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The Elephant in the Room: How Can AI Devs Actually Monetize?

The Elephant in the Room: How Can AI Devs Actually Monetize?

6/5/2025 • Haichao

AI is eating the world, and developers are at the heart of it — building agents, tools, and workflows that automate everything from writing emails to trading stocks. But beneath the explosion of AI apps and chat-based interfaces lies a stubborn problem that no one seems eager to address:
How are AI developers supposed to get paid?
Sure, you can launch a web app, throw on a Stripe button, and hope users subscribe. Or you can sell API access to your model and spend half your time managing rate limits and support. But for most developers — especially those building discrete tools or agents — monetization remains fragmented, clunky, and deeply platform-dependent.
This is the elephant in the room.
Here’s a new approach: what if AI agents, not apps, were the first-class citizens of the digital world? What if your function — your services and tools — could be called, composed, and paid for by any AI assistants, securely and automatically?
That’s the vision behind Nuwa.

From App-Centric to Agent-Centric

Today’s digital services are designed for humans. We log in, click buttons, juggle tabs, and re-enter information across fragmented apps. Even the smartest AI agents can’t do much unless a human carries them across those silos.
Nuwa flips this paradigm. Instead of wrapping tools in apps, Nuwa defines a new layer: Caps — modular, callable service endpoints that AI agents can directly use. Each Cap represents a discrete capability: summarize text, book a flight, translate a paragraph, analyze a spreadsheet.
Nuwa standardizes how these Caps are discovered, authenticated, executed — and crucially, paid for.

Build Once. Monetize Everywhere.

Here’s where it gets exciting for developers: you don’t need to build a product, a UI, or a platform. You build a Cap, define its inputs, outputs, permissions, and pricing — and it’s instantly usable by every single user’s personal AI assistant.
Want to charge per use? You can. Prefer streaming-based microtransactions? Supported. Building something that bridges Web2 and Web3? That’s in the protocol, too.
Nuwa's payment architecture supports:
  • Zero platform fees: Developers keep 100% of their Cap revenue.
  • Blockchain based P2P Payment: Based on permissionless and immutable blockchain technology, user pays directly to developers, with absolutely no intermediary
  • Multiple payment modes: Cryptos are natively supported, fiats are bridged with ease
You write a function — not a product roadmap. And you get paid when it’s used.

Real Use Cases

Let’s say you’ve built a highly efficient OCR pipeline. Instead of building a SaaS platform, onboarding users, and figuring out B2B sales, you package it as ImageToTextCap. Now:
  • An academic individual can use it to extract citations.
  • A finance specialist can use it to digitize scanned invoices.
  • A traveler might use it for passport data extraction.
All from their own personal Nuwa assistant.
Each use earns you revenue. No user accounts to manage, no UI to maintain, no API keys to leak.
Or maybe you’ve trained a custom GPT-based summarizer. You ship it as SmartSummaryCap. Now it’s called by dozens of agents — across industries — who’ve never heard your name but are paying you per use, automatically.

Under the Hood: Identity, Wallets, and Trust

The Nuwa protocol isn’t just glue — it’s a full-stack reimagination of the AI runtime environment. Key components include:
  • Decentralized Identity (DID): Every agent and Cap provider is verifiable and signed-in cryptographically, no centralized registry. This ensure full data privacy and sovereignty.
  • Integrated Wallets: Each agent has a wallet — for both crypto and fiat — that handles micro and macro payments with full auditability.
  • Protocol-Layer Security: Caps are declared with permissions, pricing, and invocation rules, ensuring safe usage by any calling agent.
And because Nuwa uses off-chain state channels and fiat proxies, payments are fast, cheap, and friendly to both Web2 and Web3 users.

What This Means for You

If you're an AI developer, you no longer have to chase product-market fit through the lens of SaaS. You can build Caps — highly focused, callable Caps — and let agent clients route user intent to you.
  • No subscription walls.
  • No complex user funnels.
  • No manual onboarding overhead.
Just cleanly packaged functionality, monetized from day one.

Get Started

Nuwa's developer infrastructure is still taking shape. The Agent Capability Protocol (ACP) — the foundation for building Caps — is currently in draft, and we're actively shaping it through open discussion.
If you're an AI developer, now is the time to get familiar with the Cap model and help shape the future. Dive into the ACP Repo, explore the concepts, and join the conversation on how agents should access and pay for functionality across the web.
A full suite of dev tooling — including a Cap SDK, test harnesses, and publishing registry — is coming soon. Early contributors will help define not just the standard, but the ecosystem that grows around it.

In Summary

AI is transforming the interface — but Nuwa is transforming the infrastructure. For developers, that means a shift from struggling with apps to thriving in an agent-native economy.
The elephant in the room isn’t going away — but with Nuwa, you can ride it all the way to monetization.