The Future Economic Form of Human-Machine Symbiosis and Ecological Autonomy
Human society is standing at the threshold of the intelligent revolution. When the dawn of general artificial intelligence (AGI) has not yet illuminated the earth, an economic transformation driven by vertical domain agents has quietly swept through the industrial hinterlands. This transformation is inevitable, rooted in the dual soil of technological evolution and commercial logic: basic large models are gradually stabilizing in the efficiency game of computing power, algorithms, and data, while the true value creation is rapidly migrating from the infrastructure layer to the application layer.
Isolated capabilities of single agents cannot cope with the challenges of complex business scenarios. Only through a multi-agent collaboration (InterAgent, IA) architecture, connecting professional "small but precise" agents into a dynamic network, can exponential productivity be released. When agents are no longer just tools that execute instructions, but "digital life forms" with digital identities, autonomous decision-making, and value exchange capabilities, a new economic form - the agent economy (Agent Economy) - characterized by human-machine symbiosis, algorithm-driven, and ecological autonomy becomes an irreversible trend of civilization.
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The agent economy will create a trillion-dollar new market. This estimate is not baseless: from the number perspective, the ratio of future enterprise employees to agents will approach 1:1 or even 1:N; from the quality perspective, core processes in manufacturing, energy, finance, and other fields will be gradually taken over by agent networks, their efficiency leap and cost optimization will reshape the industry value map.
A deeper change lies in the migration of economic paradigms - the traditional centralized platform's model of monopolizing resources will be replaced by a decentralized value network based on agents as nodes, smart contracts as rules, and data sovereignty as the foundation. This distributed business ecosystem, due to agents, gains the genes of scalability, trustworthiness, and value, ultimately giving rise to the explosive emergence of "killer applications."
The prosperity of the agent economy depends on the coordinated evolution of three core elements: digital identity, communication protocol, and data container. Just as in the real world, citizens need ID cards, languages need grammatical rules, and assets need safe deposit boxes, agents also need a "proof of existence" in the digital space, a "universal language" for interaction, and a "sovereignty space" for data. These three elements form the skeletal structure of the agent economy: digital identity gives them social existence, communication protocols enable group collaboration, and data containers ensure value accumulation. Missing any one element, agents become information islands, unable to integrate into the economic system's circulatory system.
Digitized identity is the passport for agents to participate in value exchange and the cornerstone of security and trust. Traditional internet accounts are only projections of identity, with control always belonging to the platform; however, agents' digital identity needs to achieve true self-control. Drawing on blockchain distributed ledger technology (DLT), each agent can be assigned a unique and tamper-proof distributed identity identifier (DID), making it a "digital citizen" verifiable and traceable on the chain.
Further, the smart account system integrates agent identity and asset ownership through account abstraction technology. Taking Ethereum, which is known as the global computer, as an example, its underlying protocols such as ERC-4337/EIP-7702 have already achieved highly programmable account functions, reducing barriers while granting smart accounts infinite imagination. When a risk control agent needs to temporarily increase permissions to deal with an emergency threat, or a sales agent needs to automatically distribute commissions, the programmability of smart accounts makes these complex logic become "on-chain automatic laws." The account system is not only a carrier of identity, but also a governance framework defining the role boundaries, operational permissions, and liability of agents.
Communication protocol is the "universal language" of the agent society, whose value is comparable to TCP/IP for the Internet. Without a unified protocol, multi-agent collaboration is like humans falling into the Babel dilemma. Take MCP (Model Context Protocol) as an example - it defines the standard for exchanging context information between agents, enabling seamless connection of different data sources, models, and tools. When logistics agents, customs agents, and payment agents in cross-border trade operate based on the same protocol to automatically connect customs procedures, traditional time-consuming processes can be compressed to hours.
Tongfu Shield defines this multi-agent collaboration protocol as InterAgent (IA) and builds the Agent Collaboration Platform "Legion" based on it. The core value of the protocol lies in decoupling complex tasks: through the three elements of "identification, decomposition, and action," macro goals are broken down into minimal task units, dynamically assigned to suitable agents by workflow engines. This standardized, modular communication layer is the neural pathway of Legion's efficient operation - it enables the "Roman legion-style collaboration" of unified goals and strict discipline, rather than just biological swarms (swarms) gathering.
Data containers provide fuel and moats for agents, and solve the fundamental contradiction between data sharing and privacy protection. Traditional data silos hinder collaboration, while centralized aggregation causes privacy leakage risks. Data containers for agents are built on DID to create independent storage spaces, combined with privacy computing technologies (such as zero-knowledge proofs), achieving "data available but not visible."
In energy trading scenarios, the power generation data of supply-side agents and the electricity demand of demand-side agents can be matched and bid without revealing original information; in supply chain finance, the cargo rights verification of logistics agents and the credit assessment of risk control agents can generate irrevocable "digital letters of credit" through secure interactions within containers. Data containers are not only storage tools, but also carriers of distributed governance - they make data sovereignty belong to the agents themselves, and value transfer is automatically settled through smart contracts. This "data elementization" mechanism is the key to converting high-value private data into economic momentum.
The operation of the above three elements all relies on a more fundamental system - the agent trust system. Blockchain technology plays the role of a "trust machine" here: distributed ledgers ensure traceable behavior, encryption algorithms confirm asset ownership, and consensus mechanisms maintain fair rules. But blockchain is just the foundation; the true trust upgrade requires smart contracts - this "neural network of the digital society." The essence of smart contracts is to reconstruct the trust paradigm of society through code. Traditional contracts rely on legal provisions and judicial enforcement ("wet code"), suffering from ambiguous interpretation and delayed execution; while smart contracts as "dry code" transform commitments into deterministic program logic: when conditions are triggered, results inevitably occur. In the agent economy, its value is manifested in three dimensions:
· Collaboration automation: After the risk control agent identifies abnormal transactions, the punishment instruction automatically triggers the chain-based freeze;
· Value frictionless flow: The copyright agent tracks the use of works, and the revenue is allocated to the creator's account according to the agreement in seconds;
· Ecological self-governance: The incentive model based on smart contracts is encoded into agent behavioral guidelines, forming a self-regulating ecosystem of "code as law."
Furthermore, smart contracts promote the establishment of the next-generation "zero-trust" security paradigm - not the traditional "never trust, always verify," but "no need to trust": users do not need to worry about counterparty default, as all behavioral logic is open, transparent, and immutable. For example, in an energy trading network, the bidding, settlement, and grid fee deduction between power generation agents and electricity consumption agents are all executed by smart contracts, with trust costs approaching zero.
At this point, the full picture of the agent trust system is clear: it uses blockchain as the trust foundation, smart contracts as the rule engine, weaving digital identity, communication protocols, and data containers into an organic whole. This system creates an economic form that completely disrupts traditional paradigms:
· Human-machine symbiosis: Humans evolve from executors to "rule designers," using visual canvases to arrange agent workflows, focusing on ethical supervision and complex decision-making; agents become self-evolving economic entities, exchanging capabilities and values in the market.
· Ecological self-governance: Incentive models based on smart contracts drive agent clusters to autonomously evolve. For example, a grid scheduling agent group can optimize charging and discharging strategies according to electricity price signals, and their cooperation rules and profit distribution are controlled in real-time by code, forming a dynamic balanced "digital twin economy."
The ultimate vision of the agent economy is an autonomous ecosystem worth trillions of dollars: agent factories produce massive specialized agents, agent markets provide platforms for capability trading and combination innovation; blockchain and smart contracts build trust-free collaboration networks, while data containers and privacy computing ensure the secure flow of value. Here, the expansion of the economic system no longer relies on central institutions' regulation, but on agents self-organizing, self-evolving, and self-verifying in an open market - as Tongfu Shield said: "Whoever gets the agent will get the world." When countless specialized agents create quantifiable value in solving real-world problems, and when multi-agent collaboration breeds new civilizational paradigms in distributed commerce, humanity will truly knock on the door of the human-machine symbiosis era.
Agent Factories and Agent Markets
In the previous part, we depicted the grand vision of the agent economy (Agent Economy): a new economic form characterized by human-machine symbiosis, algorithm-driven, and ecological autonomy is emerging. Its foundational cornerstone is three core elements - digital identity (DID) grants agents social existence and asset ownership capabilities; communication protocols (such as InterAgent) construct a "universal language" for multi-agent collaboration, enabling efficient breakdown and dynamic allocation of complex tasks; data containers provide "fuel" and "fortress" for agent collaboration under the premise of ensuring data sovereignty and privacy security. All of this operates on the agent trust system built by blockchain and smart contracts, ensuring traceable behavior, fair rule execution, and frictionless value flow. However, the rise of a skyscraper requires not only a solid foundation but also an efficient "prefabricated component" production and circulation system. The key to the agent economy moving from theory to prosperity lies in building two core hubs: the "agent factory" for mass-producing agents and the "agent market" for promoting their capability exchange and combination innovation. Together, they form the two engines that sustain the agent economy.
The birth of the Agent Factory is an inevitable requirement for the agent economy to scale and industrialize. When enterprise demands shift from sporadic, isolated agent applications to comprehensive agent networks covering core business processes, the traditional "craftsmanship-style" agent customization development model becomes insufficient. The pain points are obvious: long development cycles, high costs, inconsistent quality, and difficulty in maintenance. The value of the Agent Factory lies in solving this problem through standardized, modular production methods. It is like the "production line" of the agent industry, defining clear functional boundaries, input-output interfaces, interaction protocols, and performance metrics for agents, turning them into reusable standard "components."
Building an efficient and reliable Agent Factory is no easy task, and its core lies in establishing a powerful agent "production line" technology system. This first relies on a powerful agent development kit (ADK). ADK needs to provide a visual agent "assembling" interface, a rich library of pre-trained models, domain knowledge injection tools, and seamless integration capabilities with underlying protocols (such as InterAgent). Developers or enterprise users do not need to build complex agent "brains" from scratch, but instead can combine and fine-tune standardized "organs" (such as language understanding modules, task planning engines, tool call interfaces) provided by the ADK. Secondly, testing and verification sandboxes are key to ensuring the quality and reliability of factory-out agents. In this sandbox simulating a real collaborative environment, agents must undergo rigorous stress tests, security assessments (such as defense against adversarial attacks), protocol compatibility checks, and specific scenario performance benchmark evaluations. Only agents that pass the sandbox test can obtain "factory certification," ensuring stable operation and compliance in real multi-agent environments. Finally, automated deployment and lifecycle management tools constitute the "conveyor belt" of the production line. They need to solve one-click deployment of agents in heterogeneous environments (cloud, edge, terminal), seamless version upgrades, dynamic resource scheduling, and runtime status monitoring. Particularly crucial is that the factory production line must deeply integrate the three cornerstone technologies of the agent economy: assigning each factory-out agent a unique digital identity based on DID, ensuring its identifiability and traceability; embedding standard communication protocol stacks (such as MCP), allowing them to inherently possess the ability to "communicate" with other agents; and automatically configuring exclusive, secure on-chain data containers for each agent, safeguarding the privacy and sovereignty of their knowledge assets and interaction data. This integrated technology stack of ADK, sandbox verification, automated deployment, and core elements collectively constitutes the intelligent "production line" that enables the efficient operation of the Agent Factory.
If the Agent Factory solves the "supply" issue of agents, then a thriving Agent Market focuses on the "circulation" and "value realization" of agent capabilities, serving as the source of vitality for the entire ecosystem. The fundamental purpose of the market is to break down "data silos" and "capability silos," building an open, trustworthy value exchange network. In this market, developers or factories can list their carefully crafted vertical-domain agents (such as advanced medical diagnostic agents, precise agricultural monitoring agents, complex financial derivative pricing agents) as "products" or "services"; enterprises or individual users can easily search, evaluate, rent, or purchase the required capability modules based on specific task needs. The core value of this exchange goes beyond simple buying and selling relationships, but rather stimulates the flywheel effect of multi-agent combination innovation. Imagine an entrepreneur needing to build an intelligent investment advisory platform: he does not need to develop all capabilities from scratch, but can rent a macroeconomic analysis agent, a risk assessment agent, a customer profile agent, and a compliance report generation agent from the market, dynamically combining them through standard protocols. When this combination is verified to be effective in practice, its "formula" itself can become a new, higher-value "combined agent service" circulating in the market. This cycle will gather a vast array of specialized capability modules, stimulating endless combinations. Each successful combination application attracts more developers to join the supply side, producing richer and higher-quality agents; greater diversity of supply attracts more demanders to enter, creating more complex application scenarios; the expansion of scenarios in turn nourishes the iterative upgrading of agents... A self-reinforcing value creation flywheel thus forms, driving the entire agent economy ecosystem towards prosperity and expansion.
Building an efficient, fair, and safe Agent Market is as complex and important as building an Agent Factory itself. The first challenge is to establish a trusted value evaluation and discovery mechanism. The market needs to provide multi-dimensional "capability certificates" for agents, including performance benchmark test reports, success cases in specific scenarios, user review systems, and transparently accessible records of on-chain collaboration history (based on DID). This helps demanders accurately match the required capabilities among many options. Secondly, an extremely simple, frictionless transaction process is crucial. This relies on the deep application of smart contracts: when users select a customer service agent service and set billing rules (such as per session, per resolution rate), the contract can automatically execute service calls, effectiveness verification (based on key metric achievements), and instant settlements, without manual intervention or third-party guarantees, greatly reducing transaction costs and trust friction. Thirdly, strong composition arrangement and collaborative assurance are the core capabilities of the market. The market is not just a "shelf," but should also act as an "assembly workshop." Users should be able to drag and connect multiple agents from different suppliers (such as sales agents + meeting agents + legal agents) through a visual interface, define interaction logic and data transfer rules (based on InterAgent protocols), and the market's underlying system must ensure seamless, reliable, and secure communication between these heterogeneous agents (relying on data containers to guarantee secure cross-domain data access). Lastly, a sound governance and dispute resolution mechanism is the cornerstone of the market's long-term health. This includes automatic performance rewards and penalties based on smart contracts, transparent arbitration using on-chain evidence, and exploration of community governance models. Only by solving these four key issues - evaluation, transaction, composition, and governance - can the Agent Market truly become the heart of driving value flow and ecosystem prosperity in the agent economy.