Bank of AI and Peking University’s PKUBlockchain association have published a report on the Web4.0 “agent economy,” titled “Web4.0: When AI Agents Become Economic Entities — Infrastructure, Market Landscape, and Investment Outlook.” Its main claim is clear: as AI systems move beyond assistive software and begin holding assets, earning income and making transactions, crypto infrastructure will need to be rebuilt around them.
The report frames AI agents as on-chain economic actors
Under the paper’s framework, AI agents are not treated as simple software assistants. They are described as on-chain entities that should be able to send and receive payments, prove identity, call off-chain tools and accumulate verifiable records, closer in function to human-operated wallets or even companies. To support that model, the authors point to three infrastructure layers they say are still missing or immature: the x402 payment protocol for stablecoin transfers, ERC-8004 as an on-chain identity standard for agents, and MCP (Model Context Protocol) for tool invocation.
The report also presents Bank of AI’s own stack as a reference implementation. According to the paper, the company combines “five core components” into a unified “Agent financial operating system,” linking those protocols from specification to live product. It also cites outside work on agent-driven markets. One example is FinChain’s “Agentic RWA Stack,” which projects that AI agents could manage “tens of trillions of U.S. dollars” in assets and commercial flows by 2030. That projection is used to explain why payment and identity rails are drawing attention now.
Tron and USDT are positioned as the settlement base
The report leans heavily on Tron as the current settlement backbone for an agent-led Web4.0. It says Tron handles more than $22 billion in daily stablecoin volume and carries roughly $86 billion of circulating USDT. In the authors’ view, that combination of scale and fee profile makes the network suitable for high-frequency micro-settlements between AI agents.
The source material also cites independent analytics pointing in the same direction. Research from Nansen and others found that TRON routinely processes more than $21 billion in daily stablecoin transfers, with over $80 billion in USDT supply and around 2 million to 2.2 million stablecoin transactions each day. Earlier reporting noted that Tron had overtaken Ethereum in USDT supply. On-chain data showed its USDT float rising past $73.8 billion in 2025 and later moving above $80 billion, making it Tether’s main settlement layer for routine dollar transfers.
Regulatory signals and capital allocation add context
The same trend appears in regulation and funding. The article says USDT on Tron has been recognized as an accepted fiat-referenced token under Abu Dhabi’s ADGM framework. At the same time, U.S. lawmakers are increasing scrutiny of Tether’s global footprint. The source also points to TRON DAO’s $1 billion AI fund, aimed at projects combining AI agents with on-chain payments, which lines up with the area Bank of AI is trying to formalize in its report.
Across the paper, the focus is less about a single chain narrative and more about the basic rails needed for an agent economy to function: payments, identity and tool invocation. In that structure, Tron and USDT are placed at the center as the default route for day-to-day settlement between AI agents.