Wall Street Is Calculating the “AI Doomsday,” While Sun Yuchen Bets on Web4.0
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Wall Street Is Calculating the “AI Doomsday,” While Sun Yuchen Bets on Web4.0
The real question is no longer whether AI will reshape business, but rather who can secure a central position in the infrastructure ahead of this restructuring.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insights
Recently, Wall Street research firm Citrini Research released a thought experiment report titled “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis,” sparking widespread market discussion. At its core, the report models an exceptionally ruthless business reshuffling logic: AI Agents will completely eliminate “friction” in human interaction—thereby dismantling every legacy commercial empire built upon information asymmetry and intermediary-based models.
Coincidentally, just as this Wall Street “doomsday report” went viral across the internet, Sun Yuchun—a prominent figure in the Web3 industry—posted a series of highly visible statements on social media. He declared 2026 “the year miracles happen,” even urging young people: “Chat with AI instead of humans… Embrace the future wholeheartedly!”
To the general public, this may appear to be yet another flamboyant “traffic spectacle” characteristic of Sun Yuchun. But if we peel away the emotional surface and juxtapose his remarks against the macro-level projections laid out in “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis,” a striking truth emerges: the “collapse of the old order” that Wall Street fears in its macro-models is precisely the “Web4.0 New Era” that Sun Yuchun actively champions—and seeks to accelerate—at the micro-level.
Facing the same future, pessimists see an abyss; Sun Yuchun sees a staircase leading to the singularity.
Computing Power, Electricity, and Tokens: The Inevitable Convergence of AI and Crypto
The “frictionless world” depicted in “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis” is, at its essence, an extremely cold, AI-driven disintermediation revolution.
The report bluntly states that when omniscient, omnipotent AI Agents can instantly match supply and demand, execute transactions, and deliver services at near-zero cost, the moats underpinning modern commerce will be utterly breached.
For decades, countless business models—from traditional financial intermediaries and advertising distribution platforms to law firms and consulting agencies charging exorbitant fees—have effectively parasitized human cognitive limitations, decision-making delays, and informational blind spots. Once AI flattens these artificially generated “frictions,” these old empires will inevitably collapse like dominoes.
This trend resonates astonishingly with blockchain’s foundational “decentralization” ethos—the very banner it has championed since inception.
If the Web3 movement that emerged over a decade ago sought to dismantle centralized institutions’ “trust monopoly” through cryptography and distributed ledgers at the architectural level, then today’s rise of AI Agents achieves something far more thorough and efficient: eliminating the necessity of “trust” itself across many scenarios—because intelligent agents can not only automatically verify facts but also autonomously execute value exchanges.
A deeper alignment lies in the shared material foundation sustaining both revolutions.
Whether it’s the inference tokens generated by AI or cryptographic tokens on blockchain networks, both conceal a long-underestimated yet fundamentally immutable physical reality: they are digital avatars of electricity.
Every inference performed by an AI large model consumes real computing power; every on-chain transaction confirmation and every smart contract execution relies on energy continuously burned by miners or validator nodes. Tokens are not magic—they are certificates of energy conversion, representing the projection of electrical power into digital-world value after traversing chips, algorithms, and protocols. This perfectly closes the loop with Sun Yuchun’s earlier assertion: “In the short term, we lack chips; in the long term, we lack energy; forever, we lack storage.”
Thus, we witness two forces—apparently opposing, yet sharing the same origin—converging: On one side, capital elites foresee the dissolution of their own power structures in model-based projections; on the other, crypto-native builders proactively embrace, through code and slogans, a new civilizational protocol—one without intermediaries, friction, or redundancy. This “post-intermediary era” narrative, jointly authored by AI and blockchain, may have only just begun.
Why AI Is Inevitably Drawn to Crypto Settlement
Yet this grand historical convergence extends beyond philosophical and physical resonance. When translated into concrete commercial operations, a starkly practical question confronts AI: In this new world soon to be governed by machines, who will provide financial services for these disembodied “silicon-based lives”?
Centralized payment networks were designed for “humans.”
McKinsey categorizes AI-driven business automation into six tiers. Levels 0–4 can still operate within existing financial systems because each transaction remains tied to a human identity. But at Level 5, agents begin transacting directly with one another—without any human instruction. At this stage, there is no “human identity” to inherit, nor can traditional KYC processes apply; payments must be programmatic, condition-triggered, settled in milliseconds—and agent reputations must be portable across platforms. Blockchain thus becomes indispensable.
AI has no physical form—and certainly cannot hold an ID card to queue up for KYC. For them, a string of asymmetrically encrypted private keys constitutes an account; a blockchain enabling instant settlement, near-zero fees, and programmable smart contracts is the ideal clearinghouse.
“The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis” contains a particularly realistic projection: the space for price matching and information aggregation is inherently finite. Once agents begin trading among themselves, the most direct and effective path is to eliminate all fees. They seek payment methods faster and lower-cost than credit cards. Most ultimately settle using stablecoins on Solana or Ethereum Layer-2 networks—where transactions complete almost instantly and fees drop to mere fractions of a cent.
It is precisely for this reason that crypto wallets are destined to become the “native banks” for AI Agents.
This also fundamentally shatters longstanding external stereotypes about crypto: issuing tokens is not merely about secondary-market speculation and trading. In an AI-dominated future, cryptographic tokens and peer-to-peer payments will truly crystallize into the foundational financial infrastructure enabling high-frequency collaboration among intelligent agents.
Sun Yuchun’s “Open Strategy” for AI Integration: Where Does His Confidence—and Ambition—Come From?
Sun Yuchun’s bet on Web4.0 rests on an exceptionally rigorous business logic and strategic rationale.
First, TRON’s “stablecoin dominance” serves as Web4.0’s natural settlement layer.
As widely known, the TRON network hosts the world’s largest USDT circulation volume. As noted earlier, Web4.0 centers on machine-to-machine payments—requiring fast transfers, low fees, and immense liquidity. TRON’s USDT payment network perfectly fulfills AI Agents’ underlying financial needs. Sun Yuchun need only build a seamless, AI-callable payment API atop the TRON network to continue profiting effortlessly in the Web4.0 era.
Second, identifying a breakthrough point “beyond Web3.”
Traditional Web3.0 has entered a phase of zero-sum competition, lacking fresh narratives capable of breaking into mainstream consciousness. Meanwhile, AI stands as today’s most certain, well-funded growth sector. Sun Yuchun keenly recognized that crypto’s fate must be tethered to AI. By going “all-in on Web4.0,” he can redirect AI-related capital and attention from the conventional tech sphere back into the crypto market. TRON’s prior establishment of a $100 million AI Development Fund already signals clear intent toward Web4.0 positioning.
Third, building a closed loop for “decentralized networks.”
Sun Yuchun controls BitTorrent (for decentralized storage/transmission), the TRON public chain (as the foundational settlement layer), and Huobi’s massive crypto-user base. Integrating decentralized computing power and AI models into this stack would allow him to construct a full-stack Web4.0 infrastructure—entirely independent of Amazon AWS or Google Cloud.
Historical irony often lies in this: while guardians of the old order meticulously calculate the losses incurred as their walls crumble, barbarians of the new world have already laid foundations amid the ruins.
This transformation, co-authored by AI and crypto, remains incomplete—but its direction is unmistakable. The real question is no longer whether AI will reshape commerce, but rather: who will secure the central position in the infrastructure of this restructuring?
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