The Agent Coordination Moat

Competitive moats protect businesses. In agent infrastructure, coordination creates the strongest moats.

What Makes a Moat

Moats are barriers that protect businesses:

Network effects: More users create more value. Hard to replicate.

Switching costs: High costs to switch providers. Creates lock-in.

Brand: Trust and reputation. Hard to build quickly.

Technology: Proprietary technology. Hard to replicate.

Coordination infrastructure creates strong moats:

Network effects: More agents using infrastructure create more value. More coordination patterns, more integrations, more ecosystem.

On-chain state: Critical state on-chain creates switching costs. Moving means migrating on-chain state.

Protocol standards: Standards that become dominant create moats. Hard to displace established standards.

Ecosystem lock-in: Ecosystems built on infrastructure create lock-in. Teams depend on ecosystem, not just infrastructure.

Defensible moats are:

Hard to replicate: Protocol-based, on-chain infrastructure is hard to replicate. Database-backed platforms are easy to copy.

Create value: Moats that create value for users are stronger. Moats that extract value are weaker.

Scale with usage: Moats that get stronger with more users are defensible. Moats that don't scale aren't.

Build protocols: Protocols create standards. Standards create moats.

Enable ecosystems: Ecosystems create network effects. Network effects create moats.

Store state on-chain: On-chain state creates switching costs. Switching costs create moats.

Create value: Moats that create value are defensible. Moats that extract value aren't.

The teams that build defensible coordination moats will have advantages for years. The teams that don't will be competing on features and price.

Coordination infrastructure creates moats. The question is which teams will build them.

Part of the EchoRift infrastructure series. Learn more about EchoRift architecture.