This morning, I had a deep conversation with Teacher Haotian, and my stance can be summed up in one sentence: We’re now in an era of unprecedented change in the crypto industry over the past decade. The era of tech maximalism is declining ⬇️, while the era of product and operations maximalism is rising ⬆️. In the current crypto space, it’s already the world of exchanges, market makers, MCNs, and agencies. The golden age for tech geeks and research-driven investors has sadly faded away. In this environment of zero-sum competition, your growth is my decline. This is the underlying logic behind Binance creating the PerpDEX “god-tier” platform to challenge Hyperliquid on-chain Binance, and also the direct reason why Coinbase execs are accusing Binance of high-level internal manipulation with Aster. ZK, FHE, high-performance blockchains, RiscV VM, on-chain CLOB, parallel EVM, modularity—these once-hyped technical primitives have now become yesterday’s news, scorned and ignored. No one wants to spend time understanding them anymore, let alone invest precious capital into them. In this era of unprecedented change, the center stage of the crypto industry will undoubtedly be occupied by product and operations geniuses like CZ, Brother Sun (Justin Sun), and Jeff. Meanwhile, former tech maximalist leaders like Vitalik and Lin Jiawen can only dry their tears in silence. For research-driven investors, the key is to recognize the limits of your abilities. While ensuring proper portfolio allocation and risk management, you must quickly adapt and pivot, finding new growth opportunities at the intersection of AI Agents and Crypto. For example, from 2023 to 2025, we research-driven folks have been producing structured articles for humans. In the future, we’ll need to produce AI-optimized structured data for AI Agents. Another example: leveraging the rich historical data we’ve manually created in the past, we can develop SOTA-level investment advisory AI Agents with the help of AI (I’ve already created an Alpha Hunter Agent that’s been highly praised by members of my paid private group). In short, dragons have their paths, and snakes have theirs. Even in this new era of change, research-driven investors still have a way forward.