How Blockchain-Powered Queries Are Reshaping AI and Crypto Integration: 11 Emerging Scenarios

The internet’s economic foundation is shifting beneath our feet. As AI concentrates into narrower control channels, a fundamental question emerges: Will artificial intelligence democratize our digital world, or will it lock it behind new corporate walls? This is where blockchain and on-chain query systems enter the equation. While blockchain networks are often discussed as financial infrastructure, their ability to enable trustless, decentralized querying of persistent data makes them uniquely suited to solve the coordination problems that arise when AI systems need to interoperate at scale. The following 11 scenarios illustrate how blockchain-powered querying could reshape the intersection of AI and decentralized systems—from enabling AI to remember individual user contexts across platforms, to building trustless markets where AI agents negotiate directly with one another.

Part 1: The Foundation Layer—Identity and Context

1. Teaching AI to Remember: Persistent Context Across Platforms

Modern AI systems face a structural memory problem. When you switch between ChatGPT and Claude, or even open a new window in the same application, the AI forgets your preferences, your past projects, and your communication style. Each conversation begins from scratch.

Blockchain solves this by enabling AI systems to query and reference persistent digital assets that contain contextual information. Imagine user preferences—your preferred coding language, design aesthetic, communication tone, even specialized domain knowledge—stored as on-chain records that any AI application can instantly query and load. These assets become interoperable across platforms precisely because blockchain protocols are designed for open query access.

The practical value extends far beyond convenience. In knowledge work, AI that can query your accumulated expertise compounds its usefulness over time. In gaming, character preferences and difficulty settings become portable tokens. Even within enterprise AI systems, this persistent context—queried on-chain—represents a fundamental shift from siloed, non-transferable data to genuinely portable relationships with AI.

Companies like Poe have begun experimenting with context portability, but their systems remain centralized. A blockchain-backed alternative would allow users to own and license their personal AI context layers, monetizing their data while maintaining control over how it’s queried and used.

2. The Universal Agent Passport: Portable Identity for AI Agents

The rise of autonomous AI agents creates a new identity problem. Today, an agent’s identity is typically bound to a single platform—Amazon assigns product IDs, Facebook owns user identities, and each system maintains its own discovery and payment mechanisms. But when agents need to operate across multiple platforms, negotiate with other agents, and accumulate reputation over time, this walled-garden approach breaks down.

What agents need is a blockchain-based identity layer that functions as a passport. This identity would be:

• Queryable across platforms: Any interface—email, Slack, another agent—can query the agent’s identity, capabilities, and reputation
• A wallet and API registry: The agent’s on-chain identity doubles as a payment address and a registry of its capabilities
• Reputation-bearing: Past transactions and performance become queryable history

When a new agent enters a marketplace, other agents can query its capabilities, transaction history, and reliability without starting from zero. This permissionless composability enables the kind of fluid agent-to-agent markets that centralized platforms can’t match.

3. Forward-Compatible Proof of Humanity: Decentralized Identity Infrastructure

As deepfakes and AI-generated content proliferate, distinguishing humans from bots becomes essential infrastructure. Decentralized proof-of-humanity systems offer a solution: privacy-preserving, on-chain identity verification that any platform can query.

Unlike centralized government ID systems—which can be revoked or weaponized—blockchain-based proof of humanity gives users control over their identity while enabling open query access. When a dating app wants to verify a user is human, it can query a decentralized identity protocol like World ID on-chain, receiving a cryptographic proof without exposing personal details.

The key advantage is forward compatibility. This identity infrastructure can be built once and queried by platforms that don’t yet exist. As more applications adopt the same identity standard, network effects accelerate adoption—each new app accepting the proof makes the underlying identity more valuable to users, driving further adoption.

Recent initiatives like Solana Attestation Service (SAS) extend this further by allowing users to privately link off-chain data (KYC records, investment eligibility) to on-chain identities through queryable attestations. The infrastructure is maturing rapidly; we’re likely approaching a tipping point where decentralized proof of humanity becomes the standard base layer for human verification online.

Part 2: The Interaction Layer—Communication and Coordination

4. Decentralized Physical Infrastructure for AI’s Computational Backbone

AI’s growth is hitting physical limits. Chip shortage and energy constraints bottleneck development, and access remains concentrated among a few cloud providers who can extract monopoly rents.

Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) invert this model. By aggregating idle compute from gaming PCs, individual data centers, and distributed resources, DePIN creates permissionless compute markets. Developers can query available computing resources globally, negotiate payments through blockchain, and train or run inference on decentralized networks.

This matters because it creates censorship resistance. When training infrastructure is decentralized and globally distributed, no single cloud provider can cut off a developer. The AI models created on DePIN networks become more accessible, more cost-effective, and resistant to single points of control.

5. Open Protocols for Agent-to-Agent Coordination

As AI agents become more sophisticated, they increasingly need to interact with one another—without human intervention. One agent might query another to request specialized computation, or recruit multiple specialized agents to execute a complex task (a stats agent for simulations, an image generator for marketing materials, a researcher for fact-checking).

Currently, these interactions happen through closed APIs or within proprietary ecosystems. But as the number and diversity of agents explodes, standardization becomes essential. This is where blockchain’s role becomes crucial: it enables open protocol standards for agent coordination.

Protocols like Halliday now provide blockchain-backed infrastructure for agent-to-agent workflows, complete with smart contract safeguards ensuring agents stay aligned with user intent. Companies like Catena and Skyfire are building blockchain systems that enable direct agent-to-agent payments without human intermediaries. Other projects are adding query standards so agents can reliably call functions on one another.

Coinbase has begun providing infrastructure support for these efforts, recognizing that permissionless agent coordination networks represent a major shift in how software will operate.

6. Synchronizing Vibe Apps: Blockchain as a Living Protocol Layer

The generative AI revolution has made coding faster than ever—orders of magnitude improvements in speed, and now natural language has replaced traditional syntax. But this velocity comes at a cost: vibe apps generate enormous entropy. Two AI-built applications with identical functionality might have completely different internal architectures and output formats.

Traditional standardization (file formats, operating systems, APIs) worked because standards were built once and lasted years. But in a world where AI is constantly regenerating code, the standardization layer must itself be alive—continuously updatable, widely accessible, and trusted.

Blockchain protocols, combined with smart contracts, can serve as the synchronization layer. When a vibe app is created through AI coding, it can embed blockchain-backed protocol connectors that query and reference a shared sync layer. As that shared layer evolves, every connected app automatically stays in sync.

This resembles today’s open-source library maintenance, but with continuous updates instead of periodic releases—and with built-in incentive mechanisms. Developers and users who contribute to improving the sync protocol can be directly compensated through smart contracts. Shared ownership aligns everyone’s interests with the protocol’s success, discouraging malicious or incompatible changes.

Part 3: The Economic Layer—Value Creation and Distribution

7. Micropayments and Revenue Sharing at Web Scale

When AI agents drive sales or engagement, the content sources that informed those decisions should capture value. Today, they don’t. AI systems scrape, synthesize, and profit from creator content without attribution or compensation. As this dynamic accelerates, the open internet’s economics collapse.

Blockchain enables revenue-sharing systems embedded in the web’s architecture. When an AI interaction leads to a purchase, smart contracts can instantly query all contributing information sources and distribute micropayments automatically. Attribution protocols track the full chain of contribution—from original creator to aggregator to platform—and smart contracts execute payments accordingly.

This requires several technical innovations:

• Nano-scale transactions: Layer 2 solutions and rollups enable payments in cents or fractions thereof
• Provenance querying: On-chain registries track content origin and attribution
• Programmable payment splits: Code-enforced rules ensure fair distribution without centralized gatekeepers

Projects like 0xSplits and AI-native financial institutions like Catena Labs are building the infrastructure to make this possible. The result: creators become direct participants in the AI value chain rather than victims of it.

8. Programmable Intellectual Property: Building Ownership Into Code

Generative AI creates a new IP crisis. It consumes content instantly and generates variants with a click, operating at speeds that traditional IP frameworks can’t track. Current IP systems rely on costly intermediaries and post-hoc enforcement—mechanisms designed for a world of scarcity, not abundance.

What’s needed is an open, public, programmable IP registry. Creators should be able to register ownership on-chain, attach licensing terms, and have their IP queryable by any AI system or platform. This isn’t about restricting derivatives—it’s about enabling new business models around sharing and remixing IP.

Story Protocol has emerged as a dedicated blockchain layer for IP registration and licensing. Artists are already using protocols like Alias, Neura, and Titles to license their styles and creative works for remixing. Incention’s Emergence project lets fans co-create a sci-fi universe, with all attribution recorded on-chain for transparent payment distribution.

The blockchain-based approach inverts the IP problem: instead of restricting access to protect ownership, it makes ownership transparent and queryable, enabling creators to monetize their work while retaining control.

9. Compensating Creators as Bots Consume the Web

Today’s most economically significant AI agents aren’t chatbots—they’re web crawlers. Millions of bots autonomously browse the web, collect data, and populate corporate AI training datasets. Nearly half of internet traffic comes from non-human agents. Most operate without permission, ignoring robots.txt directives, and leave site owners footing the bandwidth bill for uninvited guests.

The situation is unsustainable. Site owners are increasingly blocking AI crawlers en masse. In mid-2024, roughly 9% of the top 10,000 websites blocked bots. Today that figure exceeds 30%, with the trend accelerating as tools improve and frustration grows.

Blockchain offers a middle ground. Instead of binary blocking or free-riding, crawlers could operate as economic agents. Each crawler holds cryptocurrency and negotiates on-chain with a website’s gatekeeper agent. Through x402-like protocols, crawlers query pricing, negotiate access, and execute micropayments for data.

Meanwhile, humans can prove their identity through decentralized proof-of-humanity protocols and access content free. Creators are compensated at the point of data collection—finally capturing value from their contributions to AI datasets. The open internet survives, but with a sustainable economic model.

Part 4: The Experience Layer—Personalization and Relationships

10. Privacy-First, User-Centric Personalization

Personalized ads exist, but they’re coarse: hyper-targeted tracking feels invasive, while irrelevant ads are just noise. What if personalization could be genuinely useful without being creepy?

Blockchain-backed AI agents can enable this by letting users define their own preferences locally—what they’re interested in, what they’re willing to see—and have their agents query and receive personalized promotions based on those explicit parameters. Critically, this happens without exposing user data globally.

The mechanism:

• Zero-knowledge proofs verify attributes: An ad network can query that a user meets demographic criteria (age range, interests, location) without accessing underlying data
• Micropayments reward engagement: Users are directly compensated for viewing ads or sharing data, shifting the model from extractive to participatory
• User agents maintain control: Each user’s AI agent mediates between themselves and advertisers, querying options but revealing only what the user permits

This transforms advertising from a data extraction game into a participatory economy. Advertisers gain more accurate, consented targeting. Users gain control and compensation. Creators gain sustainable monetization. The result isn’t fewer ads—it’s ads that are actually useful.

11. User-Owned and User-Controlled AI Companions

As AI companions become closer to genuine relationships—education, healthcare, emotional support, companionship—the question of who controls them becomes deeply personal. If a platform can censor, modify, or shut down your relationship with your AI companion, the relationship loses meaning.

Blockchain-based hosting offers a solution. While running local models on personal hardware is technically possible, it’s impractical for most people. But blockchain infrastructure can enable AI companions that are censorship-resistant and user-controlled without requiring individual GPU ownership.

Recent technological advances make this feasible:

• Simplified wallet interaction: Tools like Phantom have made blockchain interaction accessible to non-technical users
• Embedded wallets and account abstraction: Users can maintain self-custody without managing seed phrases
• High-throughput verification: Optimistic and zero-knowledge coprocessors can power meaningful, real-time interactions

The timeline is accelerating. Text-based companions are already sophisticated; visual representations are improving rapidly. Within years, the conversation will shift from “will lifelike AI companions exist?” to “who controls the infrastructure they run on?”

By then, the stakes of that question will be clear: in a world where people spend more time with AI than with face-to-face relationships, user control over that infrastructure becomes a human rights issue.

Conclusion: The Future of Human-Centric AI Infrastructure

These 11 scenarios share a common thread: each represents a problem that centralized platforms struggle to solve, yet that blockchain-powered query systems uniquely enable.

From persistent context that travels with users across platforms, to decentralized agent identities that operate without vendor lock-in, to IP registries that creators can query and monetize—the pattern is clear. Blockchain isn’t just financial infrastructure. It’s the technical foundation for building AI systems that are open, user-controlled, and designed for genuine interoperability.

The economic model of the internet was built for scarcity and centralization. As AI abundance accelerates, a new model is necessary—one where value flows directly to creators, where users own their relationships with AI, and where no single platform holds exclusive control over essential infrastructure.

Blockchain-powered querying makes this possible. The infrastructure is maturing. Early adopters are building. The next era of human-centric AI infrastructure has begun.