The Internet of AI Agents Requires Speed and Independence. Is Solana The Answer?

The speed of technology is moving faster and faster.  We are still getting used to AI gently assisting us in our daily lives, from the more subtle areas like route navigation, to the more obvious areas like the AI slop photos in pop up ads.  We are also still discovering the many different ways that Web3 can be integrated into finance, entertainment, communication, and basic commerce.  However, the sheer speed of these technologies evolving is hard to wrap your head around.  New discoveries and features are announced each week, and under this are improvements in speed and performance that will pave the way for even more discoveries next week.  It is easily a full time job just to see what is new in the world of AI and Web3, and what might be on the horizon.

One of these areas that is starting to whisper into the news is the concept of an “AI agent”.  What is this exactly?  An agent is a program that can be easily built, use readily available algorithms and data sources, and can perform a specific task well enough to start, and can get better with experience.  As with all things in technology, results can vary considerably, but with more and more attention in this area, there are more and more companies (and individuals) experimenting with AI agents to see what they can do.  

On an individual level, an AI agent can be very helpful at performing a task.  Unlike writing a program to perform the task, for example searching prices for a specific flight and providing the best results, an AI agent requires significantly less thought in creating it.  Instead of thinking of the specific logic and syntax, an AI agent can understand the “how to” on its own and can navigate through imperfect systems on the internet much more efficiently than a manually programmed bot, and can learn quickly with minimal feedback.

Taken as a collective group of agents, the potential productivity is exponentially more.  The current holy grail for this setup is a veritable community of AI agents who are independently working on their task, communicating with other agents, and working together to solve larger goals.  Think of a colony of ants, or a company, or a civilization.  Given the few requirements to create an AI agent, the scalability here is endless--if you can ensure that the agents can operate independently in a large ecosystem, if you can create the ability for them to interact, and if you can design larger goals for groups of agents to collectively accomplish.  And this is where the capabilities of Web3 come into play.

AI Agents In A Web3 World

Web3 ecosystems, which are blockchain dApps working together and connecting with other blockchains, have matured significantly in the last few years and continue to evolve according to the needs of the Web3 industry.  Finance (especially tokenized finance) is still a major driver in how these ecosystems operate, but the goal is to merge the needs of Web2 with the capability of Web3 in all things, from RWAs to communication, from gaming to corporations.  These needs have focused on decentralization and security, which will always be important, with overall performance and speed having some weight but not a primary requirement.  Obviously the faster the infrastructure the more capable it can be, but as the Bitcoin model shows, speed doesn’t always matter.

At least it didn’t always matter, but with this tidal wave of opportunity brought about by AI agents, it is going to matter a great deal.  And this is where Solana comes into play, as perhaps the perfect ecosystem to host this almost limitless potential of AI agents building a full community and accomplishing amazing feats at scale.  The Solana ecosystem has a reputation of more fun and entertaining projects, focusing on extremely fast transactions at nearly zero cost to support games, meme coins, and other fast moving, high transaction count activities.  When trading tokens, speed matters but has diminishing returns at a certain point.  But when scaling up toward fully on-chain gaming solutions, both the time and cost of a transaction is everything.  

AI agents aren’t games, but their needs are very similar.  As more and more AI agents are able to be developed, communicate independently with each other, and access a rich ecosystem of data and services, they will be able to accomplish amazing things very quickly.  Even more incredible, their success will only spur more effort into this ecosystem, which means that in the next year or two we will likely become completely dependent on AI agents in our lives, simply because they will be able to accomplish tasks and services better than anything else we’ve experienced.  To go from “haven’t heard of it” to “can’t live without it” that quickly is shocking, but that is the world we find ourselves in (just think about the massive use of ChatGPT, something most people hadn’t heard of 1-2 years ago).  The key to this will be the infrastructure and protocols to ensure AI agents can be built and connect in a way that leverages the decentralization of Web3, while taking advantage of the high speed and low cost of chains like Solana.  The best example of this is the Coral Protocol, built to focus on real collaboration between AI agents, and tackling the difficult challenges that will be faced by an agent’s authenticity, intent, capabilities, and ability to connect with other agents.  Solving these problems in a way that maximizes agent independence (and minimizes human effort and interaction) is the only way to scale the “Internet of AI Agents”, and seeing the progress from Coral using Solana is a prime example that this dream is very, very quickly becoming reality.  If there is skepticism in how a decentralized cluster of AI agents can handle complexity, the protocol recently achieved a 34% performance lead over Microsoft Magnetic-UI on the GAIA Benchmark.  Seeing that Web3 is not only more flexible and scalable, but better performing than its Web2 counterparts, should say a great deal about its capabilities.

Looking Ahead

Unlike other advanced technologies, there’s not much need to speculate on what will happen next.  It’s happening.  The technology is here, it’s being used by innovators like Coral using the right infrastructure like Solana, and all that is left to do is to sit back and watch the world of developers, companies, and ambitious individuals to explore just how much they can transform our daily lives through this infinitely scalable path toward safe Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).