The legacy financial and digital frameworks that support today’s Internet architecture face a looming existential crisis.
Evin McMullen, co-founder and CEO of Billions Network, told CoinDesk in an interview at the Proof of Talk conference in Paris that tech giants and global telecommunications companies are actively scrambling to deal with the impending collapse of their main revenue driver: display advertising.
As autonomous AI agents replace human semantic search, the traditional system of monetizing user eyes completely breaks down, she added.
“They are terrified, existentially threatened,” McMullen said bluntly, describing the internal reaction of media and telecommunications conglomerates approaching his company. “AI agents don’t have eyes.
They don’t get swayed by visual decoration that sits on the sidelines of the main body of information they’re looking for. The interest lies less in finding new surfaces on which to place display ads than in an existential question about how discovery happens. Are we reversing the Internet? »
At the Miami Consensus 2026, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson reflected similar thoughts to express how big tech thinks about AI agents.
“Amazon, Google, Facebook are terrified of the agentic revolution,” Hoskinson said, adding that they are investing heavily because “all their business models are going to be disrupted.”
With the rise of AI agents, software can scrape a web page, summarize the content, and keep the source user in a chatbot or automated workflow instead of sending a person back to the original site.
Also at Consensus Miami, Stephanie Cohen, Cloudflare’s chief strategy officer, said the change breaks the old business model of the internet, with non-human traffic now outpacing human engagement.
The main challenge facing the modern web is not the technical sophistication of artificial intelligence, but the complete lack of programmatic accountability. McMullen pointed out that more than 51% of current online and on-chain interactions are driven by unidentified and unaccountable automated bots.
Scaling on-chain infrastructure to existing systems
Billions Network has gradually grown to support the third largest on-chain agent population on the internet, behind Binance and Base. According to McMullen, the network’s open source cryptographic libraries are already used by more than 9,000 enterprise developers and sovereigns worldwide.
In the enterprise sector, Billions Network’s technology infrastructure is used by platforms like TikTok, financial giant HSBC, and decentralized tracking protocol DeBank. The company is also working with India’s Ministry of Labor to ensure access to credentials for national social security programs, alongside a rollout with India’s railway system that protects the digital identities of more than 1.2 million people.
