Crypto Capitalism, Crypto in the Age of AI

For the increasingly less volatile crypto industry, especially for crypto industry practitioners, where should they go?

Written by: Zuoye

One-person Media Companies, the Era of Everyone as a Founder

What are you prepared to do?

There are two futures before us now: one is spiderweb capitalism, the other is crypto capitalism.

• Sun Ge travels the world, discussing AI or nuclear fusion, all for the massive appreciation of personal capital
• Peter Thiel is "Western", capitalist, with the core aim of maintaining the hegemony of Western civilization

Image description: You are in me, I am in you

Image source: @justinsuntron @TheFP

For Thiel, maintaining capitalism is equivalent to maintaining Western civilization. In a sense, Thiel does not mind transcending the usual concepts of democracy and universal values.

For Sun Ge, the economic goal of capital appreciation is his ultimate objective. Globalization is increasingly fragmented and irreversible, and this anxiety is gradually collapsing at a deep level.

Especially in the AI era, productivity has not yet surpassed traditional models, but the demand for infrastructure such as energy is rising, and New Yorkers' demand for stable systems is becoming younger.

For the increasingly less volatile crypto industry, especially for crypto industry practitioners, where should they go?

AI Eliminates Volatility

After 34-year-old social democrat Mamdani was successfully elected mayor of New York, Peter Thiel's 2020 email to Zuckerberg began to circulate. Thiel had already sensed the widespread disappointment of young people with capitalism five years earlier.

This sense of disappointment was the direct reason Thiel turned to Trump. When young people cannot afford rent, student loans, and healthcare, blaming them for lacking a fighting spirit is meaningless. Protecting housing prices only benefits the post-war and neoliberal eras.

When old crypto OGs hold Bitcoin and look down on miners, chain, and coin communities, the post-2005 generation embracing Meme has already reached the edge of anger. 100,000-dollar Bitcoin has become a direct manifestation of intergenerational conflict.

Whether it's Labubu or Mamdani, it's all about distribution issues. To solve distribution, we have two approaches: one is to move towards AGI and UBI, believing that AI will eliminate human labor and become the economic subject. When housing problems can't be solved and capitalism can't be eliminated, energy + computing power + storage have become the "hardest" underlying improvements.

Image description: It's time to speak.

Image source: @liangsays

The second is to try crypto capitalism. Vitalik's low-risk DeFi and a16z's emphasis on new media scholarships all stress reconnecting the world, whether through the Internet, AI, or Web3.

Expression is the lowest-cost leverage, and the power law of globally linked founders will be infinite. They will cross language, systems, and technological narratives, preserving the spark of globalized applications.

This is also the advantage crypto always has over AI. Claude will not open to specific regions, but Ethereum doesn't care where you come from or go.

As a response to spiderweb capitalism—where the rentier class of countries transcends national sovereignty and is tightly intertwined like a web—workers (in the past) and young people (now) in various countries feel omnipresent shackles.

Crypto makes such connections extremely simple, and it's a necessary GTM behavior. Dalio has already predicted a crash. In the recovery after difficult times, crypto will allow capital to show its proper efficiency.

Looking back, Sun Ge's profits come from Italian-rooted USDT, the Chaoshan business group's control of Southeast Asian parks, mainland believers in Tron public offerings, and projects like USDD, which surprisingly didn't collapse after the YBS incident.

The core of crypto capitalism is not to eliminate crypto and surrender to AI. Rentiers can link up, and newcomers can also interact directly.

If the large-scale emergence of stablecoins is seen as a sign of crypto maturity, capturing and amplifying external signals will become the mainstream opportunity in the mature phase of crypto.

• AI companies don't need to go public only after success; issuing tokens and growing with entrepreneurship is more cost-effective. Hangzhou has Unitree, BN Alpha has Sapien. Whether becoming DJI or Commissioner Smith, it's ultimately about monetization paths.
• Web3's Robotics and Agentics may not become mainstream applications, but they can become mainstream assets. Since Solana phones can be made, after the Huaqiangbei industrial chain matures, shifting to low-cost Web3 hardware is also a way out.

Don't resist this historical process, clinging to the established notion that physical goods are noble. Tangshan's steel can be cheaper than cabbage. Human overcapacity is an inevitable process of industrial agglomeration, and any growth in digestion channels is a good deed.

Stability Under Strongmen

In an era of capital surplus, effective organizers are king.

Before the US entered neoliberalism, finance and the real economy were not yet separated. One dollar did not represent equivalent gold, but corresponded to American goods and Middle Eastern oil, while the Soviet gold ruble could not defeat the dollar in this regard.

Gold houses are good, but basic human needs must still be met with physical goods. Amidst the virtualization wave, Musk has already shown the leverage of industry over finance—at least you can really see Tesla and SpaceX.

Image description: Musk's trillion-dollar bet compensation plan

Image source: @AP

AI fuels bubbles. Moral criticism is worthless; the key is how to coexist with and utilize the bubble. a16z believes it's about media—globalized expression creates emotional resonance, thereby securing control over hot topics and trends.

Understanding this is the only way to comprehend a16z's long-term bet on SocialFi. You can invest in 99 that don't make money, but you must not miss the one that does.

With AI, all kinds of tools—reading, writing, editing, even publishing and managing—have lowered the entry barrier for individuals to almost zero. Individuals have become part of a network of countless agents.

Musk has long been adept at using this media leverage. He is the media for Tesla, Sun Ge is the media for TRC-20 USDT, Peter Thiel is the media for Western civilization. They are all one person, a one-person media company.

Daily tweeting is as important as the flames of SpaceX. The desire to express is the propellant for exploring Mars.

In addition, the relics of this round of the AI bubble have been locked in advance. AI Coding/Vibe Coding has become routine. Even if GPT-5 is disappointing, Kimi K2 is good enough.

Image description: New wave of layoffs

Image source: @Layoffsfyi

Entrepreneurship is becoming increasingly individualized, or rather, gang-based. The peak of the traditional bureaucratic system is not the administrative system, but the KPIs and 996 of big tech employees. Human efficiency is gradually becoming lower than that of GPUs. The Luddite movement targeted big machines, but smashing GPUs won't hurt Nvidia's 5 trillions.

This doesn't mean that people are forced to become cyber street vendors by AI, but that humans are coordinating production systems under AI. This is a process and requires some cost—the cost is being a workhorse.

Media and code have become cheaper than air and water as artificial natural resources. Everyone must learn to coexist with them, and the crypto industry happens to be best at this.

Conclusion

Super individuals, AI Agents, another wave of mass entrepreneurship.

Starting from Peter Thiel's questioning of capitalism, we see the staggering of industrial capitalism and financial/information capitalism. If AI capitalism can still convince people, then crypto capitalism is still in its infancy.

Crypto has always been a reshaping of capital, the core concept of capitalism—programming, transforming, and abusing it. In an era of dual surplus of capital and industrial products, crypto experiments are no less than aerospace or nuclear fusion.

Crypto practitioners, especially entrepreneurs, should handle the relationship between media and code well, and use new productivity architectures and systems to defeat competitors. This is not far away.

Big waves, big waves, keep growing! Crypto! Crypto! Quickly muster your strength and shoulder the rise and fall of AI!