Author: Zuo Ye Web3
Here's a side note:
Since I started sharing my insights on the crypto market at the end of 2023, more than two years have passed, and I have accumulated nearly 10,000 followers. I often feel that I am a very lucky person to have gained so much recognition and respect from so many people.
My followers are mostly successful business owners from various industries. It is your profound insights into the world that create our resonance. What I have always wanted to do is help the builders of an industry find, get close to, and occupy the most core ecological niche in the distribution of benefits within that industry, and my articles have always been based on this goal.
In the past, whether people invited me to chat online or meet in person, the topics tended to be scattered; due to time constraints, it was difficult to thoroughly discuss every aspect of a problem's logic. Perhaps establishing a longer-term business partnership with everyone is a better option, so I wanted to establish a private board of directors to provide a more continuous and in-depth discussion space for entrepreneurs who plan to enter or are interested in the crypto industry and Web3 in the long term, on key decisions and long-term paths.
The fee is $50,000 USD, which will be directly invested as equity in my stablecoin yield project, barker.money. If any interested business owners are interested, please feel free to send me a private message.
Interaction is necessary for all robots.
We live amidst vast disparities, and the passage of time often leaves us with a sense of disorientation.
In 2023, Musk called for the use of micro-payments to stop the intrusion of bots and maintain a community atmosphere for human discussion. However, just two or three years later, bots, with the support of AI, are about to become the main actors in micro-payment and are showing a "rejection" of humans.
Image caption: Musk wants to use micro-payments to block bots.
Image source: @elonmusk
It's not just ordinary white-collar workers who feel abandoned; more so, the crypto community feels outdated. You can repeatedly experience this despair by Vitalik reciting the importance of ZK for trusted AI, by Virtuals and other de-agents using decentralization to find LLMs, and the latest—Agents should consume stablecoins.
This time, Crypto aims to prove its value to AI, in the name of a stablecoin.
AI enters the productivity arena, while Crypto remains confined to finance.
“When you pursue freedom, you have already lost your freedom.
The most classic narrative about AI and Crypto is that " AI is responsible for productivity, and Crypto is responsible for production relations ," but this relationship has never come true.
Production relations refer to human collaborative patterns, while the biggest characteristic of this round of AI is "replacing humans".
AI agents are crawling out of the screen, taking over the work of white-collar workers, and invading the mechanical repetitive fields of manual laborers. Admittedly, as Huang Renxun said, AI itself will also be limited by physical hardware such as electricity, and will be firmly fixed in the geometric space woven by humans.
Image caption: AI enters the production field
Image source: @zuoyeweb3
If humans can only serve the production and consumption of AI, can they still retain their subjectivity in labor?
At the same time, Crypto's vision has gradually narrowed, from the earliest decentralized storage such as IPFS/Filecoin, to computing power and storage projects with 24/25 cycles, and then to USDAI's GPU lending model. You can't say that crypto has not tried, but it has failed to capture real-world use cases for AI in each wave.
The idea that "AI is responsible for both productivity and production relations" is more likely to come true. Even if the Agent narrative is not a bubble, the stablecoin used may not be a stablecoin " based on BTC/ETH assets and running on Ethereum ".
I am not trying to create a sense of fear or pessimism. The Genius Act has effectively given the OCC the power to define "compliant stablecoins." Sky's USDS is just a US Treasury bond certificate running on Ethereum. So, in the upcoming RWA era, will more assets choose Canton, which is backed by Goldman Sachs, or Solana, which is actively being promoted?
ETH L1 has become a high-performance public chain again, at the cost of a rapid explosion in the number of nodes. First, replace "YBS" with a compliant stablecoin, then replace ETH/SOL with Canton, and finally co-opt Vitalik as an institutionalized rebel.
The good thing about Liangshan is that it surrendered; the bad thing about the cryptocurrency world is that it's financial.
However, Liangshan had the military strength to surrender, the cryptocurrency world has all the tools for financialization, and no matter how agents replace people's spending power, they will always act according to people's wishes.
In other words, the agent is the subject of action, and humans are the subject of will; the agent's consumption behavior can only be an infinite extension of human will.
In March 2026, Stripe launched the MPP (Machine Payments Protocol), which seemed to be about getting rid of people, but was actually a failed attempt to reintegrate machines into the existing financial system.
Back in September of last year, Stripe partnered with OpenAI to launch the ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol), hoping to replace the previous "Google search + Amazon marketplace" through OpenAI's chat room page. Unfortunately, agents cannot overcome the non-standard inventory of the old giants for more than 20 years, and the complexity resulted in a negligible conversion rate.
There are many such agreements, including those from Visa and the banking industry, which are all rushing to launch their own "machine payment" agreements. But in the end, they are all just adding stablecoins to the acquiring side. You can hardly see merchants actively integrating stablecoins.
This is not to deny the trend of combining stablecoins and agents. To borrow a phrase from @Shoal Research, " Over the past fifty years, from PayPal to Apple Pay, all efforts to replace card organizations have ultimately failed ."
If a bank-issued stablecoin running on Visa's private blockchain ultimately defeats Crypto's efforts in the same way it defeated Fintech, then the story is not friendly to us.
In this respect, Crypto must learn from AI. From Prompt Engineering to Context Engineering, and now Harness Engineering, the survival form of agents has been constantly changing.
In the early days, people optimized their prompts in chat. Then, people optimized their expressions in AI's text responses, summarizing them into skills. Then, they frantically purchased software and hardware services such as APIs and Mac Minis. Finally, they trained the agent to be a version that was easier to replace themselves.
The agent-based consumption narrative of stablecoins is a desperate measure after financial value has become the only remaining option. It can only sell its cheap, fast, and technological narratives to AI and the general public, which is tantamount to putting a noose around its own neck, and at the liquidation price no less.
Crypto Token ⇄ AI Token ⇄ Crypto Token
“Stay away from the sounds of gunfire and observe the battle from as far away as possible.
If you find yourself caught up in it, try to create a new battlefield for yourself.
Providing liquidity to the AI industry is a dead end (it will not only leave no money, but also cause the cryptocurrency circle to retreat to the background) . Treating it as a SaaS and channel will lead to being swallowed up and having its profits taken away. Only by focusing on volatility can people's FOMO sentiment be triggered, thereby creating the miracle of asset price surge.
The most compelling narrative of Agents lies in the dual subjectivity of production and consumption, allowing Agents to consume and thus greatly transcending human physiological limitations:
The number of humans is limited, or rather, the main consumers of stablecoins are limited, at most 8 billion. However, the number of agents is infinite and recursively infinite. Human agents call agents, and the agents I subservient to are not my agents.
Agents do not need sleep. This is the first time a "tool" has demonstrated a physiological advantage over humans, and for the first time in a biological sense, it has demonstrated an advantage over human labor. It is not that it is smarter, but that it is more durable, a scaling law on a time scale.
Agents excel at handling fuzzy tasks, or rather, they always provide a solution. In multi-agent mode, AI demonstrates its ability to work around the clock for the first time.
Agents are not an evolution of Ford's assembly line, but rather the theoretical optimality of Taylorism. Humans are unstable, but agents can be continuously optimized to ultimately fit the ultimate dream of capitalism—capital appreciation.
This is not alarmist; the term "token," in both Chinese and English contexts, has come to refer to the throughput of AI, no longer a competition of PoW.
Image caption: The evolution of the computing power era
Data source: @DigiEconomist @IEA
Ethereum abandoned the PoW mechanism in 2022, and ChatGPT ushered in the era of AI computing power competition in 2022. Fate likes to play tricks on us. When tokens in crypto become a pure emission game, more people choose AI, which is supported by computing power consumption.
Switching from Crypto Tokens to AI Tokens isn't difficult; stablecoins are already trying. However, the reverse—converting AI Tokens into Crypto Token liquidity—has become a much more challenging issue.
If computing power, inference, and storage are all lost, how can the story of stablecoins become a reality?
Perhaps AI can offer us some lessons. The replacement of chat by agents is based on the fact that the chat model cannot sustain a business model. ChatGPT shows no signs of replacing Google or Amazon. Claude specializes in the "deterministic" field of coding.
Now it's time to consider whether Crypto will decline slowly and painfully like Binance, or rapidly like FTX.
We must learn from AI in reverse, creating volatility based on stability. This is where crypto excels. Traditional finance adopts AI to pursue accuracy and reduce human intervention, but it adopts Crypto to pursue "tokenization" and reduce friction.
This is not Crypto's own narrative; volatility has always been built on a foundation of stability, such as RWA's shift from government bonds to corporate bonds and lending from floating rates to fixed income.
What the crypto industry wants is to create volatility, or rather, asset price inflation, by having agents use stablecoins.
Image caption: Government becomes a major consumer.
Image source: @OurWorldInData
It's not as difficult as we imagine. Since the Industrial Revolution, the state has become the main body of economic operation, and even after the neoliberal narrative that began in the 1980s, the proportion has continued to rise steadily.
The quantitative easing (QE) and stricter bank regulation will ultimately lead to a wave of withdrawals by asset management giants in 2026. This market is never short of AUM (Assets Under Management), but it is always short of demand.
This is the significance of stablecoins for the retail market. Whether you package them as the chosen one of agents or a post-human necessity, human emotions are always needed to trigger the initial purchase.
The same applies to AI narratives, and the same applies to encrypted narratives; ultimately, they all need to be sold to a small market with limited demand.
Only technological progress can generate wealth surpluses, gradually increasing the overall per capita income level and thus boosting consumption levels. This is the story AI tells. However, the wealth effect of tokens is now close to zero, with no growth, which is Crypto's biggest dilemma.
It's never about productivity and relations of production; it's about the perfect union of consumption and finance. AI can become the main driver of consumption, and the government is the driving force behind consumption. But there will always be a need for people to execute the financial Big Bang in order to complete the cycle.
The leap from AI Tokens to Crypto Tokens also requires freeing tokens from quantity limitations and allowing them to re-enter the realm of imagination.
Conclusion
Circle's true brilliance lies in allowing agents to replace the limits of human numbers and spending power, creating a dream for the capital market of unlimited users.
However, even compliant Circles can experience a sharp drop due to passive interest generated by clear legal "prohibitions," which shows that the market prefers a sense of ambiguity—that there is room for survival when compliance is unfavorable.
This is the characteristic of the crypto industry; it is always the front-line financial laboratory.
Current AI has become increasingly stable in terms of methodology. The only breakthrough direction is the world model of Fei-Fei Li and Shang-Kun Yang, but this is not a complete innovation of the "algorithm" in essence, but still a dimensional update on the data side.
The significance of agents for consumption and finance is about to enter the post-experimentation and implementation stage, while stablecoins carry all the hopes of crypto.
