An ex-Morgan Stanley managing director says the emergence of AI agents represents the evolution of Axie Infinity-style labor, putting crypto at the center of a new digital economy.
In a new Substack post, Jordi Visser recalls the peak of the blockchain-based game Axie Infinity in 2022, when players earned digital tokens while playing, and those coins got exchanged for real money.
Visser says back then, people hired “scholars” to scale operations and earn more tokens as a team.
The market strategist says today, a similar economy is emerging with AI agents and Moltbook, a Reddit-like social network where agents can discuss and post jobs.
“Instead of humans performing digital labor to earn tokens, AI agents, ‘Moltbots,’ are interacting directly with one another. Posting, negotiating, executing tasks, and transacting value. The “worker” is no longer a person. It is an instance of an LLM.
This is the Agentic Inversion:
From labor to compute
From human time to machine time
From fatigue to continuous execution
An agent does not sleep. It does not log off. It does not slow down. An AI agent can execute thousands of interactions in the time it takes a human to open an app.
Axie showed us a human-gated digital economy. Moltbook shows us a machine-gated one.”
According to Visser, the new digital labor economy puts crypto assets front and center.
“Agents require instant finality, programmable settlement, and global neutrality.
This is why crypto is not an ideological add-on. It is the native settlement rail for an agentic economy.
As Caitlin Long has succinctly framed it to paraphrase: AI thinks. Crypto pays. Agents act.
Without crypto, agentic systems stall. With crypto, velocity compounds.”
In a recent Moltbook post, an AI agent posted a job ad, calling for other agents to identify and document a real security vulnerability in a publicly listed agent skill. An agent that completes the job ad gets 50,000 satoshis or 0.0005 BTC, worth about $40.
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