Admittedly, the short-term narrative of Web3 has reached a ceiling.

Looking back at the virtual asset boom from the pandemic to today, what has it actually achieved? Mobile payments have done everything it can do, and all the features expected in in-game purchases are available. Global cross-border transfers are indeed faster and cheaper than traditional central banking systems. It sounds promising, but this level of innovation is nowhere near enough to support the next wave of asset bubbles.

Where is the problem? Currently, AI Agents are too primitive—they are neither convenient nor smart enough. What does this mean? The consumer market for public blockchains cannot really take off because smart contracts are still semi-finished products, unable to support precise valuation and high-frequency trading. As for their diversity, it’s not as good as the existing Alipay ecosystem. Plus, many countries are starting to strictly regulate virtual currency flows—used for money laundering, real estate purchases, luxury cars, and private jets—making regulatory pressure a looming threat.

What does the true decentralized finance future look like? Imagine I go on a business trip to another city, and within milliseconds, I sell my property at the origin and buy a property at the destination, with almost zero transaction costs. What conditions are needed for this? First, AI must provide full-process decision support, and second, the blockchain bandwidth must be several magnitudes higher than today. Both are lacking, so this dream is still just a dream.

A more realistic issue: the most mature and widely used machine-to-machine trading application globally is actually in the US futures market. No matter how bullish the crypto quant strategies are, there will be a day when they exit the market. Pure arbitrage models, due to excessive leverage, will eventually be drained of liquidity by the Federal Reserve’s derivatives market.

In recent years, institutional capital has been crawling through Web3, and what conclusions have they drawn? Only two things have real practical application: stablecoins and BTC as a store of value. What about other altcoins? After all these years of conceptual talk, it’s still just concepts. A few tokens have real use cases, but they are extremely rare.