#Gate广场AI测评官 Silicon-Based Ghosts Take Over Wallets: Why Your Next Crypto Asset Shouldn't Be Bought by Humans?

Saying Goodbye to Blood-Soaked Manual Operations

Most ordinary people's fear of cryptocurrency doesn't stem from market volatility, but from an extremely anti-human trading interface. Imagine how you typically buy assets on decentralized exchanges: you need to carefully wake up a cold wallet, repeatedly verify a long string of chaotic hexadecimal addresses with no pattern, terrified that one wrong letter will send your money into the void. Then, you have to estimate like an actuary that constantly jumping "slippage tolerance"—it's like when you're rushing to the airport, willing to let the taxi driver take a longer route as long as you don't miss your flight, but with an upper limit on extra fees.

If, within seconds of pressing confirm, the Ethereum network suddenly congests or market volatility exceeds your "detour fee limit," you not only fail to get the token you want but also lose money paying an expensive "gas fee" to miners. This experience, like walking a tightrope on a cliff, is called the "dark forest survival rule" of the Web3 era. In this jungle filled with hackers, arbitrage bots, and complex smart contracts, humans' poor neural reflex speed and brain computing power have become the biggest disadvantage in the trading chain. While you're sweating bullets calculating decimals, machine code hidden in the dark has already completed the full loop of positioning, pumping, and harvesting. A premeditated jailbreak is happening. Just recently, Binance founder CZ threw out a spine-chilling yet seductive prophecy on social media. He revealed he's building a fully automated payment system using open-source frameworks and artificial intelligence, asserting that in the near future, over ninety percent of crypto transactions will no longer be executed by human fingers on keyboards, but entirely delegated to AI Agents to handle automatically. This is far from just a Silicon Valley magnate's late-night fantasy—Circle, the stablecoin giant, has data frantically pulsing in the background proving this silent revolution.

In just nine months, over @E5@100 million transactions have been independently completed by AI Agents. Why would Circle so closely monitor and promote this trend? The reason is simple: the fiat settlement channels of traditional finance are just too slow and too closed. Traditional banks not only have strict KYC walls but are also constrained by nine-to-five business hours and cumbersome cross-border clearing networks. When a machine program needs to pay fractions of a dollar instantly to get some data, it absolutely won't apply for a Visa credit card or wait for SWIFT's multi-day international transfers. Circle keenly realized that USDC, the stablecoin running on high-speed blockchains, is naturally the "digital lifeblood" custom-made for machine economies.

Tens of millions of dollars in real money flow silently through cyberspace via smart contracts without any human fingerprinting or face recognition. This doesn't just mean machines have learned to spend money; it announces that the old paradigm of financial interaction has been completely torn apart.

Intent Economy: Using Your Voice Instead of Private Keys

To truly understand the disruptive nature of this revolution, we need to completely shatter the existing "wallet" concept in our minds. In the past, crypto wallets were like a complex old airplane dashboard, covered with knobs, switches, and warning lights that needed manual adjustment. Now, this old machine has been forcibly stuffed into an extremely smart "silicon-based brain," birthing what's currently the sexiest narrative in crypto—the "intent economy." In this new world, natural language is the most powerful API.

In traditional workflows, if a newcomer wanted to swap stablecoins for Ethereum, they had to endure a long and painful ordeal. They had to learn what automated market makers are, what liquidity pools are, switch between different DEXs comparing prices, and even pray on cross-chain bridges that assets don't get stuck halfway. This cumbersome process was enough to deter ninety-nine percent of outsiders.

But in the AI Agent-managed future, you just need to lazily type into your phone screen: "Use a hundred USDC to buy me some Ethereum." With just this everyday chat, your personal silicon-based butler awakens in milliseconds. Like a tireless and scheming top Wall Street trader, it instantly scans liquidity depth on Uniswap, Sushiswap, and various aggregators, precisely calculating the most cost-effective trading route.

What's even better is that it knows the dark forest's dangers well, automatically setting a reasonable slippage range to prevent being "sandwiched" by malicious arbitrageurs hidden in the mempool. It even acts like a penny-pinching old accountant, specifically monitoring network congestion and picking the cheapest time to execute the trade. Throughout, you don't need to understand any obscure financial jargon or know how the underlying code works. Your "intent" is the most powerful execution instruction. This experience of completely flattening complexity is precisely the ultimate hammer that will drive crypto adoption among billions of people. When ordinary people no longer lose their life savings by pressing the wrong zero or entering the wrong address, true trust in decentralized networks will take root in the hearts of the general public.

Dark Web Trading Between Machines

If you think AI Agents are just advanced voice assistants that help you buy and sell tokens, you're severely underestimating the vast ambitions of this technological revolution. What truly excites AI giants like OpenAI and payment oligarchs like Circle—even to the point of spending fortunes forming alliances and acquiring startups in Web3—is the underlying logic: AI can finally have independent economic capability.

For a long time, AI has faced an extremely absurd predicament. They can write Shakespearean sonnets, code extremely complex underlying systems, even easily pass humanity's strictest lawyer or medical exams, but they can't buy themselves the cheapest coffee or pay a single cent toward their massive computational costs. Fundamentally, traditional banks and financial systems only serve "natural persons" with flesh and blood or registered "legal entities"—they'd never open accounts for virtual code. The combination of cryptocurrency and smart contracts perfectly breaks through the iron chains imprisoning AI evolution.

OpenAI's strategic layout has already shown its hand. Whether it's frequent contact between executives and crypto-native payment startups or founder Sam Altman personally leading the Worldcoin project with crypto DNA, clear signals are being sent: future superintelligence (AGI) must have its own native treasury. Relying on a new machine payment protocol called HTTP 402, AI Agents can not only manage their own money but conduct extremely high-frequency micro-commerce transactions with other machines. Here's a vivid analogy: when your AI butler executes an extremely complex quantitative investment strategy for you and discovers it needs millisecond-level real-time price data from an authoritative decentralized oracle.

In this new framework, it no longer needs to trigger system pop-ups or send emails asking your permission for a data purchase budget. Instead, it can directly pull fractions of a cent in cryptocurrency from its dedicated account, instantly buy that data, and feed it to the model. If it feels computing power is tight during large-scale operations, it can even use Ethereum to rent additional idle GPU computing resources directly from decentralized computing networks.

In this micro and high-frequency process, "services" are completely stripped of human society's red tape and manual reviews, becoming pure commodities freely flowing between machines. Correspondingly, several key upgrades to Ethereum's underlying architecture have become powerful catalysts for this machine economy revolution. The most core weapon is the maturation of Account Abstraction (ERC-4337) technology. This technology is like giving your AI butler an unlimited corporate credit card, allowing it to directly use certain tokens from your account to cover transaction fees while helping you, so you no longer need to pre-hoard specific native tokens just to pay for transfers. This undoubtedly removes the most counterintuitive wall blocking ordinary users, making smooth machine agent operation a reality.

Taming Your Silicon-Based Money-Printing Machine

When all complexity is hidden behind the scenes, system execution efficiency naturally explodes exponentially. This explosion appears not just in personal wealth management but in an extremely violent reshaping of organizational forms throughout the decentralized world. Take Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) as an example—past community governance was an unsolvable disaster. Expecting a bunch of retail speculators to daily read tens of thousands of words of boring, jargon-filled proposals and vote is equivalent to forcing people to attend endless, joyless homeowners meetings. This resulted in most projects' voting rates perpetually struggling at a dismal ten percent, with so-called decentralized democracy devolving into a dictatorship of a few whales.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin keenly sensed this path to breakthrough, strongly advocating for AI to serve as governance butler. Real on-chain data proves this strategy's astonishing effectiveness: when users tell AI their values, risk preferences, and interests in plain language, and AI reviews lengthy proposals and automatically triggers voting logic, community participation instantly surged several times over.

In the bloodier high-frequency quantitative trading space, arbitrage bots have started understanding human natural language instructions, anytime adjusting long/short strategies based on their master's casual chat, like special forces always on standby.

However, the other side of the coin always bears the skull of risk. Completely handing the treasury keys to a tireless, fearless, amoral silicon-based creature is itself an extremely dangerous gamble. For ordinary people yearning for wealth yet terrified of hacker theft, embracing the intent economy absolutely doesn't mean closing your eyes and surrendering all control.

You must clearly recognize that although AI Agents have independent wallet addresses and execution authority, absolute asset ownership must still be tightly bound to your ultimate permissions through smart contracts. It's like hiring an extremely smart Wall Street fund manager with big money to fight in markets, but you must put an electronic ankle bracelet around his leg, strictly limiting his movement range.

The ERC-7710 delegation standard provides an almost perfect on-chain contract for this. As a user, when using various custodial Agent tools, you must set up permission moats like guarding against bandits. Through smart contracts, you can explicitly specify that this AI can move at most a thousand dollars daily in trading volume, and can only touch relatively safe blue-chip stablecoins—absolutely can't touch the Bitcoin or Ethereum you've kept as reserves. Any fund moves exceeding the threshold or cross-chain behavior must trigger forced multi-signature notification mechanisms, ensuring every breath this cold machine takes is under your absolute control.

For Web3 developers and projects trying to strike it rich in this new blue ocean, pure technical self-indulgence is completely unworkable anymore. Just making AI understand "swap a hundred into Ethereum" is far from enough—you must translate the AI's obscure and complex execution logic, possible slippage losses, and smart contract vulnerabilities into risk summaries humans can understand at a glance. The deeper reason is that in this ultra-high-speed system where fund transfer rates far exceed human regulatory limits, without comprehensive operation log tracking and automatic interception of suspicious large transactions, this AI-led financial utopia will quickly become a lawless carnival for hackers, criminal enterprises, and money launderers, inevitably inviting devastating strikes from global financial regulators.

Ultimate Web3 Is No Web3

The history of financial technology is essentially a chronicle of constantly pushing underlying complexity to backstage black boxes while leaving minimalist experiences on user screens. Looking back, those early crypto days with screens full of code, needing to memorize twelve seed phrases like biblical verses, constantly worrying about private key leaks and slippage losses, were destined to become as ancient and absurd as the screeching dial-up internet once was.

This wallet-level revolution initiated by AI Agents is violently dismantling Web3's tallest wall of sighs. It reveals a naked truth to everyone: mass adoption never came from condescendingly educating users about blockchain and hash algorithms. Instead, it comes from letting users enjoy lightning-fast financial services while feeling blockchain's existence not at all.

In the not-distant future, when you open your phone, you won't face a cold, technically demanding collection of decentralized applications, but a twenty-four-hour online, absolutely rational, eternally loyal digital wealth butler. You need only lazily lean back on the sofa and casually say: "Markets look good this month, help me manage my wealth conservatively." Everything else—towering waves and complex games, whether defending against hacker attacks or finding optimal yields across the network—will be ruthlessly blocked outside the silicon-based brain's firewall.

By then, measuring an individual's financial freedom might not mean how many bitcoins rest in your cold wallet, but rather how many tireless, cyber-moneymaking silicon-based avatars running twenty-four hours a day you actually own.