Source: C Labs Crypto Observation

The encryption circle is calling out to the AI ​​track everywhere, but everyone is holding the AI ​​Agent tokens that rushed in to zero in January. I believe many people will issue such soul-searching questions: Is this AI+Crypto reliable?

Is it reliable?

It seems that there are really no serious projects to come out,

Isn't it reliable?

The White House really has an AI and crypto tsar in the United States. I held a press conference some time ago, so I won’t be a dignified United States. Is it also a group to fool us poor leeks, right?

After a long period of thinking and sorting,

Today, Dapiaoliang will discuss with you from a macro to a micro perspective. This AI combined with encryption , is there really something or is it another story about cutting leeks?

Let's talk nonsense, let's start~

Macro aspect: US dollar hegemony double insurance

Dollar hegemony is the core interest of the United States

Why the United States should support AI and Encryption, David Sacks, the White House Tsar, specializes in handling AI and encryption affairs.

As early as 1965, General de Gaulle realized that the dollar hegemony was a part of the United States. Super privileged exorbitant privilege, the main major moves of the United States in the 20th century were all carried out around the core interest of US dollar privilege: first, it accumulated a large amount of gold reserves through World War II

Then after the war Promote the Marshall Plan to export the US dollar globally; then establish the Bretton Woods system;

Even if you are willing to consume a lot of gold, you must ensure the hegemony of the US dollar

and then control Oil Settlement has established a petrodollar system

To this day, it has been hesitant to transfer the US industrial chain to the world, and the global trade system it has built is also for the hegemony of the US dollar.

If you understand it from this perspective, it is not difficult to find that a word often mentioned by the new American AI and crypto czar David Sacks is "American Dollar Dominance"

Competitors of US dollar hegemony

If the United States wants to maintain US dollar hegemony, they must be wary of competitors from two aspects, one is from competition from other sovereign currencies:

In today's mainstream competition, the main strategy of the United States in competing with other sovereign currencies is to maintain the leading position of technology.

After the end of World War II, the United States has been betting on important emerging technologies such as semiconductors/Internets. Now, the emerging technologies that are most valued in the United States are AI.

It is precisely for this reason that VCs in the United States have been spending all their money on investing in AI in the past decade. The investment in AI in 2024The capital is as high as US$100 billion, setting a record high~

Another traditional competitor of the US dollar is gold. Before World War II, the world could be said to be gold hegemony, and the global reserves accounted for more than 90%.

But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States' strength was unmatched worldwide, and the proportion of gold as a global reserve asset dropped to 10%, while the US dollar reached 60%:

In recent years, it seems that the status of the US dollar is not as stable as before.

Many central banks choose to return to gold, so that the US dollar and gold have emerged in the competition for international reserves. One is rising and the other is falling.

The value basis of gold as a reserve currency lies in consensus. When it comes to consensus, our friends in the crypto circle can be said to be very familiar with it, right?

The value of Bitcoin is based on consensus.

But the difference is that the output of gold is distributed all over the world. If gold becomes a reserve currency, the United States will not have any privileges. Moreover, the United States is known as the world's largest gold reserve country, but it may not be true.

Bitcoin needs to be maintained by miners' computing power. As long as the computing power is controlled, the United States can control Bitcoin.

Although Trump only expressed his attitude to support Bitcoin in 2024, the battle for computing power has already begun:

Bitcoin in the United States now Computing power has accounted for 38% of the entire network. In addition, Canada, which is completely listening to American language in the United States, has controlled 45% of the computing power of the entire network. It is basically no problem to exceed 51% in two years of development.

For the United States, seizing gold as the world's reserve currency through its own controllable Bitcoin is also a means to weaken gold and thus stabilize the hegemony of the US dollar.

Have you noticed it? Now basically all cryptocurrencies are denominated in US dollars! !

According to Mutoujie's latest research report, many are "de-dollarization". Saudi Arabia ended the 45-year petrodollar agreement. The BRICS reduced payments to the US dollar by bypassing the SWIFT network. The direct impact of the dependence of Japan has reduced its holdings of US Treasury bonds by US$200 billion since 2021, accounting for about 10% of the holdings of both countries. However, the crypto industry has all It is denominated in US dollars, which actually makes up for this part of the loss.

In particular, the scale of stablecoins has increased from US$100 billion in 2021 to US$300 billion, and the incremental 200 billion US dollars can almost make up for the scale of government bonds sold by China and Japan~

So at the macro level, although there is currently no high expectations for the integration of AI and encryption, AI and encryption have been regarded as the same strategic height by the United States.

Meso-level: AI encryption, born with a pair of

AI requires money

In fact, the development of the AI ​​industry in recent years has not been satisfactory, although the investment is very goodIt's big, but there are not many projects that can support you by making your own blood.

The AI ​​industry has developed to the present. If the entire industry relies on VC blood transfusion like this, it may not be enough to suck the blood of the entire VC industry in a few years.

Is there any way to face this situation?

It seems that it is just issuing coins.

The essence of our crypto industry is an industry that issues token assets. Whether these tokens are valuable depends mainly on faith.

The AI ​​industry is the industry with the most beliefs in the whole society in recent years. Everyone believes that with the development of time, AI will do everything, but it is just that it cannot make money for the time being.

Isn’t this just that dry firewood meets fire, meat buns meet local dogs?

AI should use encryption settlement

Big cousin CZ once said, Dapiaoliang still agrees: the currency for AI is crypto.

The development of AI requires massive data/computing power and energy, and many encryption integrates these AI infrastructure.

And AI and encryption are both online 24 hours a day, which is very suitable for execution through smart contracts.

Whether it is training or use of AI models, it can be implemented through tokenization, which is called tokenized AI.

And the popularity of AI Agent at the beginning of the year has made many AI developers make a fortune, and I believe it has also made many AI project parties jealous.

While encryption brings wealth effects to AI Agent developers, AI Agent can also provide application scenarios for encryption.

Compliance obstruction

So AI not only requires encryption, but also is suitable for issuing coins.

In this context, why don’t AI giants enter the market?

In fact, AI giants have thought that OpenAI's Ultraman just issued Worldcoin

But if you want the current AI giants to issue coins, the most important thing is Too clear the definition of tokens, whether they belong to securities, commodities, or collectibles.

This is the encryption regulatory framework that is often mentioned in the industry.

If these AI giants are punished by the SEC due to compliance issues, which will affect the stock prices of existing shareholders or future listings, it will be more than worth the loss.

However, according to David Sacks's briefing at a press conference some time ago, although this regulatory framework is one of his top priorities at present, it may not be completed until the second half of this year.

So at the meso-level, encryption and AI are born with each other and are very suitable for integrated development.

But before compliance was implemented, the phenomenon we saw was more about crypto projects taking advantage of AI hot spots, and even if the AI ​​giants who are concerned have impulsiveness in their hearts, they will move slowly by embracing encryption.

Micro: Three types of encryption AI projects

Although the regulatory framework for encryption has not been clarified, many projects combining encryption and AI have been implemented.

These AI encryption projects are divided into three types: AI infrastructure, tokenized AI, and AI applications:

AI infrastructure

AI infrastructure mainly includes three aspects: computing power/data/power energy, because the essence of AI is to use electricity, and data is processed into AI models through computing power devices.

The AI ​​computing power project Dapiaoliang introduced a lot last year, and now the heads include Aethir/IO, etc.

The main logic of the AI ​​computing power project is to form a platform to connect to the computing power equipment of each household, and provide computing power for the AI ​​project through the way that everyone is picking up fire.

Specifically, whether individuals or institutions can "rende" their idle computing power to users who need to train AI models and get paid through cryptocurrency. (emphasis) This model breaks the limitations of traditional data centers and greatly improves resource utilization efficiency.

In the past, many people believed that AI models consume too much computing power, and distributed computing power could not meet the needs of AI projects at all.

But with the emergence of deepseek projects, you may find that in the future, you don’t need to exaggerate the demand for large and large computing power, and you can also produce good models.

And with the advent of the future AI application era, if everyone has higher requirements for real-time computing power, our distributed computing power will also have significant advantages over centralized computing centers!

In addition to distributed computing power, there are also distributed data projects, and this type of representative project is Grass.

Distributed data focuses on data equality, and now AI models mainly use data generated by users on the Internet. However, major AI giants have already taken this data for themselves. For example, Google bought out Raddit's data resources, and Twitter also began to restrict and raise prices after announcing XAI.

Although these data are not open to enterprises, ordinary users can still access it, so a batch of distributed data projects turn users into data upload nodes to collect data.

In addition to collecting data, the distributed data track has further developed into the downstream of industries such as data marking. In the future, it may become a new flexible employment in addition to re-employment/delivery/delivery. A way out.

AI infrastructure has the last blue ocean, which is distributed energy!

In fact, A16Z has been eyeing the cake of distributed energy for a long time. With the development of AI and crypto mining, the power grid has consumed electricity.The control of consumption is actually weaker.

However, as a long-term monopoly enterprise, the power grid still needs a lot of game to divide its cake, but this part can be focused on in the future~

Tokenized AI

The current AI model actually has many trust issues.

For example, if you don’t believe in the US model, and the US doesn’t believe in the model, both sides think that the other side will engage in ideological infiltration.

Musk even thinks that openAI's ChatGPT is a leftist, and of course Bill Gates also thinks that Musk's Grok is a rightist.

In theory, blockchain can solve the trust problem from data sources, sample marking, and model training.

Even the development/governance of AI models can be solved in a tokenized way, and this track is called tokenized artificial intelligence.

The most top project in this track is Sentient, which has received an investment of US$85 million. It claims to directly compete with OpenAI, build an open source AI model contributed by the community, and contributed by each community. Those who are rewarded with tokens.

Da Piaoliang is still looking forward to their performance, hoping to give us a sigh of relief in the crypto industry.

AI Agent Application

After talking about AI infrastructure and tokenized AI, let’s talk about AI Agents that were popular at the beginning of the year

What is AI Where is the Agents AI Agent?

According to the definition of the latest research report of Mutoujie, AI agents must meet these four behaviors:

One is to understand intentions through natural language

The other is to use Plan for reasoning and appropriate context.

The third is to use tools to take action and realize intentions.

The fourth is to improve through iteration and continuous learning.

Simply put, it is an AI tool that can understand people's words, and then you will find ways to solve tasks and grow by yourself, which is AI Agents.

MuToujie believes that AI Agents will first make money in advertising. In traditional web2, it is to sell goods for e-commerce, and in web3, it is to sell goods for various cryptocurrencies.

According to the highly integrated development of Mutoujie AI and encryption in the payment field, by 2030, digital wallets supported by artificial intelligence procurement agents may account for 72 of all e-commerce transactions. %, which is squeezed out the share of traditional network and credit card payments.

At that time, AI+ encryption should have in turn influenced the position of the macro dollar hegemony~

Although the AI ​​track in our crypto industry has bright prospects and many projects, it is in business There are not many remarkable projects on the data.

Youjia Hedge Fund in the crypto industry made a development chart of different crypto projects at the end of 24, Bitcoin/LayeThe three tracks of r1/stablecoin have achieved stable development.

The AI ​​track is still at its peak, so now there are indeed many project parties who are cutting their leeks under the banner of AI encryption.

From this year's trend, this chart is quite accurate. The AI ​​track should have reached its peak in January and is now heading towards a period of destruction.

Waiting for the opportunity patiently

Finally, let’s summarize, are we here to form a group to cut leeks?

First of all, at the macro level, AI and encryption mainly deal with the threats of other sovereign currencies and gold respectively, and will not directly promote the integration of AI and encryption at present.

At the meso-level level, AI needs to issue coins and is also suitable for issuing coins. However, if a real AI giant enters the market, it still needs to wait for the regulatory framework to be implemented in the second half of the year. Before this, the space for the development of AI and crypto convergence will be limited by compliance risks.

At the micro level, many projects have been implemented, whether it is AI infrastructure, tokenized AI, or AI applications, but the track is still in a bubble period as a whole~

Therefore, although AI encryption has a bright future, it is not necessarily the best time to participate, because in the future, not only will there be more heavy players joining, but the track may also experience low-level consolidation after the bubble burst~

When investing, patience is often the key to winning.