Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author | Golem (@web 3_golem)
On February 27, when a user asked OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger for "the best advice for a 20-year-old" on the X platform, Peter Steinberger bluntly stated, "Don't waste time on cryptocurrency." As the founder of the hottest AI product currently, Peter Steinberger has not concealed his disdain for cryptocurrency. He previouslywarned cryptocurrency practitioners not to harass him, and even users mentioning Bitcoin in OpenClaw's Discord would bebanned.
This cutting remark sparked a collective playfulness and self-deprecation in the crypto circle. However, unlike the crypto practitioners declaring "crypto is dead" during the market downturn, when "don't waste time on cryptocurrency" was offered as advice from a top AI entrepreneur to young people, it still pierced the crypto industry.
It laid the anxiety before us—the fact that crypto is no longer the optimal solution for today's youth.
Looking back to 2011, OG of the crypto world, Baribit founder Chang Jia, advised college students to spend all 6,000 yuan on Bitcoin, which was considered one of the most powerful examples of long-termism in the crypto industry, suitable for young people to join. However, Chang Jia himself did not remain steadfast in the crypto industry; in 2023, Baribit ceased to publish cryptocurrency-related news and shifted to covering AI and the metaverse. After transitioning to the AI field in 2024, Chang Jia completely disappeared from the crypto scene.
Chang Jia, who was ahead of the curve, once drew much criticism, and now the siphoning of talent from the crypto circle to AI has become an undeniable fact. Talent is migrating, capital is reallocating, and attention is shifting.
Talent Migration: OGs Becoming AI Bloggers
Another OG from the crypto circle, Cobo co-founder and CEO Shen Yu, is also one of the early representatives of the Bitcoin mining circle. As a survivor through multiple cycles, Shen Yu typically shares his understanding of market phases and investment insights on social media, gaining much popularity in the crypto community.
However, recently Shen Yu has transformed from a crypto OG into an AI blogger, with over 80% of the content on his social account in the past month related to OpenClaw and very few related to cryptocurrency. Shen Yu himself even joked about his successful transition.
Shen Yu's exploration and focus on AI is limited to a personal level, as his company’s business and personal career still primarily revolve around crypto. Therefore, we can interpret Shen Yu's obsession with AI as a good habit of actively improving oneself and keeping up with the edge of the times during the "market's down time." However, the talent migration from crypto to AI is indeed happening.
An executive from zkSync, Anthony Rose, announced on February 4 that after four years at Matter Labs, he would leave and most likely transition to AI; EigenLayer's development advocacy director, Nader Dabit, also announced on February 5 that he would exit EigenLayer to take on a growth director role at an AI company, claiming "he has joined the future."
The most notable recent example of exiting the crypto scene is Kyle Samani, co-founder of Multicoin Capital, announcing his withdrawal from crypto to focus on AI, robotics, and other fields. Kyle Samani became famous for betting on Solana early, so his exit brought some confidence blows to the crypto space. Even more outrageous, on the day of his exit, Kyle Samani belittled the crypto industry, stating, "Cryptocurrency is not nearly as interesting as many (including myself) have imagined."
Recommended reading: “Is there more to Kyle Samani's exit?”
Capital Migration: Native Crypto VCs Begin to Allocate to AI
Native crypto VCs are also unwilling to waste more time in the crypto industry.
On February 28, according to The Wall Street Journal, the crypto venture capital firm Paradigm is planning to raise a new fund focused on AI and robotics, with a target size of about $1.5 billion. Paradigm is one of the purest native crypto capitals, rising to fame in 2019 for investing in and incubating Uniswap; subsequently, other early investment projects (like Lido, Optimism, dYdX, Blur) also achieved success, making this research-driven VC a competitor to a16z crypto.
For this reason, Paradigm's pivot is of symbolic significance.
If crypto were still in a period of rapid innovation, continually generating projects capable of accommodating billion-dollar investments, there would be no need for Paradigm to establish a heavy fund specifically for AI. But reality shows that the narrative for infrastructure in the crypto industry (like L1, L2, DEX, etc.) has become highly competitive, and the number of genuinely "paradigm-shifting" quality early projects is few and far between.
The entire crypto VC scene lacks good projects to invest in. Data illustrates this more clearly, as the number of venture capital deals in the crypto sector has been declining year-on-year for the past four years. In 2022, there were 1,639 deals in the crypto primary market, which dropped to 829 in 2025, with the proportion of early-stage financing also decreasing from 50% to below 35%.
Source: What can still be traded in the crypto market a year later?
When there are no more investments in the crypto industry, AI, as a booming sector, naturally becomes the best investment playground for crypto capital. From foundational large models to AI agents, from computing chips to the robotics industry, AI not only can accommodate capital scale but can continuously create growth stories, making it the largest reservoir of global capital today.
For a VC managing over $12.7 billion in assets, the core proposition has never been whether "faith is shaken," but rather whether "the return function still holds." As the number of projects able to be accommodated by the crypto industry declines, a singular bet on crypto means increased portfolio risk and reduced return elasticity. In such circumstances, maintaining a "native crypto" strategy becomes irrational.
Thus, Paradigm's proactive expansion into AI is also a response to the trends of the times, this is not merely a strategy issue of individual institutions, but a signal of industry stage.
Attention Migration: When Crypto Players Start Obsessing Over AI
In terms of market attention, Crypto is an industry that excels at riding the coattails of trends; whether it's political hot topics, technological frontiers, or social headlines, there’s always buzz about related projects or memes in the crypto circle. Each time the AI industry experiences a technological upgrade or product innovation, the crypto circle generates associated "Crypto+AI" projects or meme coin hype to attract market attention.
Following OpenClaw's rise, although the crypto circle sought angles to capitalize on it right away, such as hyping a similarly named meme coin, ordering OpenClaw to autonomously trade tokens, and predicting market bets for profit, crypto players eventually transformed from "how to crypto-ize OpenClaw" to "how to genuinely use OpenClaw."
Many crypto researchers began consistently producing tutorials on installing and using OpenClaw, publicly sharing their AI workflows, even detailing how to train personal AI agents to help write code, conduct investment research, generate content, etc. Some crypto KOLs even opened side gigs charging beginners to install OpenClaw.
Offline AI exchange events organized by the crypto circle are also “well-attended.” The most popular recent offline event is the “Web4 China Tour” promoted by crypto OG Kong Jianping, running from February 25 to March 8, held in five cities in China, focusing primarily on OpenClaw and agents, with hardly any crypto-related content.
This is no longer merely riding the trend, but a genuine migration of attention, with so-called progressive-thinking crypto players beginning to fear falling behind in the AI era.
The AI offline event in the crypto circle is full to capacity
Why are crypto practitioners so obsessed with AI?
The crypto sector is already the industry with the highest concentration of "super individuals," hosting many independent developers, traders, and content creators who naturally pursue tool efficiency improvements to compensate for human resource deficiencies. Therefore, when AI significantly enhances personal productivity, crypto players are among the first to embrace it.
Moreover, the core of crypto culture inherently possesses a strong geek spirit and technological worship. Although the "technical narrative" has been diluted in recent years, most crypto players still believe “underlying technology can change the world,” and now AI possesses a stronger revolutionary technological quality than blockchain, naturally drawing intense enthusiasm from crypto players.
Of course, a more practical reason is the lull in the crypto market, while AI is continuously producing "new things," whereas Crypto has been restructuring old narratives. Lacking native innovation in crypto and without significant wealth effects, the entire crypto circle hangs by a thread, breathing through a meager externality brought by prediction markets and RWA. At this point, the new discussion themes and cognitive stimuli provided by the AI industry fill the spiritual void of crypto players as market rhythm slows down, rather than simply competing for attention.
It's Time to Talk About Things Beyond Crypto and AI
Finally, returning to the opening statement of this article, the reason why the founder of OpenClaw's remark drew attention in the crypto circle is not because it was scornful, but because it articulated a fact that many in the crypto world are quietly validating through their actions— the smartest people are redistributing their time.
What we face now is a period of declining wealth generation rates and exploding technological productivity.
On one hand, as the crypto cycle slows, alpha shrinks, and wealth growth curves flatten, the marginal returns of crypto players solely relying on "refreshing information—chasing trends—seeking profits” through mere sitting are decreasing; on the other hand, AI is compressing the "time needed to solve problems," completing numerous tasks previously requiring extensive time, such as coding or content creation, in mere minutes, far surpassing human efficiency.
When the "quantities of processes pursuing results" are highly condensed by AI, we may actually have more free time to engage in activities that are not aimed at efficiency or profit—seeking "carbon-based meaning," experiencing the world, building a cognition system independent of market fluctuations, and constructing our value coordinates.
In the future of AI, what may truly bridge the gaps between people is aesthetic appreciation, independent judgment, and the construction of personal significance.
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