Monad Foundation Box: The moat of the Agent lies in "Influence + Iteration Speed," making the product itself highly replicable.

On April 21, at the roundtable discussion *Decoding Web 4.0: When AI Agents Take Over On-Chain Governance*, Box—Developer Relations for Monad Foundation Greater China—delved into the “Agent Moat” topic. He noted that the technical barrier to building AI agents is currently fairly low: the so-called “moat” for AI agents hinges not on the product itself, but rather on a founder or team’s understanding of AI, their ability to steer it, and their external influence. He pointed out that many agent products today are built quickly using open-source code and off-the-shelf tools, slashing development timelines. It’s not unusual to launch a product in just a few hours—but this also means the product form is easily replicated. When cloud providers or major model vendors step in, they can often replicate or even outpace these offerings in a short time, causing early-stage startups to quickly lose their competitive edge. Box further emphasized that in this landscape, the survival logic for agent projects is shifting: on one hand, they need to stay ahead via high-frequency iteration; on the other, they must expand market influence and user awareness as much as possible to establish a first-mover advantage before the industry fully matures. He believes that if a project’s update speed lags and it lacks distribution capabilities, once it catches the eye of big players and gets rapidly replicated, its lifecycle may shrink significantly—or even be rendered obsolete outright.