Monad Foundation Box: The moat for Agent lies in "influence + iteration speed," and the product itself is very easy to replicate

Mars Finance reported that on April 21, during the roundtable discussion titled “Decoding Web 4.0: When AI Agents Take Over On-Chain Permissions,” Box from Monad Foundation’s Developer Relations (Greater China) said in relation to the topic of “Agent Moats” that, at present, the overall technical threshold for AI Agents is relatively low. Its so-called “moat” does not mainly come from the product itself; instead, it depends more on the founder’s or team’s understanding of AI, their ability to control it, and their external influence.

He noted that at this stage, many Agent products are essentially put together quickly by leveraging open-source code and existing tools, which has greatly shortened development cycles. Even the phenomenon of “building a product in just a few hours” is not uncommon. However, this also means that product forms are extremely easy to copy. After cloud providers or large model vendors get involved, products can often be replicated, and even surpassed, in a very short time—leading early-stage startups to quickly lose their competitive advantage.

Box further emphasized that in this kind of environment, the survival logic of Agent projects is changing. On the one hand, they need to stay ahead through high-frequency iteration. On the other hand, they need to expand market influence and users’ awareness as much as possible, establishing a first-mover advantage before the industry has fully matured. He believes that if a product’s update pace is insufficient and it lacks the ability to disseminate, once it is noticed by big companies and they quickly follow up, its lifecycle may be significantly shortened—or it may be eliminated altogether.