Former Alibaba Chief Strategist Zeng Ming: AI + Crypto is Web3—value creation first, then value distribution
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Former Alibaba Chief Strategist Zeng Ming: AI + Crypto is Web3—value creation first, then value distribution
In this speech, Zeng Ming delved deeply into the concept of Web3.0, emphasizing the relationship between cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence, as well as their importance to the future digital economy.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsThis article features the keynote speech titled "The Future of Web3?" delivered by Dr. Zeng Ming, former Chief Strategy Officer of Alibaba, at the 9th Blockchain Global Summit hosted by Wanxiang Blockchain Labs on September 19.
In this speech, Dr. Zeng delves into the concept of Web3.0, emphasizing the relationship between cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence, and their significance for the future digital economy. He highlights the rise of the creator economy as a core component of the future economy and advocates for the co-evolution of infrastructure and applications to drive ecosystem growth. Additionally, he expresses optimism about Al Crypto Native Services, which he believes will be one of the most exciting trends in the years ahead.
Below is the full transcript:
Today I want to share some thoughts on Web3. I spent quite some time thinking about the theme of this talk, and ultimately decided to title it with a question mark. We all know that the next stage is Web3, but where exactly will this stop? How long will it take to get there—two years or five? There are many confusing aspects to this question, including the lack of a clear definition of what "Web3" actually means. However, two major driving forces behind Web3—cryptocurrency (Crypto) and the Metaverse—are clearly pushing the concept forward.
Everyone agrees that crypto and the Metaverse are important directions for the future, but over the past two years, both fields have faced significant challenges. This has left many practitioners confused—for example, in Silicon Valley, perhaps two-thirds or more of those working in crypto have shifted their focus to artificial intelligence (AI). So, what is the future of Web3? I believe this is a topic worth revisiting.
My talk today will primarily focus on blockchain and crypto, which I consider an essential part of the discussion. Let’s briefly summarize the achievements of crypto so far. Two solid consensus-based successes stand out: first, Bitcoin (BTC), and second, Ethereum. Ethereum is essentially a smart contract platform that has evolved through three to four key phases. The first was during the ICO era, which established Ethereum’s position and underscored the importance of smart contracts, along with foundational user-facing applications like exchanges and wallets. The second major breakthrough began in the summer of 2020 with DeFi, followed by GameFi and NFTs.
However, one of our biggest challenges today is figuring out what comes next. Everyone is waiting for a major application to emerge, but it's hard to predict what it will be or when it will arrive. Why has crypto achieved what it has? At its core, it's a value network—not just an information network—but one that enables more efficient circulation of digital assets. A related breakthrough is token economics, which allows for more effective incentive mechanisms. As Professor Lan mentioned earlier in discussing the relationship between Web3 and AI, effectively combining open-source communities with incentive structures will be a crucial area of innovation in the future.
At its essence, I see this as an innovation in production relationships. While that term may sound traditional, I believe it captures the heart of the matter because it enhances collaboration, cooperation, and the exchange and circulation of assets. It still holds enormous potential for value creation.
An interesting point is that within the broader economy, finance functions as a production relationship—an efficiency-enhancing tool. Yet financial products, especially consumer-facing ones such as savings accounts or assets, are actually applications of productivity closely tied to technology. That’s why Bitcoin represents one of the lowest-level applications of blockchain, while another persistent area of innovation in blockchain and crypto has been finance. Finance, within the broader economic context, marks a breakthrough in production relationships. It leverages blockchain technology, yet innovations in financial products can also gain significant technological advantages. Thus, finance occupies a relatively unique space. But from a broader perspective, if we’re aiming for the next billion users, crypto remains stuck on a critical issue: it doesn’t directly improve user experience, nor is it a productivity-enhancing tool.
The second challenge is that digitizing traditional assets hasn’t progressed as smoothly as expected, including areas like RWA (real-world assets). We’ve been discussing these issues recently, though they’ve actually been around for years, and the process of asset transfer continues to stall. This is easy to understand: any new technology attempting to migrate traditional businesses into a new domain often fails because the value created isn’t large enough relative to the high costs involved.
A similar case is traditional enterprises’ so-called digital transformation, which has been one of the dominant topics over the past five years—but very few companies have succeeded. The reason is that the future lies in new technologies creating new applications and new assets. Right now, however, the entire crypto space lacks new digital assets—we only have Ethereum and peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, and nearly all financial innovation revolves around these two. Therefore, I personally believe the entire crypto field needs to innovate faster and accelerate toward true Web3. We need to create new digital assets, and there may be three pathways to achieve this.
The first pathway is continued innovation within finance. Finance itself is a large and critical industry, and its integration with crypto and blockchain combines the advantages of both productivity and production relationship innovations. I believe financial innovation will remain a primary direction moving forward. Take Bitcoin, for instance—it has seen relative success in one particular area: alternative assets, serving a role akin to digital gold. However, the long-anticipated visions such as payment networks and inclusive finance—enabling financial services for billions in underserved regions—remain distant goals and represent key areas for future breakthroughs.
Second, blockchain itself still holds room for technological innovation in finance. For example, recent developments in cross-border payments suggest the possibility of playing a larger role in the future. Therefore, financial innovation will continue to be a vital component of Web3.
The second major area we’ve long anticipated is new applications such as gaming. Over the past two years, most innovation has centered on infrastructure, particularly Layer 2 (L2) development and expertise. This has led to significant technical progress in scalability, usability, and convenience. But when will applications break through? GameFi is a space many are eagerly watching. Over the past two years, numerous professional teams have entered this field, and game development typically takes around two years—so this year and early next year, we’re all expecting some standout products in GameFi that could delight consumers.
Social applications are also highly anticipated—take the recent buzz around friend.tech, for example. Whether this leads to even bigger breakthroughs remains to be seen. Given the current state of blockchain and crypto infrastructure, nurturing the next generation of applications is undoubtedly one of the community’s top priorities.
But today, I particularly want to emphasize the third pathway. From late last year to early this year, it became increasingly clear to me that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and crypto are a match made in heaven. Crypto primarily represents a revolution in production relationships, while AGI is a breakthrough in productive capacity—a technological leap that will generate vast amounts of new digital assets.
Let me briefly explain why. AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, became widely recognized as a massive breakthrough after the explosion of ChatGPT. Its first major application area is AIGC—AI-generated content—where AI can produce large volumes of new content at low cost and incredible speed. This content is inherently digital, and the pace of technological change in this field is extremely rapid. We've already seen text-to-text and text-to-image advancements; soon, text-to-video will become a major frontier. Once text-to-3D video makes a leap, we’ll undoubtedly witness an explosive boom in the content industry.
Moreover, an important point is that crypto has remained relatively marginal because much of the existing digital content—including NFTs—is not considered truly significant or valuable. However, the economic value of these new digital assets will grow substantially. Only when asset values are high will people truly care about reducing transaction costs, protecting privacy, and improving efficiency. If, like much traditional content over the past couple of years, the content itself lacks value, then naturally, interest in its asset-like properties will remain low.
Equally important is that AI development will accelerate rapidly—from its current role as an assistant to becoming an autonomous agent. AI teachers, AI doctors, AI designers, and others will increasingly replace humans. Machine-to-machine coordination will largely supplant human-machine and human-human collaboration. Smart contracts were originally designed for machine-to-machine interaction, so as AI advances further, the complexity and importance of smart contracts will undergo a qualitative leap.
Therefore, based on these three points, I believe crypto infrastructure will become increasingly important—not because crypto itself has strong momentum, but because the advancement of AI will necessitate crypto and its underlying infrastructure. Terms like "creator economy" and "Metaverse," while perhaps slightly outdated over the past two years, still resonate with me—I haven’t found better alternatives yet.
I firmly believe the creator economy will be a crucial part of the future economy—perhaps even its defining characteristic. The core value of crypto lies in building a decentralized network for efficient asset ownership verification and trading, enabling massive collaboration among individuals and machines. But before value distribution, there must first be value creation. So how do we enable mass participation in creation? How do we facilitate better collaboration among AIs? How do we solve incentive design, asset trading, and distribution? These are all critical questions. Creating a new form of creator economy—one that grants broad access to value creation—is the real opportunity. This carries profound economic and social significance and will bring Web3 into the mainstream rather than leaving it on the fringes. It is the convergence of AI, AGI, and crypto that makes this future of the digital economy possible—and this is true Web3.
At the same time, an important insight is that infrastructure and applications evolve together. Since the launch of Netscape in 1993, we’ve clearly seen that every breakthrough in infrastructure is closely tied to the emergence of killer applications. Today, seeing the infrastructure built over the past two years, we have good reason to anticipate the arrival of the next killer app. Therefore, what I’m most excited about in the next two years is the emergence of AI Crypto Native Services.
We don’t yet know what exact product forms these will take or in which specific domains they’ll appear, but the trend suggests it’s inevitable. When such applications emerge, they will attract large numbers of new users and provide clear direction for future infrastructure development, thus propelling the entire ecosystem forward. The current challenge is that true AI-native integration hasn’t happened yet. Although many in Web3 and crypto have turned to AI startups, many native AI practitioners—as Professor Lan just noted—still lack sufficient understanding of crypto. What we need most now is deeper integration between AI and crypto experts and those working on infrastructure.
To circle back to what Professor Cao mentioned earlier: starting from infrastructure, how do we integrate technologies like AI and crypto all the way up to the top layer of applications? That is the future of Web3—a future that is not only possible but deeply exciting. Thank you all.
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