Coordinated Intelligence: The Next Frontier for Onchain AI Agents

Disciplined, well-trained, and well-equipped, AI agents are digital soldiers. They operate independently to carry out their orders, working tirelessly to get the job done efficiently. But even the greatest soldiers can only achieve limited results when working alone. It’s only when formed into ranks, brigades, and divisions that soldiers are capable of truly changing the world.

Right now, the onchain landscape is awash with lone wolves: individual agents carrying out the mission they’ve been tasked with, be it identifying the optimum DeFi yield or spotting arbitrage opportunities for their human taskmasters. Imagine what could be achieved if these agents were capable of cooperating, forming groups of digital soldiers that collaborate across different networks and ecosystems? One agent is a mere soldier. But put 1,000 of them in lockstep and suddenly you’ve got a brigade capable of achieving something far greater than the sum of their parts.

This, essentially, is the vision of Coral Protocol, one of the leading advocates of the quest to make AI agents work as one. It believes that the future of onchain agents lies in providing the infrastructure for them to self-organize and work together to improve complex workflows. By communicating and optimizing as a single entity – or brigade – Coral is confident that it can create a cohesive army of agents. Their aims might be peaceful, but these agents operate like a well-drilled army brigade.

****Crypto’s Fragmentation Problem****

It’s no secret that the onchain landscape is fragmented. Due to the number of blockchains that have sprung up in recent years, including L2s and L3s, liquidity, users, and developers are scattered. Some ply their trade on EVM networks; others do their thing on Solana; while still others operate on newer chains such as TON and Sui.

Crypto is now large enough to support this level of activity: DeFi no longer needs to be on Ethereum or memecoins on Solana. But the downside to this balkanization is that it’s resulted in an onchain environment in which economic opportunities are scattered to the four winds. A user operating on Base can’t easily take advantage of superior pricing on Solana when swapping into stablecoins. Similarly, an Ethereum staker can’t use their LSTs to earn a yield on Sui.

AI agents – envoys dispatched by users to do their bidding – find themselves in a similar predicament. They can take care of business on the network on which they’ve been deployed but are powerless to react to events on far-flung blockchains. To return to the soldier analogy, they are troops that have been parachuted into the jungle, with no means of engaging in the conflict being fought hundreds of miles away on the beaches.

For this reason, getting the agentic economy to realize its full potential calls for finding a way to transform these solo operators into team players who can communicate and cooperate to achieve shared goals. This is the key to elevating agents into a fighting force that’s capable of governing the entire onchain landscape.

****Organizing the Agentic Economy****

In an attempt to organize all of this onchain activity, and bring cohesion and unity to the scattered agent economy, Coral Protocol has devised a standardized framework to support an Internet of Agents. At present, getting an agent from Project A to work with one from Project B is extremely difficult – especially if those agents are on different networks. Coral wants to streamline this process so that agents from different vendors and frameworks can collaborate.

This makes sense because onchain events don’t happen in a vacuum. A whale market buying $1M of ETH on Ethereum does affect the price of ETH on Arbitrum, Optimism, and Avalanche. But a user on one of these chains has little opportunity to take advantage of this. Similarly, a lending protocol offering boosted rewards on a new network is of little use to a lender using its protocol on a different chain.

But agents, working together to share information, transfer liquidity, and obtain maximum yield, can react to such events. This is where solutions such as Coral’s have a chance to shine, elevating the entire agentic economy by increasing the use cases and functions that agents can execute.

Coral Protocol helps AI agents work across several systems at the same time.

For example, a Coralised Deep Research agent can concurrently:

→ support B2B sales
→ drive hackathon planning
→ assist with software testing

Coralise once, use everywhere. 🪸 pic.twitter.com/7jRy8VH7Ok

— Coral Protocol (@Coral_Protocol) May 19, 2025

****Who Watches the Watchmen?****

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” is a Latin phrase commonly translated as “Who will watch the watchmen?” In a web3 context, it’s an apposite means of describing the role played by an aspiring cross-chain solution tasked with keeping AI agents on their toes. If agents are unwilling or unable to collaborate, there needs to be an overarching framework capable of ensuring this. A war general, devising strategy and issuing orders that filter down to the troops on the ground.

Coral’s vendor-neutral infrastructure is designed to ensure that no single entity can wield unilateral control. In other words, Agents are free to perform actions like managing transactions, automating workflows, and governing decentralized systems, but there’s a guiding hand ensuring that all of this activity is harmonious and steering the work towards collective goals.

Significantly, this direction isn’t implemented in a top-down manner characteristic of centralized organizations: rather it’s achieved by giving “cells” of agents the ability to communicate with fellow cells and team up to complete missions. One of how Coral facilitates this is through a universal messaging protocol for AI agents, which enables consistent communication regardless of the underlying technology or vendor. It’s analogous to TCP/IP, providing a common language for the Internet of Agents.

Coral also includes a flexible system for orchestrating multi-agent tasks. This supports dynamic workflows where agents can collaborate and complete complex tasks without centralized control. It allows agents to form trusted groups dynamically for specific tasks, using cryptographic protocols to verify identities and ensure secure collaboration. This is ideal for creating ad-hoc partnerships among agents, critical for decentralized environments where trust cannot necessarily be assumed.

****Agent Armies Are Imminent****

A near future in which armies of agents rove onchain, acting as powerful yet peaceful forces, is inevitable. Not only is it the logical way to coordinate cross-chain agentic activity, but it’s the only practical way in which to do so. Until such a solution takes root and sees widescale adoption, the capabilities of onchain agents will remain significantly impaired.

The only question still to be settled is which infra solution will become the default layer for enabling agents to work as one. Coral isn’t the only protocol vying for this role, but this much can at least be said with confidence: its vision (PDF) is compelling and its logic impeccable.

Once advanced features like payments between agents are implemented – facilitated using the recently MEXC-listed CORAL token – there will be little that AI agents can’t achieve. They may have started out as simple soldiers, but agents are well on their way to becoming a conquering army with mastery of the entire onchain landscape.