Elie Ben-Sasson, CEO of StarkWare, said that artificial intelligence algorithms are fundamentally transforming the economic model of the Internet that has existed for the past twenty-five years. The traditional system, in which publishers provided users with free access to content in exchange for displaying advertisements, is losing its effectiveness. This is because AI agents request information directly, ignoring visual banner ads. As a result, media platforms will be forced to switch to paid access models, where microtransactions implemented on the basis of decentralized blockchain networks will be the most appropriate and effective solution.

The expert identified two possible scenarios for the development of online payments in the new environment. The centralized approach assumes that large corporations will control the accounting of AI agents' access to resources, but the global nature of distributed systems creates significant difficulties for cross-border transfers and compliance with regulatory regulations of various jurisdictions. An alternative decentralized approach assumes that agents will pay for access to materials in real time through scalable blockchains. Representatives of Weaver Labs supported this position, noting that bringing publishers, users, and algorithms together on a global network is a classic coordination task that decentralized financial systems were originally designed to solve. The key technical challenge remains ensuring sufficient bandwidth to process millions of transactions per second.

Ben-Sasson stressed that although large institutional market participants do not always consider these tasks as a priority, the massive introduction of AI agents will inevitably give a powerful impetus to the development of the crypto payments sector. It is worth noting that the head of StarkWare has previously taken initiatives to adapt crypto-economic models to changing realities. In particular, he suggested reviewing the mechanism of bitcoin issuance, arguing that a fixed limit of 21 million coins could eventually lead to the irretrievable loss of access keys. As an alternative, he considered a moderate inflation rate, comparable to the demographic growth of the world's population, as a way to maintain the long-term economic stability and liquidity of the network.