More brutal than a bear market, OpenClaw founder advises young people to stay away from crypto

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 replied, "Don't waste your time on cryptocurrency." As the founder of one of the hottest AI products currently, Peter Steinberger has not hidden his disdain for cryptocurrency. He has previously warned cryptocurrency practitioners not to harass him, and even users mentioning Bitcoin in OpenClaw's Discord have been banned.

This harsh statement sparked collective memes and self-deprecation within the crypto community. However, unlike the market's downturn and the crypto practitioners shouting "crypto is dead," when "don't waste your time on cryptocurrency" is presented as advice from a top AI entrepreneur to the youth, it still stings the crypto industry.

It places anxiety before us—cryptocurrency is no longer the optimal solution for today's youth.

Looking back to 2011, the OG of the crypto circle, Babit's founder Chang Jia, suggested that college students invest all their 6,000 yuan in Bitcoin, which was considered one of the strongest examples of long-termism in the crypto industry, suitable for young people to join. However, Chang Jia himself has not remained steadfast in the crypto industry; in 2023, Babit stopped publishing cryptocurrency-related news and shifted to content in AI and the metaverse. After transitioning to AI entrepreneurship in 2024, Chang Jia completely disappeared from the crypto circle.

Chang Jia, who was ahead of the curve, once sparked much controversy, 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 multi-cycle survivor, Shen Yu often shares his understanding of market phases and investment insights on social media, gaining popularity in the crypto community.

However, recently Shen Yu has transformed from a crypto OG into an AI blogger, with over 80% of his social media content in the past month focused on OpenClaw, while crypto-related content has become scarce. Shen Yu himself even joked about his successful transition.

Shen Yu's exploration and focus on AI remain at a personal level, as his company's business and personal career are still primarily based on crypto. Therefore, we can interpret Shen Yu's obsession with AI as a good habit of actively improving oneself and keeping up with the forefront of the times during "market garbage time." However, the migration of talent 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 likely transition to AI; EigenLayer's developer advocate Nader Dabit also announced on February 5 that he was leaving EigenLayer to become a growth lead at an AI company, stating that "he has joined the future."

The most notable recent exit is Kyle Samani, co-founder of Multicoin Capital, who announced his departure from the crypto circle to focus on AI, robotics, and other fields. Kyle Samani is known for his early bet on Solana, so his exit has dealt a blow to confidence in the crypto community. Even more absurdly, on the day of his exit, Kyle Samani belittled the crypto industry, stating, "Cryptocurrency is not nearly as interesting as many people (including myself) once imagined."

Recommended reading: 《Kyle Samani's Exit: Is There More to the Story?》

Capital Migration: Native Crypto VCs Starting 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 maximum 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, and since then, other early investments in crypto projects (such as Lido, Optimism, dYdX, and Blur) have also been successful, making this "research-driven" VC comparable to a16z crypto.

Because of this, Paradigm's shift is significant.

If crypto were still in a period of rapid innovation, continuously generating projects capable of supporting billion-dollar investments, Paradigm would not need to set up a dedicated fund for AI. However, the reality is that the narrative of crypto industry infrastructure (such as L1, L2, DEX, etc.) has become highly competitive, and the number of truly high-quality early projects capable of achieving a "paradigm shift" is now very limited.

The entire crypto VC landscape has run out of good projects to invest in. Data shows a more intuitive picture: over the past four years, the number of venture capital deals in the crypto industry has been declining year by year. In 2022, there were 1,639 financing deals in the crypto primary market, which dropped to 829 in 2025, with the proportion of early-stage financing also falling from 50% to below 35%.

Source: What Can Be Traded in the Crypto Market a Year Later?

When there are no investment opportunities in the crypto industry, AI, as a booming sector, naturally becomes the best investment arena 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 also continuously generates growth stories, making it the largest reservoir of global capital today.

For a VC managing over $12.7 billion in assets, the core question has never been "whether faith has wavered," but rather "whether the return function still holds." As the number of projects in the crypto industry that can be supported declines, a singular bet on crypto means increased portfolio risk and decreased return elasticity. In this context, continuing to adhere to "crypto-native" becomes irrational.

Therefore, Paradigm's proactive expansion into AI is also driven by the trends of the times. This is not just a strategic issue for individual institutions, but a signal of the industry's phase.

Attention Migration: When Crypto Players Become Obsessed with AI

In terms of market attention, crypto is the industry that knows how to ride the wave the best. Whether it's political hotspots, technological frontiers, or social headlines, as long as it's hot, you can always find related projects or meme coins being hyped in the crypto circle. In the past, every time the AI industry experienced a technological upgrade or product innovation, the crypto circle would have related "Crypto+AI" projects or meme coin hype to attract market attention.

After OpenClaw became popular, although the crypto circle was quick to find angles to ride the wave, such as hyping a similarly named meme coin, commanding OpenClaw to trade tokens and bet on prediction markets for profit, crypto players later began to become more genuine, shifting from "how to crypto-ify OpenClaw" to "how to truly use OpenClaw."

Many crypto researchers began to continuously produce installation and usage tutorials for OpenClaw, openly 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 started side businesses charging newcomers to install OpenClaw.

Offline AI exchange events organized by the crypto circle are also "packed with guests." The most popular recent offline event is the "Web4 China Tour" promoted by crypto OG Kong Jianping, which runs from February 25 to March 8, taking place in five cities in China, with the main topics being OpenClaw and agents, and almost no crypto-related content.

This is no longer just riding the wave; it is a genuine migration of attention, as self-proclaimed progressive-thinking crypto players begin to fear falling behind in the AI era.

The scene at the crypto circle's AI offline event was packed.

Why are crypto practitioners so obsessed with AI?

The crypto circle is inherently the industry with the highest concentration of "super individuals," with a large number of independent developers, traders, and content creators who naturally pursue tool efficiency to compensate for the inadequacies of human productivity. Therefore, when AI can significantly amplify individual productivity, crypto players are among the first to embrace it.

Furthermore, the core of crypto culture itself has a strong geek spirit and technological worship. Although the "technology narrative" has been diluted in recent years, most crypto players still believe that "underlying technology can change the world," and now AI possesses a more revolutionary technological quality than blockchain, which naturally attracts fervent support from crypto players.

Of course, a more realistic reason is the crypto market's lull; AI continues to create "new things," while crypto has been restructuring old narratives. Without native crypto innovation and significant wealth effects, the entire crypto circle is barely hanging on with the slight externalities brought by prediction markets and RWA. At this time, the new discussion topics and cognitive stimuli provided by the AI industry fill the spiritual void of crypto players after the market's pace has slowed.

It's time to talk about things beyond crypto and AI.

Finally, returning to the opening statement from the founder of OpenClaw, the reason it caught the attention of the crypto circle is not because it is dismissive, but because it articulates a fact that many in the crypto community are quietly validating through their actions—the smartest people are reallocating their time.

We are now facing a period of declining wealth generation rates and explosive technological productivity.

On one hand, as the crypto cycle slows, alpha shrinks, and the wealth growth curve flattens, the marginal returns of crypto players relying solely on "scrolling information—chasing hotspots—seeking profits" over the past year are diminishing; on the other hand, AI is compressing the "time required to solve problems." Tasks like writing code and creating content that previously required significant time investment can now be completed by models in minutes, with problem-solving efficiency far exceeding that of individual humans.

When the "quantity of the process of seeking results" is highly condensed by AI, we may actually have more free time to engage in activities that are not aimed at efficiency or profit—to seek "carbon-based meaning," to experience the world, to build a cognitive system independent of market fluctuations, and to construct our own value coordinates.

In the future of AI, what may truly differentiate individuals is perhaps aesthetics, independent judgment, and the construction of personal meaning.