Written by: Patrick Collins
Compiled by: Chopper, Foresight News
In 2025, venture capital firms like Sequoia, A16z, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator are heavily investing in AI companies, with funds flowing from the crypto sector to AI, not to mention the recent sharp decline in overall cryptocurrency prices.
Sequoia Capital's investment trends over the past three years
a16z's investment trends over the past three years
Lightspeed's investment trends over the past three years
Y Combinator's investment trends over the past three years
I've seen many people who entered Web3 with me in 2019/2020 starting to leave, joining AI companies or prediction markets. As someone fully committed to the blockchain and decentralized finance space, I believe there are a few different mindsets one can have in the face of this situation.
Good Riddance, They Never Had Faith Anyway
It's a bit like a bad breakup—you say a few harsh words when they're gone. "Now only the true builders remain, and everything will be better." I don't think this mindset or approach is right. We need talent in this industry, even if they don't fully subscribe to our underlying philosophy.
As long as we have the vision, we will always need people to turn that vision into reality. Many people just want to live a good life and don't necessarily want to change the world, and I think that's perfectly fine.
Both types of people are great in the world: those with extreme passion, and those with less intense passion but who are willing to work hard, improve themselves, and do the right thing. To me, this is a bit like the difference between "rock stars" and "superstars."
Crypto is Dead, Hurry Up and Switch to AI
This is the topic I want to focus on, and it's a sentence I want to engrave in your heart: It is inevitable that the world's finance will ultimately be entirely powered by cryptocurrency.
Let that sink in. Once you accept this, switching to AI seems utterly nonsensical.
Yes, AI is exploding, AI is amazing, but AI is just a tool to build other things. And among those "other things" is the future of finance.
Of course, you can do what's best for you. There might be a fast-moving bandwagon in AI beckoning you, go ahead and hop on. But I believe you will miss a much bigger opportunity.
Why is Blockchain Inevitable?
The reason is the same reason gold has a market cap of $35 trillion today. I've talked about "what is money" countless times, especially in my explanations of stablecoins. Money has three functions: a store of value, a medium of exchange, and a unit of account.
Throughout human history, finding a currency that is credibly neutral and convenient has been nearly impossible, until recently. Gold is recognized as a "credibly neutral" currency, but it's very non-portable and inconvenient. Cryptocurrency is the solution.
Blockchain's Overwhelming Advantages
This alone is compelling enough, but when combined with smart contracts, the explosive potential is astronomical. Take the stock market as an example: the NYSE has a daily trading volume of about $80 billion, while Uniswap might only have $20 billion—a 40-fold difference. But then look at the operating costs: the parent company of the NYSE has about 12,000 employees; Uniswap, in theory, can operate with just liquidity providers and has only about 200 employees.
Operating costs are directly reduced by 60 times! From a cost perspective alone, the advantage of running a decentralized exchange is overwhelming.
Not to mention censorship resistance and credible neutrality, which are the core meaning of this technology. I won't elaborate here on why credibly neutral financial products are the future; just look at the data: DeFi has extremely low operating costs and is more fair.
Many people dismiss the logic of "credible neutrality." I'll skip that part in this article. Most of these people are from developed countries and will never understand how important this technology is for less developed nations. But I still believe this is the core reason for the inevitable success of crypto technology.
Many people, once they see the enormous costs of the existing financial system, will start asking: "Why am I paying such high fees and waiting two days for stock settlement?"
Conclusion
It's fine if you want to leave, but I believe you will miss the massive adoption that is happening, and the opportunity here is bigger than ever.
Many so-called "opportunities" in the history of the crypto space were, to some extent, scams. NFTs, yield farming, meme coins—these products exploited people's ignorance of new technology to harvest attention. We've moved past that stage; we all know those things were silly.
Now, we can have institutions and ordinary users actually using products that improve their lives: Aave, Uniswap, zero-knowledge privacy protocols, stablecoins... They provide financial services to the world with extremely low costs and lower barriers to access.
The entire world will eventually run on this infrastructure. And I will continue to do everything I can to make that day come sooner.
