Recently, the Wall Street research firm Citrini Research released a thought experiment report titled "The Global Intelligence Crisis of 2028," sparking heated discussions in the market. The core deduction of the report points to an extremely ruthless logic of business reshuffling: AI Agents will completely eliminate the "friction" in human interactions, thereby destroying all old business empires built on information asymmetry and intermediary models.

Coincidentally, as this Wall Street "doomsday report" went viral online, the iconic figure of the Web3 industry, Sun Yuchen, also made quite eye-catching statements on social media. He defined 2026 as the "time for miracles to happen," even urging young people: "If you can chat with AI, don't chat with humans… Embrace the future with all your might!"

In the eyes of the public, this may be yet another personal style "traffic carnival" from Sun Yuchen. However, if we peel away the emotional surface and contrast these statements with the macro deductions of "The Global Intelligence Crisis of 2028," we will discover a thought-provoking truth: the "collapse of the old order" that Wall Street fears in its macro model is precisely what Sun Yuchen ardently advocates and attempts to accelerate in his micro actions—the "Web 4.0 New Era."

Faced with the same future, pessimists see the abyss, while Sun Yuchen sees the ladder to the singularity.

Computing Power, Electricity, and Tokens: The Fateful Intersection of AI and Crypto

The "frictionless" scenario depicted in "The Global Intelligence Crisis of 2028" is essentially a brutally cold revolution of de-intermediation driven by AI.

The report sharply points out that when an all-knowing AI Agent can instantly complete supply-demand matching, execute transactions, and provide services at nearly zero cost, the moat that modern business relies on will be completely breached.

For a long time, countless business models, from traditional financial intermediaries and advertising distribution platforms to law firms and consulting agencies that charge exorbitant fees, have essentially thrived on human cognitive limitations, decision delays, and information blind spots. Once AI smooths out these artificially created "frictions," these old empires will inevitably collapse like a row of dominoes.

This trend resonates remarkably with the "decentralization" banner that blockchain has upheld since its inception.

If the Web3 movement that emerged over a decade ago aimed to dismantle the "trust monopoly" of centralized institutions from the ground up through cryptography and distributed ledgers, then the rise of AI Agents today directly eliminates the necessity of "trust" itself in many scenarios—in a more thorough and efficient manner—because agents can not only automatically verify facts but also autonomously complete value exchanges.

A deeper alignment lies in the fact that the material foundation supporting this dual revolution is completely homogenous.

Whether it is AI-generated reasoning tokens or encrypted tokens in blockchain networks, they both hide a long-underestimated yet incredibly solid physical truth: they are all digital incarnations of electricity.

Every inference made by AI large models consumes real computing power; every confirmation of an on-chain transaction and every execution of a smart contract relies on the energy continuously burned by mining machines or validating nodes. Tokens are not magic; they are certificates of energy conversion, the value projection of electricity traversing chips, algorithms, and protocols in the digital world. Thus, this forms a perfect closed loop with Sun Yuchen's previous assertion that "in the short term, there is a chip shortage, in the long term, there is an energy shortage, and there is always a storage shortage."

Consequently, we see two seemingly opposing yet fundamentally homogenous forces converging: on one side, capital elites foresee the collapse of their power structures in model deductions, while on the other side, crypto natives actively embrace a new civilizational protocol that is devoid of intermediaries, friction, and redundancy in codes and slogans. This narrative of the "post-intermediation era," co-written by AI and blockchain, may have just begun.

Why is AI destined to choose Crypto settlement?

However, this grand historical intersection does not merely remain at the philosophical and physical resonance. When the narrative lands in specific business operations, a very practical question looms before AI: in this new world that machines are about to take over, who will provide financial services to these intangible "silicon-based lives"?

Centralized payment networks are designed for "humans."

McKinsey categorizes AI-driven business automation into six levels. Levels 0 to 4 can still operate within the existing financial system because transactions are always associated with human identities. However, at Level 5, agents begin to trade directly with other agents without human instructions. At this point, there is neither a "human identity" to inherit nor can traditional KYC processes be relied upon; payments must be programmatic, condition-triggered, and settled in milliseconds, with the reputation of agents needing to be portable across platforms. Thus, blockchain becomes indispensable.

AI has no physical form and cannot hold an ID card to queue for KYC. For them, a string of asymmetric encrypted private keys is an account; a blockchain that can achieve near-instantaneous transactions, with fees approaching zero and supporting programmable smart contracts, is the perfect clearing center.

There is a very realistic deduction in "The Global Intelligence Crisis of 2028": the space for price matching and information aggregation is ultimately limited. When agents begin to trade with each other, the most direct and effective path is to eliminate various fees. They start looking for payment methods that are faster and cheaper than credit cards. Most ultimately choose to settle using stablecoins through Solana or Ethereum Layer 2 networks, where transactions are almost instantaneous, and fees are as low as less than a cent.

For this reason, crypto wallets are destined to become the "native banks" of AI Agents.

This also completely breaks the long-standing stereotype of Crypto: issuing tokens is by no means just for speculation in the secondary market. In an AI-dominated future, encrypted tokens and peer-to-peer payments will truly solidify as the underlying financial infrastructure for high-frequency collaboration between agents.

Sun Yuchen's "All in" strategy: Where is the confidence and ambition?

Sun Yuchen's choice to bet on Web 4.0 is backed by extremely meticulous business logic and strategic demands.

First, the "stablecoin hegemony" of TRON is the natural settlement layer of Web 4.0.

As is well known, the TRON network carries the largest circulation of USDT globally. As mentioned earlier, the core of Web 4.0 is the payment interactions between machines, and AI requires a payment network that is fast, low-cost, and highly liquid. The USDT payment network of TRON perfectly aligns with the underlying financial needs of AI Agents. Sun Yuchen only needs to build a payment API on the TRON network for seamless use by AI to continue profiting in the Web 4.0 era.

Second, finding the breakthrough point in the "post-Web3 era."

Traditional Web 3.0 has entered a game of existing stock, lacking new breakthrough stories. Meanwhile, AI has become the most certain and financially substantial incremental track in today's world. Sun Yuchen keenly realizes that he must bind the fate of Crypto with AI. By going "All in Web 4.0," he can redirect the AI funds and attention from the traditional tech circle back to the crypto market. TRON previously established an AI development fund of up to $100 million, which is already a clear signal for laying out Web 4.0.

Third, establishing a closed loop for the "decentralized network."

Sun Yuchen holds BitTorrent (decentralized storage/transmission), the TRON public chain (underlying settlement), and a vast number of crypto users from Huobi. If he integrates decentralized computing power with AI models, he has the opportunity to create a full-stack infrastructure for Web 4.0 that does not rely on Amazon AWS or Google Cloud.

The irony of history often lies in the fact that the night watchmen of the old order are still calculating the losses from the collapse of the walls, while the barbarians of the new world have already laid a foundation on the ruins.

This transformation co-written by AI and crypto is not yet complete, but the direction is clear. The real question is no longer whether AI will reshape business, but who can occupy the core position of the infrastructure in this reconstruction ahead of time.