Something I've been spending a lot of time thinking about as a crypto VC:

DeFi today has maybe a few hundred thousands of active users. Maybe like 2-3M at best.
But in an agentic world, every business, every app, every device could have its own agent interacting with financial protocols autonomously.
We're not talking about 10x more users. We're talking about 1000x.
And here's what most people aren't thinking about: the DeFi stack as we know it simply isn't built for this. Let me give you some examples.
Money markets.
Today's lending protocols require manual collateral management, have static liquidation thresholds, and make you go through multiple approval steps just to open a position. A human clicks through that in 30 seconds and doesn't think twice. An agent executing thousands of micro-loans per second across dozens of markets? Horrible friction. Agents need instant, permissionless and fully programmable credit.
DEXs.
AMMs like Uniswap were revolutionary because they solved liquidity for a world where most participants were unsophisticated retail users. But agents aren't unsophisticated. Every single agent is a highly efficient market participant that will always seek the best execution. They don't need passive liquidity pools,but more likely CLOBs with deep orderbooks, sub-second execution, and zero slippage. AMMs were built to make trading easy for humans. Agents don't need easy. They need optimal.
Oracles.
Right now, most DeFi protocols pull price feeds at fixed intervals. Good enough for human timescales. But when millions of agents are making real-time decisions, latency becomes a competitive edge. The oracle layer needs to go from "update every few seconds" to "stream continuously" or it becomes the bottleneck of the entire system.
Wallets and identity.
Agents don't have shitty wallets like Metamask. They don't sign transactions manually. They need programmable key management, session-based permissions, and granular spending limits. All on-chain, all automated. The entire wallet infrastructure needs to be rethought from the ground up.
Probably could go on with this list forever, but you get the point:
Most of the DeFi protocols and middleware solutions today assume a human is on the other end.
Blockchains are the perfect rails for the agentic economy, but a whole new target group of users will also come with a behavioral change and hence whole new needs.
Being visionary enough today to think three steps ahead and to understand what this future will look like / what it will require, will mint a whole new wave of millionaires and legendary investors.