AI is all the rage, while crypto is ignored.

Written by: Patrick Collins

Compiled by: Chopper , Foresight News

In 2025, venture capital firms such as Sequoia Capital, A16z, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator invested heavily in AI companies, with funds flowing from the crypto sector to AI, not to mention the recent sharp decline in the overall price of cryptocurrencies.

Sequoia Capital's investment trends over the past three years

a16z Investment Trends in 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 of the people who joined me in Web3 in 2019/2020 leave to join AI companies or prediction markets. As someone fully committed to the blockchain and decentralized finance field, I believe people can have several different mindsets in the face of this situation.

Goodbye and don't come back, they had no faith to begin with.

This is a bit like a terrible breakup, with people leaving and then hurling insults. "Now only the real builders remain, and everything will be better." I think this mindset and approach is wrong. We need talent to enter this industry, even if they don't fully agree with our underlying principles.

As long as we have a vision, we will always need people to turn that vision into reality. Many people simply want to live a good life, not necessarily change the world, and I think that's perfectly understandable.

There are two good types of people in the world: those who are extremely passionate; and those who aren't as passionate, but are willing to work hard, improve themselves, and do the right thing. To me, this is somewhat like the difference between a "rock star" and a "superstar."

Encryption is dead, quickly switch to AI.

This is the topic I want to focus on, and it's also a sentence I want to etch into your mind: the world's finance will eventually be entirely driven by cryptocurrencies, and that's inevitable.

Think about this carefully. Once you accept this, turning to AI makes no sense.

Yes, AI is exploding, AI is amazing, but AI is just a tool to build other things. And among these "other things" is the future of finance.

Of course, you can make the choice that's best for you. There might be a fast track to success in the AI ​​field beckoning you, so feel free to hop on board. But I think you'll miss out on a much bigger opportunity because of it.

Why is blockchain an inevitable trend?

The reason is the same as why gold has a market value of $35 trillion today. I've talked about "what is money" countless times, especially in my explanation of stablecoins. Money has three main functions: store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account.

Throughout human history, finding a credible, neutral, and convenient currency has been virtually impossible, with a breakthrough only recently emerging. Gold is widely recognized as a "credible and neutral" currency, but it is extremely inconvenient to carry and use. Cryptocurrency, however, offers the solution.

The overwhelming advantages of blockchain

This alone is attractive enough, but when combined with smart contracts, the explosive power is astronomical. Take the stock market as an example: the NYSE's daily trading volume is approximately $80 billion, while Uniswap's is likely only $20 billion—a difference of 40 times. But consider the operating costs: the NYSE's parent company has approximately 12,000 employees; while Uniswap theoretically only requires liquidity providers to operate, with only about 200 employees.

Operating costs are reduced by 60 times! From a cost perspective alone, the advantages of running a decentralized exchange are overwhelming.

Not to mention censorship resistance and credible neutrality, which are the core significance of this technology. I won't elaborate on why credible and neutral financial products are the future; the data speaks for itself: DeFi has extremely low operating costs and is more equitable.

Many people dismiss the logic of "trustworthiness and neutrality," so I'll skip that part for now. Most of these people come from developed countries and will never understand how crucial this technology is to less developed countries. However, I still believe this is the core reason why encryption technology is destined for success.

Many people, upon seeing the enormous costs of the existing financial system, will start asking, "Why do I have to pay such high fees and wait two days to complete stock settlement?"

Summarize

You can leave if you want, but I think you'll miss out on the massive expansion that's happening right now, and the opportunities here are greater than ever before.

Historically, many so-called "opportunities" in the crypto space have been scams to some extent. NFTs, liquidity mining, and meme coins—these products all exploited people's ignorance of new technologies to generate traffic. We've already passed that stage; we all know those things were foolish.

Now, we can enable institutions and ordinary users to truly access products that improve their lives: Aave, Uniswap, zero-knowledge privacy protocols, stablecoins... They provide financial services to people all over the world at extremely low cost and with lower censorship thresholds.

The entire world will operate on this infrastructure in the future. And I will continue to do my utmost to bring that day to an end.