Chainfeeds Summary:
As AI tokens become the new "digital oil," blockchain can only watch as its past dreams take root in a completely unfamiliar way. This misaligned popularization is a victory for AI, but also blockchain's deepest frustration.
Article source:
https://www.chaincatcher.com/article/2254271
Article Author:
ChainCatcher
Opinion:
ChainCatcher: Blockchain practitioners once had a grand ideal: "Tokenization of Everything," hoping to transform real-world assets, credit, and labor into tokens for free circulation. Ironically, AI has indeed achieved a form of tokenization of everything, with text, audio, and video being broken down into tokens. For the general public, they don't need to understand cryptographic principles, safeguard private keys, or worry about losing seed phrase. They only need to input a prompt, and the model consumes and outputs tokens. Making tokens widely accepted by the public was once the goal pursued by all blockchain industry practitioners. Now, the vision has come true, but only an awkward situation remains. This is not only because this token is not the same as the original token, but also because many practitioners themselves no longer believe in this goal and vision. In recent years, tokens, as tokens, have gained popularity in various forms such as NFTs and memes due to their permissionless and low-barrier characteristics, but ultimately, with the collapse of prices, they have been labeled as speculation and fraud by the outside world. Meanwhile, the blockchain industry suffers from insufficient endogenous innovation. Conceptual projects such as DePin, DeSci, AI agents, and RWA are progressing slowly, with limited application scenarios. More and more crypto entrepreneurs are abandoning their projects in confusion, either waiting for new opportunities or embracing the AI field, and capital is following suit. This may be the cruel logic of technological iteration: what truly changes the world is often not the grandest narrative, but the most practical tool. Blockchain imbued tokens with ideals, while AI imbued them with necessities; blockchain aims to change the world, but AI first changes lives. When AI tokens become the new "digital oil," blockchain can only watch its past dreams take root in a completely unfamiliar way. This misaligned popularization is a victory for AI, but also blockchain's deepest frustration. However, there is good news. In the Web2 world, assets such as US Treasury bonds and stocks have been rapidly tokenized in the past year, becoming one of the fastest-growing token assets due to their low transaction barriers and high convenience. As speculative bubbles burst and financial giants like BlackRock and Fidelity enter the market, tokens may be returning to their essence as value carriers.
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