The legacy financial and digital frameworks that underpin the current Internet architecture face a looming existential crisis.
Evin McMullen, co-founder and CEO of Billions Network, told CoinDesk in an interview during the Proof of Talk conference in Paris that global tech giants and telecommunications companies are actively struggling to deal with an imminent collapse of their main revenue driver: display advertising.
As autonomous AI agents replace human-powered semantic search, the traditional eyeball monetization system is completely breaking down, he added.
“They are terrified, existentially threatened,” McMullen said bluntly, describing the internal reaction of the media and telecommunications conglomerates that approached his company. “AI agents don’t have eyes.
They do not get carried away with visual decoration at the edges of the main body of information they seek. The interest is not so much in finding new surfaces to place display ads on, but rather in an existential question of how discovery occurs. Are we reversing the Internet?
During Miami Consensus 2026, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson reflected similar thoughts to express how Big Tech feels about AI agents.
“Amazon, Google, Facebook are terrified of the agent revolution,” Hoskinson said, adding that they are investing heavily because “their entire business models will 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 instead of sending the person back to the original site.
Also at Consensus Miami, Cloudflare Chief Strategy Officer Stephanie Cohen said the shift is breaking the old Internet business model, as non-human traffic now exceeds human participation.
The main challenge facing the modern web is not the technical sophistication of artificial intelligence, but the complete absence of programmatic responsibility. McMullen noted that more than 51% of current online and on-chain interactions are powered by unaccountable, unidentified automated bots.
Scaling on-chain infrastructure to legacy systems
Billions Network has quietly grown to support the third largest population of on-chain brokers 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 sovereign developers around the world.
In the corporate sector, Billions Network’s technological infrastructure is used by platforms such as TikTok, financial giant HSBC, and decentralized tracking protocol DeBank. It is also collaborating with India’s Ministry of Labor to ensure access to credentials for national social security programs, along with an implementation with the Indian railway system that protects the digital identities of more than 1.2 million people.
