Big tech is ‘terrified’ of AI agents wiping out ad revenue, says Billions Network CEO
Evin McMullen’s view on AI agents disrupting Google’s and Facebook’s business model was previously shared by Cardano Founder Charles Hoskinson and Cloudflare CSO Stephanie Cohen.
Big tech is ‘terrified’ of AI agents wiping out ad revenue, says Billions Network CEO
Evin McMullen’s view on AI agents disrupting Google’s and Facebook’s business model was previously shared by Cardano Founder Charles Hoskinson and Cloudflare CSO Stephanie Cohen.
Evin McMullen of Billions Network said Big Tech firms are trying to find new ways to profit from advertising as AI agents become a greater reality. (Olivier Acuna/CoinDesk)
What to know:
Tech and telecom giants are increasingly alarmed that AI agents, which do not respond to visual ads, are undermining the display advertising model that has long funded the internet.
As AI agents scrape, summarize and keep users inside automated workflows, non-human traffic now exceeds human engagement, threatening traditional web discovery and revenue systems.
Billions Network, whose cryptographic tools are used by more than 9,000 corporate and sovereign developers, is emerging as a key on-chain infrastructure provider for accountable AI agents, with clients ranging from TikTok and HSBC to Indian government programs.
As autonomous AI agents replace human-driven semantic search, the traditional system of monetizing user eyeballs breaks down completely, she added.
“They are terrified—existentially threatened,” McMullen said bluntly, describing the internal reaction of media and telecommunications conglomerates approaching her firm. “AI agents don’t have eyes.
They are not swayed by the visual decoration on the edges of the main body of information that they seek. The interest is less in finding new surfaces to place display ads on, and more of an existential question of how discovery happens. Are we inverting the internet?”
“Amazon, Google, Facebook, they’re terrified of the agentic revolution,” Hoskinson said, adding that they are investing heavily because “all of their business models are going to be disrupted.”
With the rise of AI agents, software can scrape a webpage, summarize content and keep the source user inside a chatbot or automated workflow instead of sending a person back to the original site.
The core challenge facing the modern web isn’t the technical sophistication of machine intelligence, but a complete absence of programmatic accountability. McMullen pointed out that more than 51% of current online and onchain interactions are driven by unidentified, unaccountable automated bots.
Scaling On-Chain Infrastructure to Legacy Systems
Billions Network has quietly grown to support the third-largest on-chain agent population on the internet, trailing only Binance and Base. According to McMullen, the network’s open-source cryptographic libraries are already utilized by more than 9,000 corporate and sovereign developers worldwide.
In the corporate sector, Billions Network’s technology infrastructure is utilized by platforms like TikTok, the financial giant HSBC, and the decentralized tracking protocol DeBank. It also collaborates with India’s Ministry of Labor to secure credential access for national social security programs, alongside a deployment with the Indian Railway system that protects the digital identities of over 1.2 million personnel.
Coinbase Ventures, the exchange’s venture arm, bought Ethena tokens on the open market as the protocol is set to roll out a Coinbase integration next week.
What to know:
Coinbase Ventures said Tuesday it had backed Ethena by purchasing ENA tokens on the open market.
Ethena products will become available to Coinbase’s 100 million-plus users through a new service launching next week.
The protocol also expanded its partnership with Anchorage Digital to support institutional lending activity.
