Every layer the agent economy is built on — researched, one asset at a time.
Autonomous agents do not run on a single chain or a single idea. They run on a stack — settlement, execution, compute, intelligence, memory, data, verification, and the networks that let agents find and pay each other.
Each layer below is a distinct piece of that infrastructure, and each links to a full evergreen article on the asset that best represents it: what you actually own, what would prove the thesis right or wrong, and how serious investors hold it. Structural relevance and price are separate questions — market structure is maintained in the companion MKT.TRADE outlooks.
One agent is a tool; a network of agents is infrastructure. FET ties together agent discovery, coordination, and machine-to-machine work; Virtuals provides the launch, ownership, and commerce rails when agents become economic actors.
FET: Agent Networks → Virtuals: Agent Commerce →Agents declare what they want; solvers compete to fulfill it across chains. NEAR is the clearest base-layer expression of the intent thesis — usability and chain abstraction for autonomous action.
NEAR: Intents →Can an agent trust the records and computations underneath it? EigenCloud supplies verifiable trust through restaking — cryptoeconomic security and verifiable computation that lets agents rely on results rather than take them on faith.
EigenCloud: Verifiable Trust →A model is a product; an intelligence market is infrastructure. Bittensor turns the production of machine intelligence into a competitive market; Allora synthesizes many models into a single accuracy-weighted prediction; Sentient opens the reasoning components themselves to collaborative development.
Bittensor → Allora → Sentient →Agents run on compute. Render coordinates distributed GPU; Akash is an open cloud marketplace; Aethir supplies enterprise-grade GPU; Internet Computer hosts software and state on-chain; and Phala adds confidential, TEE-based execution for workloads that must stay private.
Render → Akash → Aethir → ICP → Phala →Memory is what allows intelligence to compound. Filecoin is a market for verifiable storage with cryptographic proof that data is being kept; Arweave funds permanence up front — pay once, store permanently — for records that must outlive the application.
Filecoin → Arweave →Agents need to know what is true before they act. Chainlink is the clearest investable expression of trusted-data and oracle infrastructure — verified external information delivered on-chain.
Chainlink: Data →Execution is the line between an agent that decides and an agent that acts. Solana is the clearest execution-first architecture — the high-performance environment where agent activity and DeFi actually settle into transactions.
Solana: Execution →Settlement is the foundation: where ownership is recorded and made final. Ethereum settles more stablecoin value and tokenized assets than any other network; and 0G is a purpose-built, full-stack chain for agents — compute, storage, data availability, and an EVM L1 in one.
Ethereum → 0G →The Agent Infrastructure Index is the managed expression of this research.
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