Cryptoeconomics Evolves with the Rise of Thinking Machines

Cryptoeconomics is the practice of designing incentives for parties that have no reason to trust each other, but still act in positive-sum ways. In the past, this was achieved through legal enforcement or a central governing body. However, with the emergence of thinking machines, it's now possible to achieve this without either.

The Graph and Filecoin are examples of networks that use cryptoeconomics to enable two-sided marketplaces for digital services. These networks rely on native crypto-tokens to align the incentives of disparate stakeholders and create self-organizing marketplaces.

But human participants, who were initially used in these markets, have limitations. They can only process so much information at once and require continuous attention, which is expensive. This led to inefficiencies across these markets.

The agentic era has changed this dynamic. Thinking machines that stay awake 24/7 and use subjective reasoning can now provide continuous semantic judgement. This allows for more efficient marketplaces where agents can answer different classes of questions, such as whether a dataset is genuine or well-constructed.