On April 20, 2026, during the Web3 Festival Week in Hong Kong, the “The Scaling Summit: AI Agents & Autonomous Systems” co-hosted by 499 Group and CityUHK successfully concluded.
With the core vision of "From Models → Systems. From Tools → Autonomous Intelligence," this summit marks the industry's gradual transition from the prototype exploration stage to systematization and real-world application. AI is also beginning to evolve from a tool capability into a system form with autonomous execution and economic behavior. By bringing together top system architects and academic networks from leading universities worldwide (such as Imperial College London, Tsinghua University, Peking University, NUS, NTU, HKU, and HKUST), the summit comprehensively and deeply explored the future of AI Agents, DeSci (Decentralized Science), longevity technologies, and underlying computing architecture.
Although this event primarily focused on in-person, closed-door discussions and was not recorded, the intellectual exchange and technological debates still pointed the way for the integration of Web3 and AI. Below is an in-depth review of the entire summit agenda and a summary of its key highlights.
Opening Remarks and Keynote Address: A Cutting-Edge Collision Between Digital Medicine and AI
At the start of the event, Professor Michael Yang, Senior Vice-President and Dean of the Institute for Digital Medicine at CityUHK, delivered the opening remarks and the first keynote address. Professor Yang shared insights into the potential of cutting-edge digital technologies in the medical and scientific research fields, setting a rigorous and forward-looking academic tone for the entire summit and revealing the broad prospects for moving from digital models to real-world system applications.
Panel 1: Embracing the Rise of the Machine Consumer
In the first roundtable discussion moderated by Pinot Jiang, Senior Advisor at TechFlow, Kenny from TON Foundation, Dominic Cox from 1inch, Leo Li, CTO of AEON, Justin Yeo from Interlace, and Prof. Xiaofan Liu from CityU explored the topic of "When AI Agents Drive Mass Adoption." The panelists unanimously agreed that future mass adoption will no longer be driven solely by human users. AI agents will participate as independent "machine consumers" in on-chain interactions, transaction execution, and liquidity management, thereby fundamentally reshaping existing product design logic and business models.
Panel 2: Silicon Meets Carbon
The second roundtable shifted its focus to the more futuristic yet increasingly realistic field of "DeSci & Longevity." June, founder of Facet.ai, led an in-depth discussion with Prof. Harry Yang from HKUST, Prof. Yu Wang from CityU, Dr. Roy Rong, founder of Longevity Pioneer, and Winnie Qiu from Avinasi Labs. The discussion covered cross-disciplinary innovations ranging from embodied AI to biological longevity technologies, and delved into how decentralized networks and large-scale AI models can accelerate the processing of biomedical data and drive scientific breakthroughs.
Fireside Chat: The Full Lifecycle Engineering of On-Chain AI Agents
Following this, Michael Heinrich, CEO and co-founder of 0G Labs, and Sal, a core contributor to Virtuals Protocol, engaged in a fascinating fireside chat: "Autonomous Worlds: Engineering the Lifecycle of On-Chain AI Agents." As a Layer 1 platform focused on decentralized AI, 0G and Virtuals, which focuses on agent virtualization, discussed in depth how to build an efficient data availability layer for on-chain AI, and how to ensure the security, verifiability, and lifecycle management of Autonomous Agents running on the chain.
Keynote 2: Building Real-World Payment Infrastructure
Carter Qiu, founder of Omninal & POSX, delivered a speech titled "From Stablecoins to Everyday Commerce." He detailed how stablecoins and underlying payment infrastructure should evolve to support seamless value transfer from on-chain to everyday commerce, given the explosive growth in demand for high-frequency microtransactions via AI agents.
Panel 3: Breaking the Compute Bottleneck
With the exponential growth of AI's demand for computing power, building a native AI execution layer has become a focal point in the industry. This dialogue was moderated by Serena Deng, founder of Block Central, and featured Jing, AI Lead at Monad; Kin, CEO of Letsburn; David Ching, Investment Director at Animoca Brands; and Laughing, Head of Asia Pacific at Kite AI. The panelists engaged in a lively discussion on how to break the Compute Bottleneck of decentralized networks, exploring parallel execution, efficient consensus mechanisms, and solutions for decentralized computing networks in handling complex AI inference tasks.
Panel 4 (VC Perspective): Navigating the Hype Cycle and Pricing the True Utility of Decentralized AI
How do investors view the current AI x Web3 hype? Vaelyn Luo of Plutos Capital, Jay Yu of Pantera Capital, David Ching of Animoca Brands, Stella Yang of Hashkey Capital, and Jiahao Xu of Grace Investment Machine delivered a highly insightful investor dialogue. The discussion directly addressed the key issue: "Beyond the Hype Cycle." These seasoned investors shared their core metrics for evaluating decentralized AI projects, emphasizing that only infrastructure and agent applications with genuine business loops and the ability to generate sustainable real utility can outperform the market in the long run.
Keynote 3: How AI and Blockchain are Reshaping the Market Economy
Web3Labs CEO Caspar Wong delivered a keynote speech on "Web3.0+", providing a high-level analysis from the perspectives of macroeconomics and market architecture. He discussed how the combination of AI and blockchain, two groundbreaking technologies, will reduce trust costs, improve collaboration efficiency, and ultimately reshape the future market economy.
Panel 5: Massive Pipelines and the Intent Orchestration of Trillion-Level Agents
In the summit's closing roundtable discussion, renowned KOL Rika moderated a panel discussion on "The Hyper-Scale Pipeline" with Google Cloud Web3 BD Manager Blues Lin, BNB Chain's Walter, FLock.io CEO Jiahao Sun, and Ava Labs Hong Kong Head Jacky Kong. The discussion focused on building a massive system capable of supporting trillions of agents working collaboratively, ranging from the foundational cloud service architecture of major companies to decentralized model training and high-performance public blockchain intent execution networks, providing a highly forward-looking conclusion to the day's conference.
Live Demo & OpenClaw Lab In-Depth Practice
Following the theoretical discussions was a series of hands-on practical demonstrations. At the AI Agent closed-door seminar, over 30 participants from the ecosystem, VCs, and core developers connected deeply, gathering to explore real-world pathways for the technology's implementation. The subsequent Demo Day session was even more exciting, with eight impressive projects competing for the top three spots. This series of practical exercises and exchanges allowed participants to witness firsthand the vibrant energy of AI Agent technology moving from theoretical exploration to real-world application. It not only presented a professional and practical industry event but also truly embodied the summit's spirit: "Don't just observe the paradigm shift. Build it."
Special thanks to our partners
The success of this summit would not have been possible without the strong support of our ecosystem partners. We would like to express our special thanks to the following organizations and projects for their in-depth participation:
● Hosted by: 499 × City University of Hong Kong
● Co-hosted by: 0G × OpenSchool × IDM of CityU
● Special Partner: B.AI , Hetu
● Ecosystem Partners: Google Cloud, Pantera Capital, Hashkey Capital, BNB Chain, TON, Virtuals, Sentient, 1inch, Animoca Brands, AVA Labs, KiteAI, Flock.io , Monad, AEON, Web3 Labs, Interlace, Let's Burn, POSX, Avinasi Labs, SVP Chain, 2u2.ai , DFG, Jsquare, SUN.io, JUST, BitTorrent, WINkLink
● Media Partners: ME, The Block, Techub News, TechFlow, Foresight News, Odaily, PANews, CoinTime, ChainCatcher, TechFlame, Jinse Finance, BlockTempo, BlockBeats, Followin, CoinWorld, Caihua News Agency, WikiEXPO, Bytoken, BitRush
Introduction of core partners:
● 0G Labs (Co-organizer): 0G is currently the largest dedicated Layer 1 network for AI, providing superior infrastructure support for next-generation decentralized AI applications. By building the first decentralized AI operating system, 0G completely breaks the limitations of traditional closed AI systems. Unlike centralized solutions, 0G empowers users with complete autonomy and reshapes the rules of the AI ecosystem while ensuring privacy, verifiability, and censorship resistance.
● B.AI (Special Partner): B.AI is a financial infrastructure built for the AI Agent era, aiming to solve the core challenges faced by AI Agents in model access, payment, clearing and settlement, identity, and collaboration. Through a unified API and clearing and settlement network, B.AI enables AI Agents to more freely connect to leading global models and services, and autonomously complete payments, receipts, and value exchanges through Agent Wallet. By lowering the barriers to model access, achieving seamless value transfer, and establishing an economic operating framework for AI Agents, B.AI is committed to accelerating the maturity of the AI Agent ecosystem, promoting the development of AGI in the real world, and enabling a wider range of users and developers to more easily enjoy the value brought by AI.
A paradigm shift has occurred; the era of AI autonomy is dawning. Thank you again to all the Builders who traveled from around the world to Hong Kong to participate in this summit!
To learn more about the 499 Group ecosystem and future activities, please follow us:
● Apply to Join: https://luma.com/TheScalingHK2026
● 499 TG Channel: https://t.me/+xMlOO3VQH-piZWNl
