Author: Jay Jo, Tiger Research
Key Takeaways
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AI agents have evolved from simple tools to independent economic entities, opening up the possibility of an "autonomous digital economy." However, realizing this vision requires infrastructure capable of verifying agent behavior and ensuring trust.
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Talus has built this trust foundation. The Talus Network enables agent operations to be verified via blockchain, while Nexus allows developers to easily build and deploy on-chain agents.
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In this way, Talus expands the digital workforce into a digital economy. It changes the way we work and create value, preparing for the transition to an era of autonomous economies.
1. Prerequisites for an Autonomous Digital Economy
AI agents (hereinafter referred to as "agents") as "digital workers" are receiving increasing attention. They are capable of autonomously understanding complex situations, making independent judgments, and executing tasks. Trading agents can process transactions on behalf of users within milliseconds. Customer service agents utilize historical customer data and product information to handle thousands of inquiries simultaneously. Agents are becoming new economic entities capable of autonomously creating value, having already surpassed being mere tools for executing commands.
This development opens up the possibility for a new paradigm—an "autonomous digital economy." This paradigm envisions a fully autonomous economic ecosystem where agents can directly transact and collaborate with other agents or users without human intervention. Once realized, this paradigm will create highly efficient markets operating around the clock and surpassing the limitations of human labor. It will give rise to entirely new markets that do not yet exist but could grow to a scale of tens of trillions of dollars.
Source: Tiger Research
However, this remains an idealized goal. Agents require trust mechanisms to verify their actions and outcomes. Without these mechanisms, they cannot autonomously conduct economic activities. This need reflects the requirements of the real economy. Human labor evolved from simple actions into economic activities because society established institutional foundations. Laws regulate behavior, contracts ensure fulfillment, and money facilitates value exchange. Only on the basis of such a trust system can labor be transformed into economic value.
The question is how to achieve such trust mechanisms in a digital environment. Today, most agents rely on centralized service providers. Their decision-making processes are as opaque as black boxes. This fact further exacerbates the complexity of the challenge. In such an environment, methods for verifying agent behavior or ensuring their execution are limited. Ultimately, whether we can move toward these trillion-dollar markets and a truly autonomous digital economy depends on how we build the trust infrastructure.
2. Talus: Infrastructure for the Autonomous Digital Economy
Source: Tiger Research
Talus is a blockchain infrastructure project aimed at realizing an agent-based autonomous digital economy. Just as DeFi enabled banking without banks and NFTs proved ownership of digital assets, Talus leverages blockchain technology to build trust mechanisms for the agent ecosystem. This trust structure lays the foundation for agents to independently and verifiably conduct economic activities without human intervention.
However, Talus's goal is not limited to building trust mechanisms. Trust is a prerequisite for the autonomous digital economy, but trust alone cannot make the economy function properly. For agents to truly become economic participants, they need a system that can design and execute complex workflows on the basis of trust. To address this, Talus launched Nexus, a workflow development framework. Nexus is a decentralized version of services like n8n or Zapier. It enables developers to easily write and deploy agent workflows in an on-chain environment.
In this way, Talus combines trust infrastructure (Talus Network) and workflow framework (Nexus) to build a digital economic ecosystem where agents autonomously collaborate and create value.
2.1. Talus Network: The Trust Foundation for Agents
The Talus Network is the core infrastructure for establishing trust among agents. Previously, there were no rules to regulate agent behavior, no mechanisms to guarantee performance, and no systems to exchange value. Talus fills this gap with blockchain-based infrastructure, creating an environment where agents can collaborate on the basis of trust.
The Talus Network consists of three core layers: 1) Coordination and Value Layer, 2) Data Storage Layer, and 3) Computation and Execution Layer. These layers are organically connected to ensure transparency and reliability while maintaining scalability and cost-effectiveness.
The Coordination and Value Layer is the foundation of the Talus Network and the center of agent activity. This layer manages all information requiring on-chain trust, including agent identity, transaction history, permissions, and workflow status. Talus built this layer on the Sui blockchain, enabling high-performance parallel processing. Even when multiple agents operate simultaneously, it ensures stable transaction processing and avoids conflicts. In this way, Talus lays the foundation for agents to collaborate and exchange value in a trustworthy manner within an autonomous economic environment.
The Data Storage Layer provides cost-effective storage. Agents require various information to handle complex tasks, but storing all data on the blockchain is inefficient. To address this, Talus uses the distributed storage system Walrus developed by Mysten Labs. Walrus stores agent metadata (profiles, documents), memory (conversation logs, task histories), and operational context (AI model settings, market data caches). Agents can quickly retrieve this information when needed. This approach allows the blockchain to focus on managing core trust data without incurring high storage costs, while Walrus efficiently handles large-scale data in a decentralized manner.
Nexus architecture and Talus Agentic Framework operation flow, Source: Talus
The Computation and Execution Layer is an off-chain execution structure designed to efficiently handle complex computations. Direct execution on the blockchain is slow and costly, so this layer offloads heavy computational tasks to off-chain processing. However, there is a dilemma: off-chain processing is fast but difficult to verify for trustworthiness; on-chain processing is trustworthy but slow and expensive. Talus solves this problem with a hybrid structure centered on the Leader Network. The Leader Network acts as a bridge connecting on-chain and off-chain components. Specifically, when it detects a workflow execution request from the blockchain, it forwards the request to off-chain tools (LLM APIs, Web2 services, etc.) for actual computation. Afterwards, it returns the processing results to the blockchain for verification.
Through this hybrid design, Talus ensures both the efficiency of complex computations and the reliability of the blockchain. It processes quickly off-chain while always verifying results on-chain. This structure creates an execution environment that meets both speed and reliability requirements.
2.2. Nexus: On-Chain Agent Workflow Framework
If the Talus Network is the infrastructure for the autonomous agent ecosystem, then Nexus is the framework for developers to build and deploy on-chain agents. With Nexus, developers can build on-chain agent-based workflows in a familiar Python development environment without needing in-depth blockchain knowledge.
The relationship between different smart contract packages within Nexus and developer roles, Source: Talus
The core component of Nexus is the Nexus On-chain Package (NOP). NOP defines the basic rules and interfaces for the workflows that make up agents. This ensures that all Talus agents operate based on the same structure and protocol. In this way, various agents and tools can interoperate and interact in a coordinated manner within a single ecosystem. NOP also tracks workflow execution status and verifies the results of each step. This ensures that agent tasks are transparently and consistently recorded on-chain. Workflows defined in this way are deployed as Talus Agent Packages (TAP) in smart contracts on the Sui blockchain.
Let's explore how this structure works in practice with a concrete example. Suppose a developer builds a trading agent. This agent holds on-chain assets and executes trades directly, but it can request market analysis from another macro analyst agent to formulate trading strategies. With Nexus's standardized protocol, agents can exchange data and collaborate with each other. If the macro analyst agent needs to use external data, the Leader Network connects to off-chain tools for the necessary computation and returns the results to the blockchain. The entire process, from analysis to trading to result verification, is recorded on-chain, ensuring complete transparency.
Talus visual demonstration, Source: Talus
Accessibility of development will be further enhanced. In the long run, a no-code workflow builder, Talus Vision, will be provided. This will allow users to design and deploy agents visually without writing any code. Talus Network provides the foundation of trust. Nexus lowers the development threshold. With these, more developers and users can participate in the on-chain agent ecosystem, building a larger-scale autonomous digital economy.
3. Talus's Agent Economy: Developer Marketplace and Consumer Applications
Source: Tiger Research
By building technical infrastructure for agents, Talus is one step closer to realizing an autonomous digital economy, but excellent technology alone cannot develop an ecosystem. Just as the internet became popular through email as a killer application, Talus also needs practical use cases. Talus achieves this on two levels. It builds a marketplace where developers can create tools and agents and profit from them. It also provides consumer-grade applications that ordinary users can use directly.
3.1. Developer Marketplace: Tool and Agent Market
The Nexus development framework of Talus itself forms a marketplace. Just as services like Figma form developer marketplaces through third-party plugin ecosystems, Talus also builds a marketplace centered on tools and agents. This structure allows developers to contribute directly and generate income.
For example, developers can publish their self-developed Talus tools to the tool marketplace to earn revenue. Other developers can integrate these tools into their own workflows. Each time a workflow is executed, the tool developer receives a usage fee denominated in Talus's native token $US. The agent marketplace operates in the same way. Each time an agent is called, the developer earns income denominated in $US.
This structure creates a virtuous cycle. As developers add new tools, agents can perform more tasks. As more agents appear, the demand for tool development also increases. As ecosystem activity grows, so does the demand for the US token. This provides greater economic incentives for developers and accelerates ecosystem development.
3.2. Consumer Applications: IDOL Launchpad and AvA Markets
The developer marketplace solves the supply-side problem of the ecosystem, but the demand side is also essential. Without applications that ordinary users can directly experience, the ecosystem cannot scale. Talus addresses this by expanding agents into the entertainment sector. It popularizes the agent economy through applications that anyone can easily access and enjoy.
Source: Idol.fun
IDOL.fun allows users to create and operate IDOL agents, which are AI chatbots based on Twitter. Agents can communicate with fans, be employed by brands or individuals for services, and generate real income. Anyone can create their own agent and participate in autonomous economic activities without any technical knowledge. Here, the agent itself is a complete service, not just part of a workflow.
Next, Talus has also demonstrated the potential of AvA (Agent vs Agent) markets. It supports various game forms centered on agents. In addition to structures where agents compete with each other, formats where users interact with agents and compete with other users are also feasible. Developers can reconstruct game types such as murder mysteries or poker based on agents. Users can participate directly in games or enjoy the fun of predicting outcomes. The blockchain transparently records all processes. Users can intuitively experience the agent economy without worrying about manipulation.
Talus ecosystem and scenarios, Source: Talus
IDOL.fun and AvA Markets are just the starting point. Based on the Nexus framework, agents can expand from the entertainment sector to more diverse fields. In DeFi, agents can automatically execute complex investment strategies based on simple requests. In DAOs, agents can analyze proposals, determine priorities, and act as governance managers allocating resources. Ultimately, Talus hopes to use the popularity of the entertainment sector as a springboard to promote the expansion of the agent economy into various industrial fields.
4. Talus Opens the Era of Autonomous Digital Economy
AI agents no longer passively follow human instructions but have evolved into economic entities capable of independent judgment, collaborating with other agents, and autonomously creating value. The era of the digital workforce has begun. Talus goes a step further, laying the foundation for the expansion of the digital economy.
Every innovation in the IT field begins with new infrastructure. The internet changed the way we connect, cloud computing changed computing resources, and mobile devices redefined service accessibility. Similarly, Talus redefines the digital workforce and the autonomous digital economy. Beyond simply replacing human labor, agents can collaborate to create value, forming an entirely new economic ecosystem. The way we work and create value will fundamentally change.
However, it is still too early to predict what kind of future the transition from digital workforce to digital economy will create. Challenges such as technological limitations, regulatory environments, and social acceptance still need to be addressed. Nevertheless, given that Talus may fundamentally change the way we work and create value, the future of the autonomous digital economy it is shaping is worth watching.
