Meng Yan: Web3 Drives Away from Barbaric Growth, Enters a Colonial Era of Heroes Contending
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Meng Yan: Web3 Drives Away from Barbaric Growth, Enters a Colonial Era of Heroes Contending
Over the next decade, the colonization of the Web3/crypto world will be the central narrative of the industry, marking a fundamental shift in its story—where the most significant innovations and wealth creation opportunities lie.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Meng Yan
Recently, two significant events occurred in the AI and Web3 domains. Both carry strong symbolic meaning, yet their deeper implications have been buried beneath a flood of gossip and sensational details in media coverage.
When observing any major event, we can adopt two distinct perspectives. The first is an entertainment-driven view—seeking amusement from news stories. If this is your goal, then you should use a microscope: the more granular the details, the denser the drama, and the richer the gossip becomes, making it all the more entertaining. The second perspective is macroscopic: using events to discern broader industry or even global trends, and reflecting on how these trends relate to oneself—primarily for decision-making purposes. For this purpose, one must use a telescope rather than a microscope. Only by filtering out trivialities can large-scale patterns emerge, allowing us to identify meaningful trends that inform our choices.
Neither perspective is inherently superior. Entertainment matters too—especially during bear markets, when action feels futile; embracing enjoyment is perfectly valid. But if your goal is strategic decision-making, then the bigger the event, the coarser your analysis should be. Avoid obsessing over mysteries and curiosities—the juicy details are irrelevant to you. Instead, ask: How will high school history textbooks describe today’s events 100 years from now? Which historical episodes do they rhyme with? Only through such reflection can real trends be uncovered.
Unfortunately, many people fail to grasp this. They blindly worship “seeing the big picture through small details,” believing that knowing more minutiae leads to better insights. In reality, they overestimate their brain’s capacity to process information and end up going in the wrong direction.
I am no expert on AI, but take OpenAI’s internal turmoil: Sam Altman’s dramatic ousting and return, the behind-the-scenes power struggles—entertaining, yes, but ultimately just gossip for spectators. What truly matters is what this chaos reveals: the intensifying conflict between the “arrivalists” and “saviors” at the threshold of artificial general intelligence (AGI). A similar struggle emerged around the advent of nuclear weapons—a parallel now familiar due to the film *Oppenheimer*. Yet if you get lost in the details, you’ll miss the poetic echo between these two moments. Recognizing this resonance shows that the AGI singularity has arrived, its capabilities already surpassing creators’ expectations, triggering fear, controversy, and confrontation. And just like in the past, the outcome favors the “e/acc arrivalists.” This signals that AGI development has broken free from its last internal constraint and is now charging forward unchecked. Future attempts to control or contain AGI will require external mechanisms—such as balancing one superintelligence against another, or imposing cryptographic and blockchain-based constraints—because internal governance mechanisms are no longer effective.
I’ve repeatedly stated that AI and crypto are two sides of the same coin. Many dismiss this idea, viewing AI as profoundly transformative while seeing crypto as mere farce, assuming I’m just trying to piggyback on AI’s popularity. But they fail to see that cryptography is fundamentally the only tool capable of constructing order in digital space. So far, the digital world has been relatively simple and primitive, mainly handling human-to-human interactions, so basic cryptographic tools were sufficient. With the arrival of AI, however, intelligent agents now exist within digital environments. Meanwhile, vast economic resources and activities are becoming digitized. Relationships between AI and humans, and among AIs themselves, grow increasingly complex—and decisive. Establishing order in digital space thus becomes a matter of existential importance. Primitive cryptographic tools and protocols are no longer enough. Blockchain, smart contracts, self-sovereign identity, verifiable credentials, token economies—these emerging components, whether by coincidence or destiny, are simply new cryptographic protocol building blocks. They enrich our toolkit for constructing order in the digital realm. I once said, “Blockchain must legislate for AI.” Now I realize that limiting it to blockchain alone is too narrow. We should include all these technologies as parts of a unified system—call this system “crypto,” for instance—and say, “Crypto must legislate for AI”—a far more accurate framing.
The settlement between Binance and the United States is also highly indicative. By “indicative,” I mean that witnessing this event allows us to clearly determine which way the tide is turning. Just as OpenAI’s internal crisis signaled the arrival of the AGI singularity, Binance’s legal resolution indicates that Web3 has definitively left behind its wild, exploratory phase and entered a new era of competitive colonization.
Let me explain briefly.
From early on in blockchain’s evolution, many described the crypto economy as a “parallel world” or a rich, newly discovered continent. If this analogy holds, we must ask: How do humans typically react when confronted with a sudden, risky, and potentially lucrative new frontier? Historically, this scenario has played out at least twice: once when Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa, and again when Europeans colonized the Americas and Australia after 1500. The former lacks detailed records, but the latter is well-documented and instructive. Five centuries may have passed, but human nature remains unchanged. When seeking to understand the overarching trajectory of Web3, a useful historical template is the gradual colonization of the American continent post-1500.
The colonial history of the New World over its first two centuries can roughly be divided into two phases. The first, in the 16th century, saw Spanish and Portuguese adventurers and gold seekers rush in. They quickly seized South America, rich in silver and gold, extracted immense wealth, and returned to Europe as elites. Driven by this goal, they had no interest in institution-building. Their sole aim was plunder and exploitation—shipping precious metals back to Europe to exchange for tea, silk, porcelain, spices, and warships.
By the 17th century, latecomers like the Dutch, British, and French recognized the New World’s potential and launched their own colonial efforts. Arriving too late to compete in the gold rush, they turned instead to agriculture and commodity trade. Farming, however, demanded greater complexity than mere looting: cooperation, infrastructure, division of labor, and education became necessary. Thus, this phase was characterized by corporations exporting not just people, but entire socio-technical systems—including institutions, technology, and culture—to establish regional colonies. Most of North America began its colonial history during this period. On this foundation, by the late 18th century, British colonies in North America fused inherited colonial structures with local conditions under new ideological guidance, eventually forming the United States.
This narrative may seem overly simplistic. Scrutinize it closely, and you’ll surely find countless counterexamples and nuances that challenge this broad-brush “historical logic.” But only by applying such coarse filters can we cut through the noise and perceive “history’s rhymes.”
The past decade-plus since blockchain’s emergence has mirrored the 16th-century phase of American colonization—a period best described as the “Age of Exploration.”
During this era, those entering the Web3 frontier included a handful of idealists, but mostly adventurers and fortune hunters. They care little about Web3’s underlying philosophies, values, or social visions. Their sole motivation for entering this new domain is financial gain—fast, massive profits. Under this mindset, blockchain technologies, tools, and innovations are merely disposable means to an end: returning home laden with digital gold. Whether Web3’s ecosystem suffers degradation or systemic collapse is of no concern to them.
This has been a phase of unregulated growth—an era brimming with innovation, exploration, speculation, hype, fraud, and chaos. Amid this disorder, Binance, led by a genuine idealist, seized a historic opportunity, balanced multiple complex forces, and rose to become the dominant player of this age. While luck played a role, Binance’s success primarily stemmed from its disciplined exercise of power and influence, consciously providing the most scarce public good in a chaotic market: order.
Yet this new continent has not yet produced organizations or power structures strong enough to resist the old world. Its original strategy of passive resistance based on thin anonymity is now obsolete. As Web3 grows larger and begins to disrupt the balance of power in the traditional world, the established order cannot remain idle. It will inevitably deploy its existing strength and instruments to intervene. This intervention pushes Web3 into a second phase—the Colonial Era—paralleling the 17th-century colonization of North America.
In the Colonial Era, Web3 will enter a stage of institutional construction. The main drivers of this process will, in fact, be incumbents from the traditional world. These actors care little for short-term spoils. Instead, they recognize Web3’s intrinsic technological advantages and seek to build sophisticated production and transaction systems within it, aiming to generate enormous wealth and reshape real-world power dynamics. Compared to the previous wave of pioneers, they will place far greater emphasis on institutional design and favor new corporate forms to advance colonization and establish new orders.
Nations aware of this shift are advancing their colonial agendas in various ways. Some act proactively, venturing deep into the frontier; others react defensively, aiming only to secure borders. The Binance settlement with U.S. authorities exemplifies exactly this dynamic. It marks a significant acceleration of America’s colonization of the Web3 frontier. Other regions like Hong Kong and Singapore are also moving faster, though their strategies, pacing, and objectives differ.
The order established during the Colonial Era won’t reflect the native character of the new land. Rather, it will consist of multiple competing colonial systems—each shaped by different imperial powers claiming territory, grafting their own institutions onto local technological features. The Colonial Era is not the end. The competition among these systems will eventually give rise to a new order—one better aligned with the technology’s inherent nature, possessing superior competitiveness and resilience, capable of powerfully influencing the old world in return. But creating, establishing, and consolidating such an order may take considerable time. For now, we must focus on navigating the Colonial Era.
Over the next decade, the colonization of the Web3/crypto world will be the central narrative of the industry. The entire story arc will fundamentally shift, and the greatest opportunities for innovation and wealth creation will lie precisely along this axis. We will soon witness the following phenomena:
- Central banks, regulators, and international organizations from various countries will successively release authoritative reports on key technological topics such as central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), programmable payments, decentralized identity, and blockchain.
- Major nations will comprehensively tighten regulatory control over Web3, demarcating spheres of influence by population and sector, effectively establishing their respective colonies. The anarchic order of the exploration era will persist in the cracks, but regulators will increasingly crack down on transgressions.
- Government agencies in certain countries will actively support and nurture enterprises, encouraging them to enter Web3 and continuously develop and deploy new application cases.
- Some late-mover countries and regions, unburdened by legacy systems, will act more aggressively and innovatively, whereas earlier leaders in the digital economy may lag due to conservatism and hesitation.
- Given Web3’s natural advantage in cross-border operations, multinational institutions will act proactively, and some nations will form alliances to jointly advance into Web3.
- Enterprises backed by different nations will operate under distinct rules and systems, leveraging their unique resources and strengths to compete across various Web3 domains—acting as vanguard and auxiliary forces in their home countries’ colonial campaigns, both before and after direct state involvement.
- Innovation will still determine winners and losers, but most breakthroughs will occur not in lawless experimentation, but within structured frameworks of institutional building.
Only from this vantage point can we properly understand the Binance incident—and Binance itself. Its settlement with U.S. authorities may appear forced, but in the long run, it’s actually a highly positive development. As the king of the exploration era, Binance will survive and transition smoothly into the colonial era, emerging without fundamental damage to its core strength. It will retain ample room to negotiate or collaborate with major colonial powers, continuing to play a pivotal role in the new age. Such favorable outcomes are rare in history. Those who naively believe that Binance’s settlement removes the final obstacle before a bull market—and therefore expect instant riches—will likely continue cycling through repeated highs and crushing lows.
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Yan Meng
