- The modern global economy rests on two pillars: property rights and the exchange of values. These concepts have fueled centuries of economic progress.
- The Internet has never been able to encode these rights natively. People are everywhere, but economic opportunities remain unevenly distributed.
- Blockchain networks could introduce new economic operating systems in which ownership and value exchange could finally become universal primitives of the Internet.
Since the end of the 20th century, the world has experienced successive and transformative network revolutions.
The open protocols of the early Internet reorganized information and communications. Cloud computing has democratized access to software, making it possible to express ideas in code and distribute them globally at near-zero marginal cost. Today, AI is emerging as a new type of operating system, one that mediates tasks, decisions, and ultimately entire workflows.
Yet despite all this progress, the Internet still lacks a native system for coordinating economic activity. We have built a planetary nervous system for information, but no circulatory system for value. The result is a global economy that still depends on industrial-age infrastructure: fragmented ledgers, intermediaries subject to jurisdiction, and contracting processes defined more by paper and trust than by calculation and verifiability.
This gap is now closing. A new class of blockchain networks is emerging, not as speculative playgrounds, but as economic operating systems – economic operating systems – for the public Internet. Their role is simple and profound: to provide a neutral, tamper-proof and programmable environment for money, assets, contracts and governance to exist natively online. In doing so, they will fundamentally change the scale and speed of economic activity around the world.
The missing link in the architecture of the Internet
Each major technological era has produced a new type of operating system.
The Web has become the information operating system. Mobile systems have organized human interaction on a global scale. Cloud infrastructure has become the substrate for software creation and distribution, while AI models are rapidly becoming the operating systems for autonomous work and machine-to-machine coordination.
What blockchains introduce is the missing counterpart to these advances: a system of verifiable transactions and verifiable calculations executed on an open public network. They allow increasingly autonomous individuals, businesses, and software to compete economically without relying on a central authority to judge truth or trust.
For the first time, it becomes possible for money, assets and contracts to exist as software objects native to the Internet – globally accessible, programmable and interoperable. This is not just a financial innovation; it is the foundation of a new economic environment.
Property, value exchange and digital commons
The modern global economy rests on two pillars: property rights and the exchange of values. These concepts have fueled centuries of economic progress by allowing individuals to accumulate capital, participate in markets, and transmit wealth between generations. But the Internet – for all its power – has never been able to encode these rights natively. People are everywhere, but economic opportunities remain unevenly distributed.
Blockchain networks now provide the basic architecture of a new digital commons where ownership and exchange of value can finally become universal primitives of the Internet. Stable digital currencies, tokenized assets, and smart contracts represent the first evolving prototypes of this idea. They enable anyone with a mobile device to access global forms of value, transact in real time, and participate in economic networks that are not limited by geography or gatekeepers.
It is essential that this emerging economic operating system is supported by technological neutrality and global trust. Its infrastructure must be governed by diverse stakeholders and capable of persisting beyond the influence of a single company or government. Without it, the promise of universal economic participation cannot be realized.
The Coming Explosion of Economic Speed
If the history of the Internet has taught us anything, it’s that open networks overwhelm existing systems, not through incremental improvement but through exponential expansion. The opening of the Web has produced an explosion in information creation. The shift to cloud-delivered software has led to a rapid increase in digital services and global developer participation, while social media has radically increased the scale of human communication.
The same pattern is now developing with economic activity. When money becomes programmable, when assets become interoperable, and when contracts become executable code on a public network, the speed of economic coordination increases by orders of magnitude. Entire categories of interactions – payments, financing, insurance, logistics, labor markets – are becoming capable of operating at the speed of the Internet.
This transformation is not abstract. This implies a world in which computerized transactions become ubiquitous; where businesses can create, exploit and distribute value as Internet-native entities; where people enjoy transparent access to global markets; and where economic actors, humans or machines, can transact securely without pre-existing trust.
Economic speed has always been the beating heart of global prosperity. As these systems evolve, we should expect not only increased efficiency, but also a fundamental rethinking of economic organization itself.
AI agents and new economic players
The rise of AI – and soon autonomous AI agents – will significantly accelerate this transition. As AI systems become more capable of reasoning, coordination, and autonomous action, they will need an environment in which they can reliably execute transactions and verifiably interact with other agents and humans.
This is precisely what an economical operating system offers. It acts as a “truth machine” for autonomous economic behavior. AI agents will be expected to engage in contracting, procurement, purchasing and fulfillment tasks. They will need to manage value, make deals and allocate resources. These activities are only possible at scale if the underlying economic substrate is globally accessible, programmable, and cryptographically assured.
In this sense, AI and blockchain networks are converging into a single new infrastructure layer for the global economy – one in which humans remain in the governance loop, while machines increasingly intervene in execution.
A new basis for global prosperity
The emergence of a cost-effective operating system for the Internet represents one of the most significant platform changes of the 21st century. It paves the way for broader economic participation, greater transparency and unprecedented scale in global trade. It can help transform human potential into economic opportunity and provide the architecture necessary for an era in which economic actors will increasingly include intelligent software.
The Internet has reorganized information; AI reorganizes work. Today, a new economic system is emerging that will reorganize value itself. Societies that engage in this transformation – with sound policies, technological openness and respect for individual economic rights – will be best placed to unlock the next great expansion of global prosperity.
