Recently, a certain viewpoint has been widely shared on X. It goes beyond the familiar ups and downs of crypto prices and short-term battles over candlestick charts, and takes a fresh look at crypto finance in the broader context of the AI wave. Researchers at traditional institutions and asset allocation professionals alike are discussing how our understanding of the crypto market has mostly focused on speculative trading between people. But the core use case for the next generation of crypto finance may be the exchange of value between machines.
Before we get into this, let’s start with a simple question: What is money, really?
Textbooks tell us that money is a medium of exchange. From ancient times to the present, every monetary system, bank account, and payment clearing network has been designed around people. People hold accounts, initiate transfers, verify identities, and manually approve transaction limits. This system has supported centuries of commercial activity and is highly mature, but it has an inherent weakness: it cannot efficiently serve automated, high-frequency, low-value machine transactions running 24/7.