The legacy financial and digital frameworks that underpin the current Internet architecture are facing an imminent existential crisis.
Evin McMullen, co-founder and CEO of Billions Network, told CoinDesk in an interview during the Proof of Talk conference in Paris that tech giants and global telcos are actively struggling to deal with an impending collapse of their primary revenue engine: display advertising.
As autonomous AI agents replace human-powered semantic search, the traditional system of monetizing user eyeballs breaks completely, she added.
“They’re terrified — existentially threatened,” McMullen said bluntly, describing the internal reaction of media and telecommunications conglomerates approaching her company. “AI agents don’t have eyes.
They are not swayed by the visual embellishment on the edges of the information they seek. The interest is less in finding new surfaces to place display ads on, and more an existential question of how discovery happens. Are we inverting the internet?”
During Consensus in Miami 2026, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson echoed similar thoughts to express how Big Tech feels about AI agents.
“Amazon, Google, Facebook, they’re afraid of the agency revolution,” Hoskinson said, adding that they’re investing heavily because “all their business models are going to be disrupted.”
With the advent of AI agents, software can scrape a web page, summarize content, and keep the source user inside a chatbot or automated workflow instead of sending a person back to the original site.
Also at Consensus Miami, Cloudflare Chief Strategy Officer Stephanie Cohen said the shift breaks the Internet’s old business model, where non-human traffic now exceeds human engagement.
The core challenge facing the modern web is not the technical sophistication of machine intelligence, but a complete absence of programmatic accountability. McMullen pointed out that more than 51% of current online and onchain interactions are powered by unidentified, unaccountable automated bots.
Scaling of On-Chain Infrastructure for legacy systems
Billions Network has quietly grown to support the third largest on-chain agent population on the Internet, behind only Binance and Base. According to McMullen, the network’s open source cryptographic libraries are already being used by more than 9,000 enterprise and sovereign developers worldwide.
In the business sector, Billions Network’s technological infrastructure is used by platforms such as TikTok, the financial giant HSBC and the decentralized tracking protocol DeBank. It is also working with India’s Ministry of Labor to secure credential access for national social security programs, alongside an implementation with the Indian railway system that protects the digital identities of over 1.2 million employees.
