How blockchain can build a new economic OS for the internet

Since the late 20th century, the world has experienced successive and transformative network revolutions.

The open protocols of the early internet reorganized information and communications. Cloud computing democratized access to software, which allowed ideas to be expressed in code and distributed globally at near-zero marginal cost. Now, AI is emerging as a new kind of operating system – one that intermediates tasks, decisions and, ultimately, entire workflows.

Yet for all this progress, the internet still lacks a native system for coordinating economic activity. We have built a planetary nervous system for information, but no circulatory system for value. The result is a global economy that still depends on industrial-age infrastructure: fragmented ledgers, jurisdiction-bound intermediaries and contractual processes defined more by paper and trust than by computation and verifiability.

That gap is now closing. A new class of blockchain networks are emerging, not as speculative playgrounds, but as economic operating systems – economic OSs – for the public internet. Their role is simple and profound: to provide a neutral, tamper-resistant and programmable environment for money, assets, contracts and governance to exist natively online. In doing so, they will fundamentally alter the scale and velocity of economic activity in the world.

Every major technological epoch has produced a new kind of operating system.

The web became the operating system for information. Mobile systems have organized human interaction at a global scale. Cloud infrastructure has become the substrate for software creation and distribution, while AI models are rapidly becoming the operating systems for autonomous work and machine-to-machine coordination.

What blockchains introduce is the missing counterpart to these advances: a system for verifiable transactions and verifiable computation executed on an open public network. They allow individuals, firms and increasingly autonomous software to face one another economically without relying on a central authority to adjudicate truth or trust.

For the first time, it becomes possible for money, assets and contracts to exist as internet-native software objects – globally accessible, programmable and interoperable. This is not merely a financial innovation; it is the foundation for a new economic environment.

The modern global economy rests on two pillars: ownership rights and value exchange. These concepts have powered centuries of economic progress by enabling individuals to accumulate capital, participate in markets and pass on generational wealth. But the internet – for all its power – has never been able to encode these rights natively. People are everywhere, yet economic opportunity remains unevenly distributed.

Blockchain networks now provide the basic architecture for a new digital commons where ownership and value exchange can finally become universal internet primitives. Stable digital currencies, tokenized assets and smart contracts represent the first scalable prototypes of this idea. They allow anyone with a mobile device to access global forms of value, transact in real time and participate in economic networks that are not constrained by geography or gatekeepers.

Crucially, this emerging economic OS must be underpinned by technological neutrality and global trust. Its infrastructure must be governed by diverse stakeholders and capable of persisting beyond the influence of any single company or government. Without this, the promise of universal economic participation cannot be realized.

If the history of the internet has taught us anything, it’s that open networks overwhelm existing systems, not by incremental improvement but by exponential expansion. The openness of the web produced an explosion in information creation. The shift to cloud-delivered software created a rapid increase in digital services and global developer participation, while social media radically increased the scale of human communication.

The same pattern is now unfolding with economic activity. When money becomes programmable, when assets become interoperable and when contracts become executable code on a public network, the velocity of economic coordination increases by orders of magnitude. Entire categories of interaction – payments, financing, insurance, logistics, labour markets – become capable of operating at internet speed.

This transformation is not abstract. It implies a world where machine-intermediated transactions become ubiquitous; where businesses can form, operate and distribute value as internet-native entities; where individuals gain seamless access to global markets; and where economic actors, human or machine, can transact securely without pre-existing trust.

Economic velocity has always been the beating heart of global prosperity. As these systems scale, we should expect not just incremental efficiency but a fundamental reshaping of economic organization itself.

The rise of AI – and soon, autonomous AI agents – will expedite this transition dramatically. As AI systems become more capable of reasoning, coordination and autonomous action, they will require an environment where they can reliably execute transactions and interact with other agents and humans in a verifiable way.

This is precisely what an economic OS provides. It acts as a “truth machine” for autonomous economic behaviour. AI agents will need to engage in contracting, provisioning, purchasing and fulfilling tasks. They will need to manage value, enter into agreements and allocate resources. These activities are only possible at scale if the underlying economic substrate is globally accessible, programmable and cryptographically assured.

In this sense, AI and blockchain networks are converging into a single, new infrastructure layer for the global economy – one where humans remain in the governance loop, while machines increasingly intermediate execution.

The emergence of an economic operating system for the internet represents one of the most consequential platform shifts of the 21st century. It offers a path toward broader economic participation, greater transparency and unprecedented scale in global commerce. It can help transform stranded human potential into economic opportunity and provides the architecture needed for an era in which economic actors will increasingly include intelligent software.

The internet reorganized information; AI is reorganizing work. Now, a new economic OS is emerging that will reorganize value itself. The societies that embrace this transformation – with sound policy, technological openness and respect for individual economic rights – will be best positioned to unlock the next great expansion of global prosperity.