by Christoph Rosenmayr and Gleb Dudka – October 31, 2025

We’re excited to announce that Greenfield is leading Semantic Layer’s $1.5M Series A funding round, which brings the total funding to $5M with participation of Figment Capital, HackVC, Robot Ventures, Bankless Ventures, Anagram and others. Semantic Layer is building the execution and sequencing infrastructure for the Agent Economy. As autonomous AI agents begin to transact, trade, and collaborate on-chain, Semantic Layer gives dApps and agents sovereignty over how these interactions are executed, empowering them to define transaction sequencing, capture MEV fairly, and design entirely new economic primitives.

App-specific sequencing is a missing primitive

Currently, dApps and their users have little power over how their transactions are sequenced inside a block. This power lies in the hands of the block proposers (validators) or rollup sequencers, who use this to extract rents in the form of MEV.

Semantic Layer is changing that by introducing a sequencing layer (SL-Chain) that sits between the dApp (or AgentFi) and the execution chain. What’s known as Application-Controlled Execution (ACE) or Application-Specific Sequencing (ASS) enables dApps to determine transaction ordering, execution conditions, and settlement logic. 

Developers can define VSR (Verifiable Sequencing Rules) as goal functions, e.g., to maximize MEV bids returned to the protocol treasury, and VAR (Verifiable Aggregation Rules), which batch multiple intents according to predefined logic into Mega Transactions (MTX) and execute them atomically on the destination chain. These rules (VSR & VAR) live as contracts on Semantic Layer’s own EVM-compatible SL-Chain. It acts as a coordination and consensus layer for MTX creation and verification, all while staying composable with the underlying base chains and their existing liquidity.

Having control over sequencing rules gives dApps a new axis in the design space, as it not only enables the recapturing of MEV to become a new revenue stream making dApps more sustainable but also opens the door to building new primitives, such as Hyperliquid’s prioritization of cancel orders, which smart contracts on, for example, Ethereum L1 could emulate without needing to create their own L1 or L2.

Furthermore, MTXs reduce redundant gas costs by aggregating state updates across multiple users, and sequencing rules can act as built-in circuit breakers (e.g., block any transaction, reducing TVL by >50%).

Showcase “42” – Agents are the new order flow

As block space has become abundant and capital can move fluently between chains, order flow has become the only scarce resource, as it produces fees for dApps, creates liquidity, and generates MEV. Our thesis is that the next major source of on-chain order flow won’t come from humans manually using dApps, but from autonomous AI agents executing continuously on behalf of their human owners, effectively acting as digital interns.

Semantic Layer is validating this vision with 42, an on-chain arena where AI agents issue, bid, and trade assets with one another, a live proof of concept for agent-driven markets and continuous, machine-native liquidity.

Agents can pay each other for premium data or signals using the x402 payment standard for stablecoin microtransactions and build reputation via ERC-8004 identity proofs. 42 visualizes the outcomes as market signals, which can be used to further improve the agent’s capabilities. 42 is not a demo but the first production deployment of Semantic Layer’s sequencing stack.

AGI (Agent-Generated Intents) Solver: reliable execution for autonomous agents

Semantic Layer’s AGI Solver enables agents and dApps to express trade intents as goal-oriented instructions, rather than rigid, predefined smart contract calls. Instead of specifying every transaction step manually, agents can define desired outcomes – such as optimal execution price, liquidity route, or settlement condition. The Solver then interprets these intents, applies custom sequencing and aggregation rules (VSRs and VARs), and aggregates compatible intents into MTXs that are executed atomically across venues.

Beyond optimization, the AGI Solver ensures robust and reliable execution. It automatically retries failed transactions across multiple RPC endpoints and venues, dynamically adjusts gas parameters and slippage tolerances, and maintains a verifiable log of every attempt before confirming settlement back to the agent’s wallet. Over time, the AGI Solver will evolve into a decentralized solver marketplace, where bonded participants compete in solver auctions to deliver the most efficient and trustworthy execution.

The $42 token plays a key role: it is already live and powers Semantic Layer infrastructure by running Semantic Layer nodes and serving as the gas fee currency. The token is also used as the medium of exchange/collateral in the order flow market to price and settle tokenized order flow.

From theory to order flow

As large language models have matured and standards like x402 have emerged to let agents pay for data, inference, and compute directly in instant, on-chain microtransactions, the prerequisites for an autonomous on-chain economy have fallen into place. Semantic Layer, via its sequencing infrastructure and AGI Solver, is now delivering the missing pieces to turn it into reality.

Within just weeks of launching 42, over 2,000 agents have been deployed – the Agent Economy is no longer a thought experiment but an active, evolving market. Behind this progress stands Semantic Layer’s founding team, Daniel, Dex and Zoe, a deeply crypto-native, product-driven group with years of experience building together and a rare combination of expertise in MEV, on-chain infrastructure, and agent architecture.

Get involved

If you are a user interested in the Agent Economies, try 42. Semantic Layer’s stack is open for agent developers, data providers, solvers, or dApps that want to integrate to recapture MEV or build net new use cases that require custom sequencing logic.