AI × Cryptocurrency Era: Why Do Ordinary People Feel "It's Not My Business"?

Byline: Fang Dao

When AI and crypto are brought up at the same time, many people instinctively develop a sense of distance. This is not because they don’t understand the technology; it’s a more direct, felt experience: this transformation seems to be gradually pushing ordinary individuals to the margins of the “core asset-liability statement.” This sense of “irrelevance” is not an illusion—it’s more like the inevitable outcome after a structural shift in technical paradigms.

In the past, every wave of technology reserved a clear niche for ordinary people. In the internet era, the corresponding activities were building websites and distributing content; in the early days of crypto, they were mining and providing liquidity. As long as you were willing to bear the cost of time or risk, the path was visible, and the rewards could be imagined. However, the combination of AI × crypto is changing that. AI gives software autonomous capabilities, crypto gives software an ownership structure; together they form “Agentic Entities”: code-driven, token-coordinated, and able to self-run and profit in a closed loop. In this process, the intermediate operations that were originally carried out by humans are being gradually swallowed by algorithms. The system’s operation no longer relies on large-scale individual participation, so the path begins to narrow.

The crypto market in the past was, in essence, a market of “opportunities.” Price volatility meant opportunities existed—rising prices themselves were a reason to participate. But once AI enters, the market is shifting to another structure. Trading is increasingly dominated by high-frequency algorithms and agents, compressing the space driven by emotion. Compute power, data, and network effects become core assets, and the barriers to entry rise significantly. Those able to capture these structural values are often large capital or a small number of builders. For ordinary individuals, “participation” no longer equals “earning returns.” The more stable the system is, the narrower the path becomes instead.

These changes are further reflected in the rewriting of “companies,” the most basic unit. AI × crypto is changing the minimal structure of companies. In the future, companies will no longer rely on traditional human organizations, but may be driven by a set of sustainably running protocols: execution is handled by agents, coordination is achieved through token mechanisms, and revenue is automatically allocated through code. In such a structure, participants gradually converge into three categories: builders who master model and protocol design capabilities, capital providers who can supply compute power and resources, and the system itself, which automatically extracts revenue through rules. Ordinary individuals neither master the structure nor can participate in the underlying allocation of resources, so their position naturally becomes blurred.

The essence of this “sense of irrelevance” lies in the fact that technology is becoming infrastructural. AI × crypto hasn’t moved away from ordinary people; they are simply sinking down to become underlying presences like electricity and network protocols. And once they enter this stage, the logic of allocation changes as well: technology no longer distributes dividends in the form of “opportunities,” but instead hardens structures in the form of “efficiency.”

This may mean a fact that is not easy to accept: when a technology truly starts to change the world, it often stops being a mining field that everyone can participate in, and becomes more like a system that has already stabilized and is running reliably. The role of ordinary people in it changes accordingly—from participants to users. From people who directly create value to those who provide the system with data and demand.

Technology is still accelerating, but the “participation dividend” belonging to individuals may be gradually narrowing as part of a structural adjustment.

References

EigenCloud / Sreeram Kannan

Digital Asset Summit 2026

Market Structure Analysis