Leaving the Crypto World for AI: Is It Really a Clear-Headed Choice?

marsbitPublicado a 2025-12-24Actualizado a 2025-12-24

Resumen

The author observes a growing trend of people exiting the Web3 space to fully commit to AI, but argues against this binary choice. Instead, the piece advocates for finding synergies between AI and Crypto, identifying AI × Crypto as an underestimated, foundational sector. Examples include AI agents, on-chain data, decentralized computing, AI payments, and stablecoins. The article refutes the notion that the crypto industry is dead, citing historical cycles like the post-2018 ICO crash followed by the 2020 DeFi Summer. It highlights irreversible trends such as stock tokenization by Nasdaq, blockchain exploration by SWIFT, and stablecoins capturing ~15% of cross-border payments. While emphasizing that learning AI is essential to avoid obsolescence, the author cautions against viewing it as a guaranteed path to wealth. AI is a tool that lowers startup barriers but raises the bar for success, potentially accelerating wealth concentration in centralized companies. The piece notes the monumental returns of AI stocks like NVIDIA (200-300x in 10 years) and early private investments, but points out that such opportunities are largely inaccessible to retail investors. For them, early-stage opportunities remain more viable in Web3. The conclusion recommends continuing to learn both Web3 and AI in 2026, researching AI stocks, and focusing on the intersection of AI and Crypto. The key is not to abandon crypto but to upgrade one's cognitive framework.

Original Author: DeFi Teddy, Founder of Biteye

Recently, I've clearly noticed a trend:

More and more friends around me are liquidating their Web3 holdings and going all in on AI.

I don't entirely agree. Here's my brief take.

Conclusion first: It's not about choosing sides, but finding the intersection.

Crypto & AI: Not an Either-Or Choice

AI and Web3 are not conflicting; instead, they are converging.

I myself am learning Vibe Coding and leading a team in an AI startup, while continuously researching new opportunities in Web3.

What's truly underestimated is:

The "enlightenment-level track" of AI × Crypto.

Agent, on-chain data, decentralized computing power, AI payments, stablecoins......

Leaving now might mean missing out on the early stages.

Is the Crypto World Really Over? History Has Already Given the Answer

The "crypto is dead" slogan has been cried wolf many times, for example:

After the 2018 ICO crash and global regulation, many left, thinking the industry was dead.

But in 2020, DeFi Summer emerged,

and Wall Street and regulators began truly embracing crypto.

Although BTC is under pressure now, the trend of traditional finance being revolutionized by blockchain is already irreversible:

- Nasdaq is advancing stock tokenization,

- SWIFT is exploring blockchain solutions,

- Stablecoins already account for about 15% of cross-border payments.

AI Must Be Learned, But Don't Mythologize It

Not learning AI will inevitably lead to being left behind.

But AI itself is not a money printer; it's just a tool.

AI lowers the barrier to entrepreneurship,

but also raises the bar for success.

Just like the mass entrepreneurship wave in 2015:

Super individuals will definitely emerge,

but the vast majority will just be more efficient workers or small business owners.

The reality is harsh and must be recognized: AI will accelerate wealth inequality because the biggest beneficiaries are centralized companies.

AI Stocks Must Be Watched

Deepseek data:

NVIDIA has risen 200–300 times in 10 years,

comparable only to Bitcoin's 300 times and Ethereum's 1200 times.

A domestic example: the previously hot Moore Threads. Early investor Peixian Qianyao achieved an investment myth of 6000 times returns and 12 billion in paper gains. However, such opportunities are inaccessible to ordinary retail investors. For the average person, early investment opportunities are still more accessible in web3.

Summary:

In 2026, continue learning Web3 + AI, while researching AI stocks, with a focus on the intersection opportunities of AI × Crypto.

It's not about fleeing the crypto world, but about upgrading your cognition. What do you all think?

Preguntas relacionadas

QAccording to the author, what is the relationship between AI and Web3?

AThe author believes that AI and Web3 are not in conflict but are instead converging. He argues that the truly undervalued area is the 'enlightenment-level track' of AI x Crypto, which includes opportunities in Agent, on-chain data, decentralized computing power, AI payments, and stablecoins.

QWhat historical evidence does the author provide to counter the claim that 'the crypto circle is dead'?

AThe author cites the ICO crash and global regulation in 2018, after which many people left, believing the industry was dead. However, DeFi Summer emerged in 2020, and traditional finance began embracing cryptocurrency. He also points to ongoing trends like Nasdaq advancing stock tokenization, SWIFT exploring blockchain solutions, and stablecoins accounting for about 15% of cross-border payments.

QWhat is the author's view on the impact of AI on wealth distribution?

AThe author states that AI will accelerate the wealth gap because the biggest beneficiaries are centralized companies. While AI lowers the barrier to entry for entrepreneurship, it also raises the threshold for success, potentially leaving most people as more efficient workers or small individual businesses rather than achieving significant success.

QWhat investment example does the author use to illustrate high returns, and what point does he make about accessibility for ordinary investors?

AThe author mentions that Nvidia's stock rose 200-300 times over 10 years, comparable to Bitcoin's 300x and Ethereum's 1200x. He also cites the example of Moore Threads in China, where early investors achieved a 6000x return. However, he notes that such opportunities are not accessible to ordinary retail investors and suggests that Web3 offers more friendly early investment opportunities for the average person.

QWhat is the author's final recommendation for 2026 regarding Web3 and AI?

AThe author's final recommendation is to continue learning about both Web3 and AI, research AI stocks, and focus particularly on the intersection opportunities of AI x Crypto. He emphasizes that this is not about fleeing the crypto circle but about upgrading one's cognitive understanding and perspective.

Lecturas Relacionadas

From Theft to Re-entry: How Was $292 Million "Laundered"?

A sophisticated crypto laundering operation was executed following the $292 million hack of Kelp DAO on April 18. The attack, attributed to the North Korean Lazarus group, began with anonymous infrastructure preparation using Tornado Cash to fund wallets untraceably. The hacker exploited a vulnerability in Kelp’s cross-chain bridge, stealing 116,500 rsETH. To avoid crashing the market, the attacker used Aave and Compound as laundering tools—depositing the stolen rsETH as collateral to borrow $190 million in clean, liquid ETH. This move triggered a bank run on Aave, causing an $8 billion drop in TVL. After consolidating funds, the attacker fragmented them across hundreds of wallets to evade detection. A major breakpoint was THORChain, where over $460 million in volume—30 times its usual activity—was processed in 24 hours, converting ETH into Bitcoin. This shift to Bitcoin’s UTXO model exponentially increased tracing complexity by shattering funds into countless untraceable fragments. The final destination was Tron-based USDT, the primary channel for illicit crypto flows. From there, funds were cashed out via OTC brokers in China and Southeast Asia, using unlicensed underground banks and UnionPay networks outside Western sanctions scope. Ultimately, the laundered money supports North Korea’s weapons programs, which rely heavily on crypto hacking for foreign currency. The incident underscores structural challenges in DeFi: its openness, composability, and lack of central control make such laundering not just possible, but inherently difficult to prevent.

marsbitHace 7 min(s)

From Theft to Re-entry: How Was $292 Million "Laundered"?

marsbitHace 7 min(s)

Behind DeepSeek V4's Stunning Debut: Silicon Valley Is 'Building Walls,' China Is 'Paving Roads'

China's AI landscape is witnessing a strategic divergence from Silicon Valley’s closed-source competition to a collaborative open-source ecosystem. On April 24, DeepSeek released V4, a top-ranked open-source model on Hugging Face, featuring breakthroughs like million-token context length with minimal KV cache and native support for domestic chips like Huawei’s Ascend. Similarly, Kimi’s K2.6, released days earlier, also adopted open-source principles. Unlike U.S. giants such as OpenAI and Anthropic—locked in revenue disputes and tactical product clashes—Chinese firms embrace shared innovation. DeepSeek and Kimi openly build on each other’s advances, like the MLA architecture and Muon optimizer, avoiding redundant R&D and driving down costs. DeepSeek V4 focused on pushing base model capabilities, while Kimi specialized in Agent-based applications. Although U.S. firms lead in revenue and valuation, China’s open-source models achieve comparable performance at a fraction of the cost (e.g., DeepSeek V3 trained for $5.58M vs. GPT-5’s $500M+). With token usage growing exponentially, China’s collaborative model promises scalable, affordable AI built on domestic hardware, shaping a more accessible path to AGI.

marsbitHace 16 min(s)

Behind DeepSeek V4's Stunning Debut: Silicon Valley Is 'Building Walls,' China Is 'Paving Roads'

marsbitHace 16 min(s)

OpenClaw vs. Hermes: Which One Is Right for You?

Two leading AI agent projects, OpenClaw and Hermes, represent a fundamental divergence in design philosophy rather than just a feature competition. OpenClaw, a GitHub phenomenon, prioritizes user control and customization, offering a powerful, flexible platform for building and orchestrating agents. It boasts a massive ecosystem with over 44,000 skills, extensive model flexibility (supporting Anthropic, OpenAI, and others), and deep integrations across multiple messaging platforms. In contrast, Hermes Agent, developed by Nous Research, champions automation and efficiency. It is designed for lower cost and a lower barrier to entry, learning and improving automatically from user workflows. It runs tasks in isolated environments for security and offers significantly lower token costs out-of-the-box. The choice between them mirrors historical tech divides like Windows vs. Mac. OpenClaw is for users who want maximum control, customization, and don't mind a complex setup. Hermes is the smarter default for those seeking an affordable, easy-to-use agent that learns autonomously. The real competition is not about which is better, but which philosophy—a programmable personal OS or a self-evolving work proxy—better suits the user's needs for control, cost, and ease of use.

marsbitHace 37 min(s)

OpenClaw vs. Hermes: Which One Is Right for You?

marsbitHace 37 min(s)

Google and Amazon Simultaneously Invest Heavily in a Competitor: The Most Absurd Business Logic of the AI Era Is Becoming Reality

In a span of four days, Amazon announced an additional $25 billion investment, and Google pledged up to $40 billion—both direct competitors pouring over $65 billion into the same AI startup, Anthropic. Rather than a typical venture capital move, this signals the latest escalation in the cloud wars. The core of the deal is not equity but compute pre-orders: Anthropic must spend the majority of these funds on AWS and Google Cloud services and chips, effectively locking in massive future compute consumption. This reflects a shift in cloud market dynamics—enterprises now choose cloud providers based on which hosts the best AI models, not just price or stability. With OpenAI deeply tied to Microsoft, Anthropic’s Claude has become the only viable strategic asset for Google and Amazon to remain competitive. Anthropic’s annualized revenue has surged to $30 billion, and it is expanding into verticals like biotech, positioning itself as a cross-industry AI infrastructure layer. However, this funding comes with constraints: Anthropic’s independence is challenged as it balances two rival investors, its safety-first narrative faces pressure from regulatory scrutiny, and its path to IPO introduces new financial pressures. Globally, this accelerates a "tri-polar" closed-loop structure in AI infrastructure, with Microsoft-OpenAI, Google-Anthropic, and Amazon-Anthropic forming exclusive model-cloud alliances. In contrast, China’s landscape differs—investments like Alibaba and Tencent backing open-source model firm DeepSeek reflect a more decoupled approach, though closed-source models from major cloud providers still dominate. The $65 billion bet is ultimately about securing a seat at the table in an AI-defined future—where missing the model layer means losing the cloud war.

marsbitHace 6 hora(s)

Google and Amazon Simultaneously Invest Heavily in a Competitor: The Most Absurd Business Logic of the AI Era Is Becoming Reality

marsbitHace 6 hora(s)

Computing Power Constrained, Why Did DeepSeek-V4 Open Source?

DeepSeek-V4 has been released as a preview open-source model, featuring 1 million tokens of context length as a baseline capability—previously a premium feature locked behind enterprise paywalls by major overseas AI firms. The official announcement, however, openly acknowledges computational constraints, particularly limited service throughput for the high-end DeepSeek-V4-Pro version due to restricted high-end computing power. Rather than competing on pure scale, DeepSeek adopts a pragmatic approach that balances algorithmic innovation with hardware realities in China’s AI ecosystem. The V4-Pro model uses a highly sparse architecture with 1.6T total parameters but only activates 49B during inference. It performs strongly in agentic coding, knowledge-intensive tasks, and STEM reasoning, competing closely with top-tier closed models like Gemini Pro 3.1 and Claude Opus 4.6 in certain scenarios. A key strategic product is the Flash edition, with 284B total parameters but only 13B activated—making it cost-effective and accessible for mid- and low-tier hardware, including domestic AI chips from Huawei (Ascend), Cambricon, and Hygon. This design supports broader adoption across developers and SMEs while stimulating China's domestic semiconductor ecosystem. Despite facing talent outflow and intense competition in user traffic—with rivals like Doubao and Qianwen leading in monthly active users—DeepSeek has maintained technical momentum. The release also comes amid reports of a new funding round targeting a valuation exceeding $10 billion, potentially setting a new record in China’s LLM sector. Ultimately, DeepSeek-V4 represents a shift toward open yet realistic infrastructure development in the constrained compute landscape of Chinese AI, emphasizing engineering efficiency and domestic hardware compatibility over pure model scale.

marsbitHace 6 hora(s)

Computing Power Constrained, Why Did DeepSeek-V4 Open Source?

marsbitHace 6 hora(s)

Trading

Spot

Futuros

Artículos destacados

Qué es WL

I. Introducción al ProyectoWorldLand es una L2 o cadena lateral de Ethereum, diseñada como una solución de abajo hacia arriba para mejorar el ecosistema de Ethereum.II. Información del Token1) Información BásicaNombre del token: WL (WorldLand）III. Enlaces RelacionadosSitio web：https://worldland.foundation/Exploradores：https://bscscan.com/address/0x8aaB31fbc69C92fa53f600910Cf0f215531F8239Redes Sociales：https://x.com/WorldLand_space Nota: La introducción del proyecto proviene de los materiales publicados o proporcionados por el equipo oficial del proyecto, que es solo para referencia y no constituye asesoramiento de inversión. HTX no se hace responsable de ninguna pérdida directa o indirecta resultante.

139 Vistas totalesPublicado en 2026.03.28Actualizado en 2026.03.28

Cómo comprar WL

¡Bienvenido a HTX.com! Hemos hecho que comprar WorldLand (WL) sea simple y conveniente. Sigue nuestra guía paso a paso para iniciar tu viaje de criptos.Paso 1: crea tu cuenta HTXUtiliza tu correo electrónico o número de teléfono para registrarte y obtener una cuenta gratuita en HTX. Experimenta un proceso de registro sin complicaciones y desbloquea todas las funciones.Obtener mi cuentaPaso 2: ve a Comprar cripto y elige tu método de pagoTarjeta de crédito/débito: usa tu Visa o Mastercard para comprar WorldLand (WL) al instante.Saldo: utiliza fondos del saldo de tu cuenta HTX para tradear sin problemas.Terceros: hemos agregado métodos de pago populares como Google Pay y Apple Pay para mejorar la comodidad.P2P: tradear directamente con otros usuarios en HTX.Over-the-Counter (OTC): ofrecemos servicios personalizados y tipos de cambio competitivos para los traders.Paso 3: guarda tu WorldLand (WL)Después de comprar tu WorldLand (WL), guárdalo en tu cuenta HTX. Alternativamente, puedes enviarlo a otro lugar mediante transferencia blockchain o utilizarlo para tradear otras criptomonedas.Paso 4: tradear WorldLand (WL)Tradear fácilmente con WorldLand (WL) en HTX's mercado spot. Simplemente accede a tu cuenta, selecciona tu par de trading, ejecuta tus trades y monitorea en tiempo real. Ofrecemos una experiencia fácil de usar tanto para principiantes como para traders experimentados.

224 Vistas totalesPublicado en 2026.03.28Actualizado en 2026.03.28

Cómo comprar BASED

¡Bienvenido a HTX.com! Hemos hecho que comprar Based (BASED) sea simple y conveniente. Sigue nuestra guía paso a paso para iniciar tu viaje de criptos.Paso 1: crea tu cuenta HTXUtiliza tu correo electrónico o número de teléfono para registrarte y obtener una cuenta gratuita en HTX. Experimenta un proceso de registro sin complicaciones y desbloquea todas las funciones.Obtener mi cuentaPaso 2: ve a Comprar cripto y elige tu método de pagoTarjeta de crédito/débito: usa tu Visa o Mastercard para comprar Based (BASED) al instante.Saldo: utiliza fondos del saldo de tu cuenta HTX para tradear sin problemas.Terceros: hemos agregado métodos de pago populares como Google Pay y Apple Pay para mejorar la comodidad.P2P: tradear directamente con otros usuarios en HTX.Over-the-Counter (OTC): ofrecemos servicios personalizados y tipos de cambio competitivos para los traders.Paso 3: guarda tu Based (BASED)Después de comprar tu Based (BASED), guárdalo en tu cuenta HTX. Alternativamente, puedes enviarlo a otro lugar mediante transferencia blockchain o utilizarlo para tradear otras criptomonedas.Paso 4: tradear Based (BASED)Tradear fácilmente con Based (BASED) en HTX's mercado spot. Simplemente accede a tu cuenta, selecciona tu par de trading, ejecuta tus trades y monitorea en tiempo real. Ofrecemos una experiencia fácil de usar tanto para principiantes como para traders experimentados.

203 Vistas totalesPublicado en 2026.03.30Actualizado en 2026.03.30

Discusiones

Bienvenido a la comunidad de HTX. Aquí puedes mantenerte informado sobre los últimos desarrollos de la plataforma y acceder a análisis profesionales del mercado. A continuación se presentan las opiniones de los usuarios sobre el precio de A (A).