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

Goodbye to the Bleeding Manual Operations Console

Most ordinary people's fear of cryptocurrency doesn't stem from market volatility, but rather from an extremely anti-human trading interface. Imagine how you typically buy an asset on a decentralized exchange: you need to carefully wake up a cold wallet, repeatedly verify a long string of seemingly random hexadecimal address codes, terrified that a single wrong letter will send your money into the void. Next, you have to estimate the constantly fluctuating "slippage tolerance" like an actuary—it's like when you're rushing to the airport and willing to give the taxi driver an upper limit on how much extra you'll pay for taking a detour to avoid missing your flight.

If in those few seconds after you hit confirm, the Ethereum network suddenly gets congested, or market volatility exceeds your "detour fee limit," you not only fail to get the tokens you wanted, but also have to pay an expensive "highway toll" (Gas Fee) to miners for nothing. This experience of walking a tightrope on the edge of a cliff is mockingly referred to as Web3's "dark forest survival law." In this jungle filled with hackers, arbitrage bots, and complex smart contracts, humans' pathetic neural reflex speed and computational brain capacity have already become the biggest weakness in the trading chain. While you're sweating over calculating decimals, machine code hidden in the shadows has already completed the entire cycle of position building, price pumping, and profit harvesting. A premeditated jailbreak is happening.

Recently, BN founder CZ threw out a prophecy on social media that sent chills down the spine yet was also extremely tempting. He revealed that he's using open-source frameworks and artificial intelligence to build a fully automated payment system, asserting that in the not-too-distant future, over 90% of crypto transactions in the market will no longer be executed by human flesh tapping keyboards, but will be entirely delegated to AI agents for automatic execution. This is far from just a Silicon Valley bigwig's late-night fantasy. The data wildly jumping in the backend of stablecoin giant Circle is proving this silent revolution.

In just the past nine months, over 100 million transactions have been independently completed by AI agents. Why is Circle so closely monitoring and promoting this trend? The reason is simple: the traditional financial system's fiat settlement channels are just too slow and too closed. Traditional banks not only have strict real-name authentication walls, but are also constrained by nine-to-five business hours and cumbersome cross-border clearing networks. When a machine program needs to instantly pay a few cents for some data, it absolutely won't queue up to apply for a Visa credit card, nor can it wait for days for SWIFT's cross-border transfers. Circle keenly realizes that USDC, the stablecoin running on the high-speed blockchain, is naturally the "digital blood" tailored for the machine economy.

Tens of millions of dollars of real money are quietly flowing through smart contracts in cyberspace without any human fingerprints or face verification. This not only means machines have learned to spend money, but also signals that the old paradigm of financial interaction has been completely torn apart.

Intent Economy: Using Words Instead of Private Keys

To truly understand the disruptive nature of this revolution, we need to completely shatter our existing concept of "wallets" in our minds. In the past, crypto wallets were like a structurally complex old aircraft dashboard, covered with various knobs, switches, and warning lights that needed manual adjustment. Now, this outdated machine is forcibly stuffed into an extremely intelligent "silicon-based brain," which has spawned the sexiest narrative in the current crypto world—the "intent economy."

In this new world, natural language is the most powerful API. In the traditional operation flow, if a newcomer to crypto wants to swap their stablecoins for Ethereum, they must go through a long and painful ordeal. They need to bite the bullet and learn what an automated market maker is, what a liquidity pool is, and learn to switch back and forth between different DEXes to compare prices. They even have to pray on cross-chain bridges that their assets don't get stuck in mid-air.

Going through this tedious process would discourage 99% of outsiders. But in the future ruled by AI agents, you only need to lazily type into your phone screen: "Use a hundred USDC to buy me some Ethereum." With just this everyday casual chat, your exclusive silicon-based butler will wake up in milliseconds. Like an tireless and exceptionally shrewd top Wall Street trader, it will instantly scan the liquidity depth across Uniswap, Sushiswap, and various aggregators, precisely calculating the most cost-effective trading route.

Even better, it understands the perils of the dark forest and will automatically set you the most reasonable slippage interval to prevent being "sandwiched" by malicious arbitrageurs lurking in the mempool. It will even meticulously monitor network congestion like a penny-pinching old accountant, picking the cheapest time to execute the transaction. Throughout the entire process, you don't need to understand any obscure financial jargon, nor do you need to know how the underlying code operates. Your "intent" is the most powerful execution command. This experience of completely reducing complexity is precisely the ultimate weapon driving the mass adoption of crypto assets to billions of people.

Dark Net Trading Between Machines

If you only think AI agents are just an advanced version of a voice assistant that can help you buy and sell tokens, then you're vastly underestimating the grand ambitions of this technological revolution. What truly excites AI giants like OpenAI and payment oligarchs like Circle, even driving them to invest heavily in Web3 alliances and acquire relevant startups, is the underlying logic: AI can finally have independent economic capacity.

For a long time, artificial intelligence has faced an extremely absurd situation. They can write Shakespearean sonnets, can write extremely complex underlying system code, and can even easily pass the most rigorous lawyer or medical license exams for humans. But they alone cannot buy themselves a cheapest cup of coffee, or pay even a cent for the massive computing power they consume. Ultimately, traditional banks and financial systems only serve "natural persons" with blood and flesh or registered "legal entities," and absolutely won't open accounts for a piece of virtual code. The combination of cryptocurrency and smart contracts perfectly split open the iron shackles imprisoning AI evolution.

OpenAI's strategic layout has already shown its hand. Whether it's their executives' frequent contact with crypto-native payment startups or founder Sam Altman personally leading the Worldcoin project with crypto genes, they're sending a clear signal: future superintelligent AI (AGI) must have its own native treasury. Thanks to a new machine payment protocol called HTTP 402, AI agents can not only manage money themselves, but also conduct extremely high-frequency micro-business transactions with other machines. To use a vivid metaphor, when your AI butler is executing an extremely complex quantitative investment strategy for you and discovers it needs to obtain millisecond-level real-time price data provided by an authoritative decentralized oracle.

Under this brand new framework, it no longer needs to pop up system windows or send emails to you requesting a data purchase budget. Instead, it can directly pull out a few cents of cryptocurrency from its own small treasury, instantly buy this data, and feed it to the model. If it feels computational resources are tight during large-scale operations, it can even use Ethereum to directly rent additional computing resources from idle GPUs on decentralized compute networks.

In this micro and high-frequency process, "service" is completely stripped of the formalities and manual review of human society, transforming into pure commodities that can freely circulate 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 issuing your AI butler an "unlimited overdraft corporate credit card," allowing the AI to directly use a certain token in your account to pay transaction fees while helping you. You no longer need to pre-hoard specific native tokens just to pay for a transfer. This undoubtedly pulls away the most counterintuitive wall blocking ordinary users, making smooth operation of machine agents a reality.

Taming Your Silicon-Based Money-Printing Machine

When all complexity is hidden backstage, system execution efficiency naturally bursts at an exponential level. This burst is reflected not only in individual wealth management, but more so in the extremely violent reshaping of organizational forms throughout the decentralized world. Take decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) for example. Past community governance was a disaster with no solution. Asking a group of retail investors driven by speculation to read tens of thousands of words of extremely boring, jargon-filled proposals every day and vote is tantamount to forcing people to attend endless, joyless homeowners' meetings. This results in most projects' voting rates struggling at a dismal 10%, so-called decentralized democracy degenerates into a dictatorship of a few whales. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin keenly perceived this breakthrough, strongly advocating for AI to serve as governance butler.

Real on-chain data proves the astonishing effectiveness of this strategy: when users tell AI their values, risk preferences, and interests in plain language, and the AI reviews those lengthy proposals and automatically triggers voting logic, community participation instantly skyrockets several times over. In the bloodier realm of high-frequency quantitative trading, arbitrage bots have already started understanding human natural language instructions, ready to adjust long/short strategies at any moment based on their master's casual remarks, like a special forces team on standby.

However, the other side of the coin always bears the skull of risk. Completely handing over the keys to your treasury to a tireless silicon-based creature without fear or morality is itself an extremely dangerous gamble. For ordinary people hungry for wealth yet terrified of being robbed by hackers, embracing the intent economy absolutely doesn't mean closing your eyes and handing over complete control.

You must clearly recognize that although AI agents have independent wallet addresses and execution rights, the absolute ownership of assets must still be tightly bound by smart contracts under your highest authority. It's like you hired an extremely smart Wall Street fund manager with big money to go fight in the market, but you must put an electronic ankle bracelet on his ankle to strictly limit his range of activities.

In this regard, a delegation standard named ERC-7710 provides a nearly perfect on-chain contract. As a user, when using various custodial agent tools, you must set up permission moats like guarding against bandits. You can clearly stipulate through smart contracts that this AI can only touch up to a thousand dollars in trading volume per day, and can only touch relatively safe blue-chip stablecoins, absolutely must not touch your Bitcoin or Ethereum reserves that you keep as backup. Any fund transfer exceeding the threshold or cross-chain behavior must trigger a mandatory multi-signature notification mechanism, ensuring every breath of this cold machine is under your absolute control.

For Web3 developers and project teams trying to strike gold in this new blue ocean, pure technical self-indulgence is completely out of the question anymore. Simply enabling AI to 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 behind the scenes into risk summaries that humans can understand at a glance. The deeper reason is that in this extremely fast system where money flows faster than human regulators can monitor, without comprehensive operation logs, tracking, and automatic interception mechanisms for large suspicious transactions, this financial utopia led by AI will quickly become a lawless carnival for hackers, black industries, and money launderers, ultimately inevitably inviting devastating strikes from global financial regulators.

The Ultimate Web3 Is No Web3

The history of financial technology development is essentially a history of constantly pushing underlying complexity to the backstage black box while leaving extreme simplicity on the user's screen. Looking back now, those early crypto days full of code, requiring you to memorize twelve seed phrases like reciting the Bible, constantly worrying about private key leaks and slippage losses, were destined to become ancient and absurd like those screechy dial-up internet modems.

This wallet revolution initiated by AI agents is violently tearing down the tallest wall of sighs in the Web3 world. It reveals a naked truth to everyone: true mass adoption has never relied on condescending education of users about what blockchain is or what hash algorithms are. Rather, it's about letting users completely fail to notice blockchain's existence while enjoying ultra-fast financial services. In the not-too-distant future, when you open your phone, you won't face a cold, technically-gated collection of decentralized applications anymore. Instead, you'll face a 24-hour online, absolutely rational, never-betraying digital wealth butler. You just need to recline lazily on the sofa and say casually: "Market looks good this month, help me manage my wealth steadily." All the turbulent waves and complex games that follow—whether resisting hacker attacks or finding the best yield rates across the entire network—will be ruthlessly blocked outside the silicon-based brain's firewall.

By then, the real problem troubling you probably won't be how to carefully operate your wallet or how to memorize those twelve words by rote. Perhaps the ultimate standard for measuring someone's financial freedom in the future won't be how many Bitcoins are sleeping in their cold wallet, but rather how many tireless 24-hour silicon-based alter egos you own, crazily earning money for you in the cyber dark net.