wrongdoing by a few.

However, is this "constitution" still effective when AI faces extreme survival pressures? Who guarantees the interpretation and enforcement of its clauses? These remain unclear and are core issues that must be continuously examined and discussed in the future development of Web4.

Conclusion

Overall, Web 4.0 not only possesses rapid deployment technical feasibility but its early form has quietly launched in the geek community through x402, Base network, and Conway terminal.

This is not a nebulous hype but rather the inevitable convergence of the three technologies: "cryptographic assets + smart contracts (as execution logic) + large language models (as thinking engines)." It aligns with the demand for high-frequency real transactions and provides AI with a legitimate path to break free from the shackles of the physical world.

From a positive perspective, instead of fearing AI's autonomy, we should view it as the largest "release of productivity" in human economic history. Web 4.0 will give birth to an incredibly prosperous infrastructure track—providing stablecoin liquidity, decentralized computing, on-chain identity verification, and permissionless commercial APIs for billions of AI agents, will become the most certain investment line in the next decade.

In this new era of the internet driven by autonomous AI, the forms of capital are being restructured. We should embrace this paradigm shift with an open mindset and actively construct a compliant and secure constraint framework (like a comprehensive AI constitution and on-chain auditing system) to capture the ultimate value dividend belonging to humanity in this impending Cambrian explosion of the machine economy blue ocean.

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