When the founder of OpenClaw advises young people to stay away from crypto

Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Golem (@web 3_golem)

On February 27, when a user asked the founder of OpenClaw, Peter Steinberger, on X platform, “What’s the best advice for a 20-year-old,” Peter Steinberger straightforwardly replied, “Don’t waste time on cryptocurrency.” As the founder of the hottest AI product right now, Peter Steinberger has not hidden his disdain for cryptocurrencies. He has warned crypto practitioners not to harass him, and even mentions of Bitcoin in OpenClaw’s Discord are met with bans.

This blunt remark sparked a wave of memes and self-deprecating jokes in the crypto community. But unlike the market downturn and the crypto industry shouting “Crypto is dead,” when “Don’t waste time on cryptocurrency” is given as advice to young people by a top AI entrepreneur, it still stings the crypto industry.

It puts our anxiety front and center — crypto is no longer the best solution for young people today.

Looking back to 2011, OG in crypto and founder of BlockBeats, Chang Jiao, suggested that college students should invest all 6,000 yuan in Bitcoin. This answer was considered one of the strongest examples of long-termism and youth-appropriate involvement in crypto. But Chang Jiao himself has not always stayed in crypto; in 2023, BlockBeats stopped publishing crypto-related news and shifted focus to AI, metaverse, and other fields. After turning to AI entrepreneurship in 2024, he completely disappeared from the crypto scene.

Chang Jiao, who was once ahead of the curve, has attracted much criticism. Now, the crypto scene has been largely absorbed by AI, becoming an undeniable fact. Talent is migrating, capital is reallocating, and attention is shifting.

Talent Migration: OG Become AI Bloggers

Another OG in crypto, Shen Yu, co-founder and CEO of Cobo, is also one of the early Bitcoin mining figures. As a survivor through multiple cycles, Shen Yu often shares his understanding of market phases and investment insights on social media, making him popular in the crypto community.

Recently, Shen Yu has shifted from a crypto OG to an AI blogger. Over the past month, more than 80% of his social media content has been about OpenClaw, with little to no crypto-related posts. Shen Yu even jokes about his successful transformation.

Shen Yu’s exploration and focus on AI are mainly personal. His company’s business and his personal career still revolve around crypto. So, we can interpret Shen Yu’s obsession with AI as a good habit of actively improving oneself and keeping up with the times during “market downtime.” But the talent migration from crypto to AI is real.

On February 4, Anthony Rose, an executive at zkSync, announced he would leave Matter Labs after four years and likely move into AI; Nader Dabit, director of developer advocacy at EigenLayer, also announced on February 5 that he was leaving EigenLayer to join an AI company as growth lead, saying he “joined the future.”

The most recent high-profile exit is Kyle Samani, co-founder of Multicoin Capital, who announced he is leaving crypto to focus on AI and robotics. Kyle Samani is known for his early bet on Solana, so his departure has shaken confidence in crypto. Even more surprisingly, on the day he left, he disparaged the crypto industry, saying, “Cryptocurrency is not as interesting as many (including myself) once thought.”

Recommended reading: Kyle Samani’s Exit from Crypto — Is There More to the Story?

Capital Migration: Native Crypto VCs Start Allocating to AI

Native crypto VCs are also reluctant to waste more time in the crypto industry.

On February 28, The Wall Street Journal reported that Paradigm, a crypto-focused venture capital firm, is planning to raise a new fund focused on AI and robotics, with a maximum size of about $1.5 billion. Paradigm is one of the most pure crypto-native capital firms. In 2019, it gained fame for investing in and incubating Uniswap. Since then, early investments in other crypto projects (like Lido, Optimism, dYdX, Blur) have also been successful, making this “research-driven” VC a peer of a16z crypto.

This shift by Paradigm is highly symbolic.

If crypto were still in a period of rapid innovation, continuously generating projects capable of attracting billion-dollar investments, Paradigm wouldn’t need to set up a dedicated fund for AI. But the reality is that infrastructure narratives in crypto (L1, L2, DEX, etc.) are highly competitive, and the number of high-quality early-stage projects with “paradigm-shifting” potential has become very limited.

The entire crypto VC scene has few good projects left to invest in. Data shows that over the past four years, the number of crypto VC deals has declined annually. In 2022, there were 1,639 deals in the primary crypto market, dropping to 829 in 2025, with early-stage funding dropping from 50% to below 35%.

Source: What Can the Crypto Market Trade After a Year?

When there are no more investments to be made in crypto, AI, as a booming industry, naturally becomes the best target for crypto capital. From foundational large models to AI agents, from computing chips to robotics, AI can support large-scale capital deployment and continuously generate growth stories — making it the biggest pool of capital worldwide today.

For a VC managing over $12.7 billion, the core question is never “Is our faith wavering,” but “Does the return function still hold?” As the number of viable crypto projects declines, betting solely on crypto increases portfolio risk and reduces return elasticity. Under these circumstances, continuing to insist on “crypto-native” investments becomes irrational.

Thus, Paradigm’s active expansion into AI is also driven by industry trends — this is not just a strategic choice for individual firms, but a signal of the industry’s stage.

Attention Shift: Crypto Players Obsess Over AI

In terms of market attention, Crypto is one of the industries most adept at piggybacking on hot topics. Whether political hotspots, technological frontiers, or social headlines, whenever there’s a buzz, related projects or memes tend to emerge in crypto circles. Historically, whenever AI experiences a technological upgrade or product breakthrough, the crypto community would create “Crypto+AI” projects or meme coins to attract attention.

After OpenClaw became popular, the crypto community quickly jumped on the bandwagon — creating meme coins with the same name, promoting OpenClaw’s self-trading tokens, and betting on prediction markets to make money. But later, the focus shifted from “how to crypto-ify OpenClaw” to “how to truly use OpenClaw.”

Many crypto researchers have started sharing tutorials on installing and using OpenClaw, openly discussing their AI workflows, even detailing how to train personal AI agents to help with coding, research, and content creation. Some crypto KOLs have even started charging newcomers for OpenClaw setup services.

Offline crypto AI events are also packed with attendees. The most popular recent event was the “Web4 China Tour” organized by OG in crypto, Kong Jianping. It ran from February 25 to March 8 across five Chinese cities, mainly focusing on OpenClaw and AI agents, with almost no crypto-related topics.

This is no longer just riding the trend — it’s a genuine shift of attention. Crypto enthusiasts who once prided themselves on their ideas now fear falling behind in the AI era.

Crypto AI offline event scene is packed

Why are crypto practitioners so obsessed with AI?

Crypto is inherently a “super-individual” industry, filled with independent developers, traders, and content creators. These people naturally seek tools that improve efficiency to compensate for human limitations. When AI can significantly amplify individual productivity, crypto players are among the first to embrace it.

Moreover, crypto culture itself has a strong geek spirit and technological worship. Although “technological narratives” have been somewhat downplayed in recent years, most crypto enthusiasts still believe “underlying technology can change the world.” Today, AI is more revolutionary in tech than blockchain, naturally attracting crypto fans’ frenzy.

Of course, a more pragmatic reason is that the crypto market is in a lull, while AI continues to produce “new things.” Crypto is still restructuring old narratives. Without native innovation or significant wealth effects, the entire scene relies on market predictions and RWA (real-world assets) for external support. In this context, the new topics and cognitive stimulation brought by AI fill the gap left by the slowing market.

It’s time to talk about something beyond crypto and AI

Finally, returning to the opening, the founder of OpenClaw’s remark resonated not because of its contempt but because it revealed a truth many in crypto are quietly acting on — the smartest people are reallocating their time.

We are now in an era where wealth generation slows down, but technological productivity explodes.

On one hand, as crypto cycles slow, alpha shrinks, and wealth growth flattens, the marginal returns of the past year’s “information chasing, hot topic chasing, and profit chasing” behavior are diminishing; on the other hand, AI is compressing the time needed to solve problems. Tasks like coding and content creation that once took hours or days can now be done in minutes, with far higher efficiency.

When the “quantity of pursuit results” is highly condensed by AI, we may find ourselves with more free time to do things that aren’t driven by efficiency or profit — seeking “carbon-based meaning,” experiencing the world, building independent cognitive systems beyond market fluctuations, and establishing our own value coordinates.

In the future of AI, what may truly differentiate people is perhaps their aesthetic judgment, independent thinking, and personal meaning-making.