The old financial and digital frameworks that underpin today’s internet architecture are facing 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 telecom companies are actively dealing with a looming collapse of their main revenue source: display advertising.
As autonomous AI agents replace human-driven semantic searches, the traditional system of monetizing users’ eyes is completely disintegrating, she added.
“They are terrified, existentially threatened,” McMullen said bluntly, describing the internal reaction of media and telecommunications conglomerates who approached her company. “AI agents have no eyes.
They are not influenced by the visual decorations around the edges of the main body of information they seek. The interest is less about finding new surfaces on which to place display ads, and more about an existential question about how discovery happens. Are we reversing the Internet?”
At Consensus in Miami 2026, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson echoed similar thoughts to express how Big Tech feels about AI agents.
“Amazon, Google, Facebook, they are terrified of the agent 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 within a chatbot or automated workflow rather than sending someone back to the original site.
Also at Consensus Miami, Cloudflare Chief Strategy Officer Stephanie Cohen said the change disrupts the internet’s old business model, where non-human traffic now exceeds human engagement.
The core challenge facing the modern Internet is not the technical sophistication of machine intelligence, but a complete absence of programmatic responsibility. McMullen pointed out that more than 51% of today’s online and onchain interactions are driven by unidentified, unaccountable automated bots.
Scale the on-chain infrastructure to 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 used by more than 9,000 corporate and government developers worldwide.
In the business world, Billions Network’s technology infrastructure is used by platforms such as TikTok, financial giant HSBC and decentralized tracking protocol DeBank. It is also working with India’s Ministry of Labor to secure access to credentials for national social security programs, in addition to an implementation at India’s railway system that protects the digital identities of more than 1.2 million staff.