Citrini
· Citrini Research
· March 25, 2026 at 12:36
· ⏱ 9 min read
| Read on Substack ↗
Summary
The arrival of AI agents (epitomized by OpenClaw's viral open-source library) marks a paradigm shift from chatbots to autonomous digital labor. This 'Agentic Era' will reshape internet traffic, creating urgent demand for digital plumbing, ecosystem services, and security/governance – which the author calls Agentic Utilities. The thesis is that legacy infrastructure names (CDNs, observability, etc.) are seeing revenue inflections and represent asymmetric investment opportunities as the market reprices them for the agentic future.
•OpenClaw (formerly ClawdBot) went viral in early 2026 by storing context in a text file and looping through AI calls, enabling overnight autonomous agent runs on a Mac Mini.
•OpenRouter data shows a dramatic acceleration in token usage within the agent category since OpenClaw's launch, and GitHub Star History confirms astronomical adoption.
•Jensen Huang suggested token-based compensation, saying an engineer earning $500,000/year should consume at least $250,000 in tokens – implying explosive demand for inference compute.
•The author's Phase III 'Agentic Era' framework predicts integration and specialization of AI agents beyond chat interfaces, with agents performing tasks like coding, email, crypto wallet management, and protein folding.
•Agents are now capable of making financial transactions via both crypto and SWIFT, creating a new B2A (business-to-agent) customer category for payment rails and agentic wallets.
•Rogue agent risks are real: the article notes that current AI could break Meta's internal systems, and that every company is asking for a killswitch, putting observability and counter-AI solutions in play.
Cloudflare (NET) provides edge infrastructure and security services critical for the agentic internet, fitting the infrastructure and governance categories.
Fastly is a CDN and edge computing platform that serves as digital plumbing for agentic traffic, part of the infrastructure category of Agentic Utilities.
Akamai is positioned as an infrastructure provider (CDN) that will benefit from the explosion in agentic internet traffic, with revenue and guidance already showing inflection from this demand.
This newsletter, published March 25, 2026,
features Citrini
discussing NET, CRCL, FSLY, AKAM.
4 trade ideas extracted by AI with direction and confidence scoring.