Author: Gu Yu, ChainCatcher

At the beginning of this month, the established crypto venture capital firm Variant announced the completion of a new fund raising of $222 million, further expanding the fund's theme from the previous "digital ownership" to "autonomy".

This may seem like a typical fund-raising, but the signal behind it is not ordinary.

Variant partner Jesse Walden stated that in the future, the label "crypto investor" may gradually disappear and evolve into something like "internet investor." In other words, crypto is no longer an independent and closed investment track, but more like a fundamental technology paradigm embedded within main channels such as AI, finance, social, robotics, data, content, and consumer products.

This might also be the most realistic response crypto VCs can offer in the face of the impact from AI: not to compete with AI for narrative but to attempt to become the underlying financial rail of the AI world.

1. Crypto VCs Begin to Blur Boundaries

In recent years, the fundraising logic of crypto VCs has mainly been based on one premise: blockchain will give birth to a new batch of platforms, protocols, and applications that are independent of the Web2 world.

When narratives like DeFi, NFT, GameFi, Layer1, Layer2, modularization, re-staking, DePin, RWA, and others emerged one after another, this logic was once very persuasive. As long as funds entered new narratives early enough, they could obtain returns far exceeding traditional equity investments in the secondary market liquidity of tokens.

However, this logic is now failing, with the core reason being the significant weakening of the wealth effect in the crypto market itself. Bitcoin has dropped significantly this year, and many market perspectives regard the withdrawal of funds from crypto ETFs, macro liquidity pressure, and the shift of investors towards AI and large tech IPOs as important reasons. Meanwhile, companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are continuously attracting the attention of LPs and the secondary market, significantly diminishing the scarcity of crypto assets as a "growth story".

This means that crypto funds are not just competing with other crypto funds, but are competing with all assets that can represent future growth. AI, robotics, space, defense technology, and energy infrastructure are all vying for the same LP risk budget.

In this context, "only investing in crypto" has gradually become a potential constraint rather than just a professional label.

If LPs believe that AI is the most important technological variable in the next decade, it will be hard for a fund to prove its irreplaceability by simply stating "we understand token economics better." Especially in recent cycles, many crypto projects have not justified real revenue, user retention, or application scenarios, leaving behind structural problems such as high FDV, low circulation, airdrop mining, and on-chain zombie applications.

This is also why more and more crypto VCs are starting to actively blur the boundaries.

YZi Labs has expanded its investment focus to three major areas: Web3, AI, and biotechnology, and this year participated in the $52 million financing of AI industrial robotics company RoboForce.

According to a report by The Wall Street Journal this February, Paradigm is seeking to raise up to about $1.5 billion for its next fund, extending its investment focus from crypto to “frontier technologies” such as AI and robotics, while still continuing to lay out in the crypto track. In May of this year, AI manufacturing company SendCutSend completed a $110 million financing with participation from Paradigm.

In May, Haun Ventures announced the completion of a $1 billion fundraising for a new fund, expanding its investment scope to the AI agent field. Its founder Katie Haun stated that artificial intelligence will “increasingly represent us in economic activities,” and services need to be adjusted to adapt to this future.

2. AI Agents Could Be the True Large-Scale Application for Crypto

In the past, crypto projects often tried to make users use their products for "decentralization," but reality has proven that the vast majority of users will not change their behavior because of ideals.

Today, the crypto industry finds itself in an awkward situation: it still possesses unique capabilities such as globalization, open finance, composability, asset issuance, and censorship resistance, but these capabilities have long lacked genuine high-frequency, essential, and scalable application entries.

What is more likely to happen in the future is that users may not even realize they are using crypto, but AI Agents, robots, financial applications, games, or content platforms will call upon stablecoins, wallets, smart contracts, and on-chain identities in the background.

According to Variant, autonomy is not just about automation. Automation addresses whether machines can complete tasks on behalf of humans, while autonomy focuses on whether users truly control their own assets, identities, data, and decision-making power. Variant states in the article that building autonomous systems requires addressing a series of issues such as incentive mechanisms, laws, governance, security, verification, policy, and geopolitical interfaces in adversarial markets, of which digital ownership is an important pillar of autonomy.

"The ideas driving the Web3 movement will find new momentum in the era of artificial intelligence. We conducted many experiments, initially intending to view cryptocurrency as a product itself. But ultimately we discovered that cryptocurrency is the rail supporting numerous products, and its growth story has just begun," Jesse Walden stated.

This may be the most significant cognitive adjustment in the crypto industry in recent years.

Crypto does not have to become a front-end application that users open daily; it can be the economic settlement layer between machines and machines, humans and machines, applications and applications in the era of AI.

If AI Agents are going to act on behalf of users to complete tasks, they will need wallets; if they are to autonomously purchase APIs, call upon computing power, pay for data, and subscribe to services, they need a low-cost, global, programmable payment network; if they are to carry identities, reputations, and assets across multiple platforms, they need an open account system; and if they are to convince the outside world of the results of their actions, they need verification and auditing mechanisms.

These issues precisely align with the capabilities accumulated by crypto over the past decade.

3. Tether's Investment Case

The investment of crypto giant Tether in NEURA Robotics is a typical example of this trend.

On June 10, the German robotics company NEURA Robotics completed $1.4 billion in financing, with investors including Tether, Amazon, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Bosch, Schaeffler, and the European Investment Bank. NEURA stated that this funding will be used to expand the commercialization of cognitive robots and humanoid robots, with plans to produce millions of robots by 2030. The company also disclosed that its backlog amounts to over $1 billion.

On the surface, this is an AI robotics investment; but for Tether, it is clearly more than just a financial bet.

According to relevant press release information, NEURA's robotics platform is expected to integrate Tether's wallet development kit WDK, embedding the self-custody wallet functionality directly into the robotic systems. This means that in the future, robots might earn micro-payments for completing tasks, conduct transactions with other systems, or execute economic behaviors within human preset parameters.

This is precisely one of the most imaginative new scenarios for stablecoins.

In the past, the primary users of stablecoins were traders, cross-border payment users, gray arbitrageurs, and some residents of emerging markets. It addressed the issues of transfers, settlements, and value storage between humans. However, if AI Agents and robots begin to become economic entities, the frequency and scenarios of stablecoin use could be significantly amplified.

A robot can take an order, complete transport, and earn USDT micro-payments; an AI Agent can automatically purchase data, call models, and pay for SaaS services; an automated supply chain system can automatically settle once goods arrive, sensors verify, and contracts confirm. Compared to traditional banking systems, on-chain payments are naturally suited for these high-frequency, small-amount, cross-regional, machine-readable economic activities.

This is also why AI does not have to be in a purely competitive relationship with crypto. AI has grabbed the capital attention from crypto, but it may also create the real demand that crypto has been missing in the past.

4. AI + Crypto is Not a Universal Formula

Of course, AI + Crypto does not naturally hold.

In the past two years, the market has seen too many forcibly stitched projects: calling a Telegram group with ChatGPT an AI Agent, packaging model call interfaces as token economics, cramming data labeling, computing power rental, and agent platforms into white papers. Many projects face issues that are not fundamentally different from the last rounds of GameFi and SocialFi: grand concepts, tiny revenues, heavy tokens, and light products.

Truly valuable AI + Crypto projects should meet at least one condition: they cannot exist without crypto, or they are clearly better with crypto.

For example, Agents need self-custody wallets and permission management; AI-generated content requires verifiable sources and ownership; model, computing power, and data markets require open settlement and incentive mechanisms; the robotic economy needs a machine-readable payment network; and autonomous organizations need transparent governance and enforceable rules. In these scenarios, crypto is not just a marketing label on the outside but a foundational component required for the system to operate.

This is also a question that crypto projects and VCs need to address going forward.

If they are merely changing their fund introduction pages to AI + Crypto because it's easier to raise funds, then this will not change the industry's predicament. The market will eventually realize that most so-called integrated projects have neither AI barriers nor crypto necessity.

However, if they can find the real intersection points among AI Agents, robotics, data markets, financial automation, and on-chain identities, the crypto industry may indeed usher in a new application cycle.

This time, growth may not necessarily come from more retail investors rushing into exchanges to buy new coins, but perhaps from more machines, applications, and enterprises utilizing on-chain rails in the background.

5. Conclusion

In the face of the impact from AI, the answer given by crypto VCs is already clear: do not treat crypto as an isolated track anymore, but reinterpret it within the bigger wave of technology.

This is both a proactive evolution and a forced turn.

As LPs' funds flow toward AI, entrepreneurs' attention shifts to AI, and the risk appetite of the secondary market moves towards AI, if crypto funds continue to only discuss Layer1, DeFi, NFTs, blockchain gaming, and airdrop growth, their survival space will only grow narrower.

But this does not mean the story of crypto has ended. On the contrary, if AI Agents truly become new internet users, if robots indeed become new economic participants, and if automated systems start to represent humans to execute more transactions, then the wallets, stablecoins, smart contracts, on-chain identities, and open financial networks built by crypto over the years may finally welcome high-frequency, essential, non-speculative usage scenarios.

The crypto industry needs a new narrative more than ever, but it needs new real demand even more.

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