We discuss how the machine economy has already surpassed humanity in scale, with connected devices, AI agents, and automated systems outnumbering and outperforming human labor. We explain that economic value is increasingly accruing to owners of machines and digital capital rather than to human workers, consistent with decades of research on capital–labor dynamics and the observed stagnation in human-driven GDP. Ultimately, we argue that robot money, AI agents, and emerging ownership structures for autonomous systems define the frontier — and that whoever owns the robots will rule the world.

In this 32 page research report, we analyze the current Web2 AI industry, highlight the opportunities from decentralization and the differences in sector structure, and focus on the investment performance differences across the Western, Eastern, and Decentralized AI financial instruments.

In this 51 page year-end industry overview report, we analyze the global macroeconomic environment, capital markets, and fundamentals in Web3 and AI. There are now over 1.3 billion addresses across major computational chains and daily active users have grown from 4.5 million to 7.5 million; stablecoins surpass $150 billion. We also introduce our investment index across Western, Eastern, and Decentralized AI.

Generative Ventures is excited to announce our strategic investment in Peaq's $15M series A round. Peaq is a Layer 1 aggregating DePINs, providing infrastructure for machine identities, financial capabilities, and eventually aggregated ecosystem demand generation. This investment, which we co-led with Borderless Capital, reflects our conviction in the emergent Economy of Things (EoT) and the Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePINs) upon which it is built.

There will be only more robots, and Web3 is the correct economic and financial venue for their emerging machine economy. This macro thesis was compelling enough to get started, but there is reality on the ground and its patterns are starting to become more clear. Today, we want to dive more deeply into how this is already happening and describe the AI and DePIN trends driving the sector forward.

In this 55 page year-end industry overview report, we analyze the global macroeconomic environment and the developments across traditional and crypto capital markets. We then explore Web3 fundamental progress, looking at adoption and DeFi metrics, followed by an analysis of AI fundamentals and expansion.

We are entering the age of a new machine economy. Humans, software machines, and our ever-evolving hybrids are connected through fintech financial networks and anchored to blockchains. Digital production, powered and accelerated by generative AI, will lead to the creation of countless digital objects — from art and code to goods and services — that form the backbone of economic supply and demand. Crypto has built the money, DeFi has built the market venues, and NFTs have built the commercial packaging for this machine economy to flourish.