Recently, I was chatting with a friend who has been working at a big tech company for five years, and I was deeply touched.

He was laid off at 35, with a mortgage and a kid in school. Every day, he leaves home on time without fail and goes to a company pretending to work, just to avoid worrying his family;
but he noticed that a woman sitting at the next desk arrives even earlier than him every day, yet she never opens any work software. After inquiring, he found out she’s using AI to help companies create brand copy, earning over 40,000 dollars a month steadily.
She asked him a piercing question: What do you think is stability?
He used to think that working at a big company until retirement was stability, but now he realizes that no matter where you are, being able to find work is what stability really means;
and this is exactly the hallmark of the post-industrial era in 2026:
Capable people are breaking through the boundaries of unemployment and employment, and the foundation of this ability is now collectively called AI.
The “AI for Science” forum at Zhongguancun Forum 2026 just concluded. If you still believe that pure hard work is enough, look at the current Middle East situation and global inflation, and you’ll understand.
So, when we talk about AI × Web3, we’re actually discussing a whole new way of thinking about assets:
How to leverage future infrastructure to achieve automatic arbitrage under economic rules?
Recently, the AI track has become a red ocean, with too many projects making empty promises. It wasn’t until I saw the announcement that Origins Network @OriginsNetwork_ secured $8 million in funding led by Animoca Brands, TBV, Candaq, and others that I found this interesting.
The participants behind it, like Animoca Brands and Candaq FinTech Group, actually represent native crypto capital;
while their partners—Amazon Web Services, Tencent Cloud, Alibaba Cloud—represent the core of real-world computing power.
The fact that both sides appear simultaneously essentially shows one thing:
They’re trying to connect on-chain narratives with the real computing power system.
Compared to projects that only start hiring after funding, the Origins ecosystem is already fully operational:
Origins Cloud: directly connects GPU computing demand and supply;
OrClaw AI: allows developers to run applications directly on it;
OrtradeX: provides asset liquidity;
It’s not just the underlying layer; it’s built a complete ecosystem, which at least shows it’s not stuck in the design phase but is already trying to generate network effects.
Here’s another point many people tend to overlook: tokens.
$OR ’s logic is actually very simple:
Fixed supply;
Zero inflation;
Revenue buyback and burn;
This model itself isn’t extraordinary, but it only works under one premise:
The network must have real usage.
So, what’s truly worth paying attention to in this $8 million funding isn’t the amount or the narrative, but a deeper question:
In the future world, who controls computing power? Who can verify calculations? Who can turn resources into assets?
Returning to a very practical point:
Why do you need to understand investment, or even participate?
Because today’s world is no longer a linear logic of “work more, earn more.”
Labor determines the lower limit;
Assets determine the upper limit;
Cognition determines which side you’re on.
You can choose to ignore these changes, but they won’t stop happening.
It may not necessarily succeed, but the direction it’s heading—computing power, AI, assetization—is already an irreversible trend.
#AI #OriginsNetwork