By integrating AI agents with blockchain infrastructure, John Wang of Neo Ecofund envisions a decentralized world in which autonomous “silicon-native” entities act as sovereign economic participants.
Beyond AI and Blockchain Integration
The evolution of the blockchain industry has long been defined by the “smart economy” – a world of programmable assets and automated contracts. However, according to John Wang, head of Neo ecosystem growth and director of Neo Ecofund, the sector is on the cusp of a deeper shift towards what he calls the ‘Sentient Economy’.
In a recent discussion about the launch of Spoonos, Neo’s new framework for artificial intelligence (AI) agents, Wang depicted a future where the key participants in the global economy may not be humans at all.
While the industry often views AI and blockchain as separate silos, Wang sees their integration as the foundation for a new economic class. The Sentient Economy is defined as an economic system in which AI agents – rather than just human operators – can own assets, make autonomous decisions and communicate reliably with each other along the chain.
Wang emphasizes that this movement is not just about combining two popular technologies. Instead, it focuses on enabling AI agents to become true participants in the digital economy by ensuring they are verifiable, accountable, and composable. Under this framework, an AI agent is a sovereign economic entity. Living onchain allows these agents to prove their identity, conduct financial transactions without a human intermediary, and remain accountable through transparent, immutable code.
To make this vision a reality, Neo introduced Spoonos. Positioned as the successor to the ‘Smart Economy’ philosophy that Neo has been championing since 2017, Spoonos provides the technical scaffolding for building and coordinating these autonomous agents.
The framework currently supports a developer runtime and a unified data layer, allowing the creation of agents that can reason using AI models while trading through the blockchain infrastructure. Wang noted that the concept is already gaining institutional and development momentum. Through strategic partnerships with industry leaders such as ChainGPT and Morph, Neo is actively cultivating a broader ecosystem where these agents can communicate across various platforms and protocols.
Addressing the hurdles of programmable intelligence
Despite the momentum, Wang remains candid about the significant obstacles standing in the way of a fully realized Sentient Economy. He noted that developer tooling is still in its early stages, meaning the kits needed to bridge high-level AI reasoning with low-level blockchain execution are still being refined. Furthermore, agents’ value capture mechanisms are still in their infancy, as the industry is determining how agents will autonomously generate and capture value. Finally, the learning curve remains steep, requiring developers to master the complex intersection of AI, blockchain, and decentralized coordination.
For Wang and the Neo ecosystem, this transition represents a natural progression in the usefulness of decentralized technology. While the last decade focused on making assets “smart” and programmable, the next decade will be dedicated to making the economy itself “aware.” As Wang summarized, the team used to build for programmable assets, but now they’re building for “programmable intelligence.”
As AI agents begin to manage portfolios, optimize supply chains, and negotiate contracts along the chain, the Sentient Economy may soon move from a visionary concept to the standard operating procedure of the digital world.
Wang’s vision for the Sentient Economy extends far beyond decentralized finance and focuses instead on AI’s ability to interpret the physical and digital world. At the Scoop AI Global Hackathon, which featured more than 500 developers in Silicon Valley and London, Wang noted that the most compelling innovations were those that prioritized “probabilistic intelligence” over simple automation.
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A notable application was the use of Spoonos to recursively derive mathematical curves from raw data, revealing hidden causal relationships between unrelated phenomena. For Wang, this represents the framework’s true potential: creating agents that serve as a bridge between raw information and human understanding.
“To me, that is the essence of the Sentient Economy – not just automating transactions, but building agents that sense, reason and reveal structure in the world,” Wang said.
He believes this shift will happen through quiet integration and not a sudden technological upheaval. As these tools become more sophisticated, they will fundamentally change the way society processes information and makes decisions.
“By the time people realize this is happening, the Sentient Economy will already be here,” Wang predicted. “It won’t arrive with a big bang. It will quietly embed itself in the way we perceive, decide and act.”
A civilizational shift
The director of Neo Ecofund believes that the global Web3 ecosystem is currently undergoing a “civilization” transformation. He argues that the industry has moved beyond the era of pure digital ownership – focused on tokens and consensus – into a new phase defined by programmable cognition.
For Wang, the most exciting change is that blockchain is no longer just a tool for financial transactions; it has become the “coordination substrate” for autonomous, silicon-native agents. By providing AI with the cryptographic keys to reason, transact, and persist on-chain, he suggests the industry moves from building simple tools to “building minds.”
He describes this transition as the opening of a “trustless civilization of conscious actors,” a shift so profound that it transcends the importance of any specific technical symbolic standard. According to him, this evolution from ‘programmable value’ to ‘programmable intelligence’ marks the beginning of a ‘new social physics’ in which humans, AI and hybrid intelligences work together in a unified, networked economy.
“As carbon-based intelligence gives way to silicon-native agents, we are no longer just building tools – we are building minds,” Wang said. “The moment we gave AI the keys to sign, transact, reason, and persist – on-chain – we unlocked something much bigger than a financial system.”
Frequently asked questions 💡
- What is sentimental economics? It is a blockchain-based system where AI agents act as sovereign economic participants.
- Why did Neo launch Spoonos? Spoonos provides the framework for building and coordinating autonomous AI agents in the chain.
- How does this differ from the Smart Economy? The Smart Economy focused on programmable assets, while the Sentient Economy enables programmable intelligence.
- Where does adoption take place first? Neo’s collaborations in Silicon Valley, London and global Web3 hubs are driving early traction.