This month, we asked our Mavens:
How has your view on the significance of AI agents changed in the past week?
How has this changed your plans for web3 gaming in 2026?
Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO, CCP Games
Until recently, AI coding agents felt like tools that would make us more efficient. What has changed is the speed at which they are becoming autonomous actors that are not just capable of generating code, but of iterating, coordinating, and executing strategy on their own. This transforms AI from a backstage assistant to a frontline civilizational force, and it makes AI agents the ultimate force multiplier for human agency within EVE Frontier.
We designed EVE Frontier as a virtual world that lives completely in the hands of players, who are free to build, experiment, and expand it as they envision it should be. Agents are the perfect companions to empower the architects and builders of this permissionless, moddable universe. Every player who enters the Frontier with an idea of how they want to impact it now has the agency to do so, regardless of their technical background.
In March, we are kicking off an $80,000 hackathon with Sui. A few months ago, you would expect this competition to be dominated by supercoders, but as of this week, it could be won by a single gamer with a big idea and a fleet of coding agents. When you are tasked to rebuild civilization itself within a shattered region of space, this is exactly the kind of emergent power you want.
This does not reduce the importance of blockchain, it intensifies it. Blockchains provide the neutral, persistent substrate where both humans and AI agents can operate under transparent rules. The key design challenge now isn’t preventing automation, but ensuring equilibrium: binding all agency – human or synthetic – to energy costs and economic physics that produce diminishing returns to scale.
So our plans evolve from “empowering players to mod the world” to “designing a world where humans and AI agents can coexist without collapse.” AI democratizes creation; Web3 guarantees ownership and enforcement; game design ensures balance. The frontier in 2026 will be post-human by default.
Robby Yung, CEO, Animoca Brands
I’m not sure my view on the significance of AI agents has changed much as of late. Similar to my long term thesis on the inevitability of tokenisation / digital assets, I think the question about AI agents is not when of “if” but more one of “when.”
The huge interest in Clawdbot and Moltbook has just confirmed what I think we all surmised which is that widespread agent use is “around the corner,” similar to crypto mass adoption. However, the presence of amazing use cases amongst a niche audience is really the canary in the coalmine, and widespread adoption of agents we can trust, with the appropriate guardrails and cybersecurity is still a ways off.
If anything, the claim from Anthropic that AI is now generating all their new code is probably the more jarring of the updates I’ve seen recently, and it’s a reminder of just how quickly progress is being made.
Rebecca Liao, co-founder and CEO, Saga
AI agents have evolved from being a conversational layer into becoming economic actors, and that shift is what makes them meaningful for web3 gaming in 2026.
Last year proved that players are willing to form persistent relationships with characters that can guide them through worlds and exist beyond a single gameplay session. What was missing was continuity. Agents could create engagement, but they couldn’t hold assets, execute transactions, or participate in the game economy.
As on-chain infrastructure matures, that limitation disappears. When an agent can manage a wallet, complete a purchase, maintain a membership, or allocate rewards based on player behavior, it evolves from being an interface to becoming part of the world’s logic. That’s a fundamentally new design primitive for games because it connects narrative, player activity, and economic systems into a single loop.
Just as importantly, we’re seeing a move toward higher-fidelity agents as characters with memory, identity, and consequence, guided by original creators and capable of evolving over time. That creates deeper player relationships and more sustainable user acquisition, which is one of the biggest structural challenges in gaming today.
The real impact in 2026 is that web3 gaming moves from static economies to autonomous ones. When characters can earn, spend, and allocate value on-chain, the world itself becomes a live commercial system that improves retention, monetization, and user acquisition
Jack O’Holleran, CEO, SKALE Labs
Over the past week, it’s become clear that AI agents are not a future edge case but the primary users of blockchains going forward. That realization sharpens everything we are building toward at SKALE. If we want to bring a billion agents onchain, the infrastructure has to be invisible, massively scalable, and private by default through BITE-enabled cryptographic guarantees, with zero gas fees as a foundational requirement.
In web3 gaming by 2026, most in-game actions will be driven by autonomous agents making decisions in real time, and that only works if those agents can operate without friction, without being front-run, and without exposing sensitive strategy.
Very soon, agents will not just assist players, they will be playing games themselves. Humans will collaborate with their agents on strategy, optimize performance together, and even sleep while their agents continue farming, competing, and evolving onchain.
SKALE was built for exactly this moment. BITE-enabled privacy, combined with zero gas fees and instant finality, creates an environment where AI-driven games can actually scale to mainstream adoption. The next generation of games will not just onboard players, they will onboard millions of intelligent agents.
David Bolger, head of gaming and consumer partnerships, Offchain Labs
Fundamentally, it seems highly likely that AI agents will continue to proliferate into society, and that they will naturally choose blockchain rails rather than the SWIFT banking system. The reasons for this are due to the ease of obtaining their own wallet vs KYC’ing with a bank. So machine finance will surely become a large driver of blockspace consumption in the long term, and that will likely bring downstream growth effects to web3 gaming.
However, in the short term, I believe we need to see AI agents be more ingrained in our daily lives and consumer habits before they will start to make payments on our behalf. Most AI agent use cases don’t seem to have much payment focus yet, so I think that has to happen first for blockchain to see the downstream effects.
From a blockchain infrastructure perspective, there don’t appear to be significant blockers on this adoption – the agents are already more than capable of understanding blockchain documentation, initiating their own wallet and making transactions. Having a consumer-driven force behind this and a commerce system willing to accept agentic payments is the key moment we are watching for.
Christina Macedo, CEO, PLAY Network
My mindset has always been simple: how can AI agents simplify and accelerate game ops, dev ops, go-to-market, and marketing? AI is no longer a novelty or a trend – it’s a commodity. And like any commodity, the advantage no longer comes from having it, but from knowing how to use it well.
Everyone needs to start learning how to work with AI. It’s no longer optional; it should be part of our everyday workflow. The real challenge now isn’t adoption, it’s restraint. How do we use AI to simplify what we do, rather than overcomplicate it?
For developers especially, AI should be viewed as an unblocker. What was once too expensive is now viable. What was once impossible to scale or distribute is now achievable. What once took months of iteration can now be explored in weeks – or days. The right question isn’t “Can AI do this?” but “How does AI get me to B faster, cheaper, and better?”
That mindset should be ingrained in the development process. When am I using AI to get to B – so I can focus my time, energy, and creativity on getting to C?
This is a uniquely powerful moment for game developers. With operational and development bottlenecks dramatically reduced, teams finally have the space to experiment, to explore new genres, mechanics, and experiences that previously felt out of reach.
Strong AI agents don’t replace creativity; they create room for it.
The reality is that AI agents are becoming as essential to our work as phones and computers. The only question left is how quickly and effectively you embrace it and whether you use it to reach a truly great C, or just a slightly better B.
Alexander Goldybin, founder and chairman, iLogos
The past week did not change my long-term view on AI agents, but it clarified where they actually help.
Agents are useful when they remove bottlenecks. Generating variations of a mechanic, adjusting progression values, preparing internal test builds, or creating playable ads for early acquisition tests.
For web3 gaming in 2026, the practical impact is cost control and validation speed. Many blockchain teams operate with limited runway and high burn. If iteration cycles shrink from weeks to days, you gain time. If you simulate economic behavior before deploying contracts, you avoid expensive corrections later.
At iLogos, we’ve been building internal AI-driven tooling in this direction through Code Maestro. We use it to support prototyping, system iteration, and production tasks across web3, mobile, and PC projects. The goal is not automation for its own sake. The goal is tighter feedback loops and fewer avoidable mistakes.
I do not see agents replacing core design decisions. They are operational tools. Teams that use them to improve discipline and validation will benefit. Teams that treat them as a shortcut to product-market fit will struggle.
You can check out previous Maven articles here and follow our coverage of AI agents here.
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