Former Binance Labs Executive: AI and Institutional Influx Will Radically Transform the Crypto Industry in Two Years
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Former Binance Labs Executive: AI and Institutional Influx Will Radically Transform the Crypto Industry in Two Years
The era of token speculation is coming to an end; the winners of the next era will be infrastructure companies holding licenses, generating real revenue, and capable of serving AI Agents.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Christy Choi
Translation & Editing: TechFlow
TechFlow Intro: Christy Choi served as a core executive during the early days of Binance Labs and has spent a decade deeply immersed in the crypto industry. She now manages a fund spanning Asia, the Middle East, and the United States.
In this article, she puts forward a bold thesis: the crypto industry is undergoing a fundamental generational shift, driven by two simultaneous structural forces— institutional capital entering via stablecoins, and AI driving the cost of building everything toward zero.
She argues that the era of token speculation is ending. The winners of the next era will be licensed infrastructure companies with real revenue streams capable of serving AI agents. Her perspective is sharp and incisive—ideal for reading alongside today’s market conditions.
Full Text Below:
Something changed over the past twelve months—but most people in the market haven’t noticed yet.
I’ve been in crypto for ten years—serving as a core executive during Binance Labs’ founding, making early-stage investments and building projects across multiple cycles, and now managing a fund with exposure across Asia, the Middle East, and the U.S. I’ve lived through every version of this industry: the ICO frenzy, DeFi Summer, the NFT bubble, the cascade of bankruptcies. Each cycle felt distinct at the time—but beneath it all ran the same engine: speculative capital chasing narrative-driven tokens.
That engine is dying—not because crypto failed, but because it succeeded. What replaces it will reshape the industry more fundamentally than anything since Bitcoin.
Two structural forces are converging simultaneously: institutional capital entering via stablecoins, and AI driving the cost of building *everything* in crypto toward zero. Together, they’re changing not just which tokens win—but what crypto itself *is*.
Institutional Shift: Stablecoins Consuming Everything
Most crypto-native players haven’t internalized this yet: the largest wave of capital ever to enter this industry won’t buy tokens—it will use stablecoins.
Stablecoins now settle trillions of dollars annually. They’re the first crypto product that institutions, enterprises, and governments genuinely want—not as a speculative asset, but as infrastructure. When a multinational runs treasury operations on stablecoin rails; when a remittance corridor shifts from SWIFT to USDC; when a new bank offers stablecoin-denominated savings accounts to the unbanked across Southeast Asia—these are real economic activities moving on-chain. Not TVL mining. Not governance token speculation. Real revenue.
This transforms the entire value chain. Winners in this new landscape aren’t protocols with clever tokenomics—they’re licensed enterprises with regulatory moats. Stablecoin issuers, compliant middleware providers, licensed neobanks, settlement infrastructure—these companies are capturing the largest share of the institutional wave. By Crypto Twitter standards, they’re boring—but they’ll generate the most durable returns over the next decade.
Their moats aren’t technological—they’re regulatory.
This is where crypto-native players have consistently underestimated the landscape. In the old crypto world, moats came from liquidity, network effects, and community. In the new crypto world, the deepest moat is a license. Every jurisdiction that finalizes stablecoin rules, tokenization frameworks, or digital-asset banking regulations creates a window—typically 12 to 18 months—during which the first licensed operators build advantages no later entrant can replicate, regardless of how much money they spend. Customer relationships, banking partnerships, compliance infrastructure, regulatory trust—none of these can be forked, and no agent can write them. By the time competitors secure licenses in the same jurisdiction, first movers have already locked in distribution channels.
This is happening jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction—not globally unified. Europe’s MiCA, emerging stablecoin frameworks in Singapore and the UAE, South Korea’s Digital Asset Basic Act, and the regulatory architecture now taking shape in Washington—each is creating distinct licensing moats in different markets. Winning companies treat regulation as a strategic asset—not an obstacle. They hire former regulators—not just engineers. They help shape frameworks—not just comply with them. Policy proximity—the ability to influence rules during their formation—is the most valuable—and least understood—competitive advantage in crypto today.
The native token speculation playbook—launch a token, attract TVL, pump via narrative, dump at unlock—has ended, because the capital entering the system doesn’t play that game. Institutional allocators demand yield, compliance, and predictable revenue. They don’t want governance rights over a protocol that could be forked next quarter.
As real cash flows move on-chain, tokens inevitably become equity-like. When a protocol generates real revenue and distributes fees to token holders, tokens cease to be speculative instruments—and become machine-readable ownership claims on real businesses. This is convergence. Not tokens replacing equity, nor equity replacing tokens—but both collapsing into the same thing: programmable, composable, instantly settling, software-readable claims on real economic activity. The wrapper no longer matters—what matters is that the underlying business generates cash, and the claim to it is software-readable.
The same licensing moat applies to tokenization platforms. When stocks, bonds, and structured products move on-chain, the platforms tokenizing them won’t be permissionless protocols—they’ll be licensed securities intermediaries operating under specific regulatory frameworks in specific jurisdictions. The infrastructure is crypto-native; the business model is traditional finance-grade; the moat remains the license—not the code.
Crypto spent ten years building rails to transfer value. But rails to transfer identity, professional credentials, and authorization remain unbuilt. That gap—this missing layer—is where the next wave of infrastructure will be built. Teams solving for on-chain primitive-level authenticated identity, machine-verifiable compliance, and portable professional credentials are constructing the layer that connects institutional finance and autonomous AI. Neither side functions well without it.
AI Shift: Building Gets Cheap—Verification Gets Precious
The second force is AI—whose impact on crypto runs far deeper than the “AI × Crypto” narrative suggests.
First, the obvious: AI has driven the cost of building any software down to near-zero. Launching an L2, deploying smart contracts, spinning up a DeFi primitive—all of this can now be done in days, requiring only a fraction of the engineering team it once did. The impact on existing infrastructure is brutal: when supply approaches infinity, premium margins evaporate. The 100+ blockchains already live will compress to utility-level profitability. Infrastructure once valued at $1B–$5B FDV will be repriced based on its actual earnings. The VC playbook—“invest in infrastructure, ride narrative premiums, exit to retail”—is structurally broken.
But AI also does something entirely different—this is where crypto shifts from optional to essential.
When AI agents can generate infinite transactions, content, identities, and interactions, the cost of forging anything approaches zero. Noise becomes indistinguishable from signal; bot activity becomes indistinguishable from human activity. In a world saturated with infinite machine-generated noise, the only way to establish trust is cryptographic proof.
Zero-knowledge technology has shifted from a niche scaling solution to essential infrastructure. Privacy-preserving credentials have moved from academic research to the authentication layer of every AI-inclusive system. If you cannot prove who you are, that your transaction is authorized, or that your agent is qualified—without exposing underlying data—you simply cannot participate.
This is the most underappreciated proposition in crypto today: ZK and privacy technologies aren’t about privacy—they’re the trust layer of the AI economy.
Convergence of Forces: Tokens as the Operating Layer for Machines
Where institutions and AI converge—that’s where I believe the deepest opportunities lie.
AI agents have already begun trading autonomously. Coinbase just launched a wallet designed specifically for AI agents. The x402 protocol enables machine-to-machine payments. Autonomous systems are beginning to hold assets, execute trades, pay for compute, and interact with financial services—without human intervention.
These agents need three things to operate.
Identity. Not a username—a cryptographic credential that counterparties can verify in milliseconds without seeing underlying data. Who does this agent represent? In which jurisdiction does it operate? What is it authorized to do? If you cannot answer these questions with programmable proofs, you fall back to centralized databases and manual reviews—a model that fails to scale when millions of agents trade simultaneously.
Programmable assets. Stablecoins proved money can be programmable and settle instantly. The same logic extends to Treasuries, equities, credit, and structured products. Agents don’t care whether they hold USDC or tokenized Treasuries. They care that terms are readable, rules are programmable, and settlement is deterministic.
Credentials. Today, compliance lives in human judgment and legal documents. It must be encoded as machine-verifiable proofs—KYC status, licenses, jurisdictional permissions, risk limits. The only scalable way to deliver these at volume is cryptographic proof—not centralized APIs.
This is where the two transformations I’ve described truly collide. Institutions push financial assets on-chain because programmable infrastructure reduces settlement risk and operational friction. AI pushes economic activity toward autonomous execution. When these forces meet, financial objects themselves must become software.
Machines won’t buy tokens to speculate. They’ll consume tokens to operate. This creates a demand curve utterly unlike anything in crypto history. Retail speculation is cyclical—narrative-driven capital rotates in and out. Machine consumption scales directly with the volume of autonomous economic activity. As AI systems automate more decisions, trades, procurement, and coordination, demand for machine-readable financial objects grows in lockstep.
What This Means for Our Investments
I’m writing this not as abstract analysis—but as active investment guidance for my new fund.
The old crypto game was: find the narrative, front-run the token, exit before unlocks. The new game is: find the licensed infrastructure layer capturing stablecoin flows, build the machine-readable primitives required for agent trading, invest in jurisdictions where regulatory frameworks crystallize first.
The companies winning the next era look fundamentally different from those that defined the last. They hold licenses—not just liquidity. They generate revenue—not just TVL. They possess regulatory moats—not just network effects. By the standards of those who built careers launching memecoins, they’re boring. By the standards of those allocating institutional capital, they represent a generational opportunity.
The token speculation era gave crypto its beginning. Institutions and AI will give it its future. The transition between these eras is happening right now—and faster than most participants realize.
The speed of this transformation is a story no one has fully told yet. Consider this the first draft.
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