This article combines the latest 2025 data from the cryptocurrency market with cutting-edge observations on the explosion of AI technology, revealing a dual revolution that is currently underway: AI is not only reconstructing the underlying logic of knowledge work but is also reshaping the investment paradigm of cryptocurrencies. From the $22.9 billion annual inflow into Bitcoin ETFs to the rise of the AI agency economy, from 'code is law' to 'prompts are strategies', we are at a historical intersection of traditional finance and intelligent technology. This is not an abstract discussion about whether 'AI will replace traders', but a firsthand account from an eyewitness—when model capabilities undergo nonlinear leaps and intelligent agents begin to autonomously execute on-chain strategies, your cryptocurrency asset allocation plan may be becoming outdated.
I. Please recall January 2024
If you were paying close attention back then, you might have noticed that the U.S. SEC approved a spot Bitcoin ETF. But most people didn't care. At that time, Bitcoin was hovering around $40,000, and Ethereum was still struggling at $2,000. You were still following the Fed's interest rate decisions, analyzing on-chain data, and manually executing trading strategies. If someone told you that a year later AI would do most of your investment analysis, you'd probably think they'd been reading too much science fiction in some Discord group.
But in about a year, the whole world changed completely.
In 2025, US spot Bitcoin ETFs saw net inflows exceeding $22.9 billion, and BlackRock's IBIT holdings surpassed 773,000 BTC (worth approximately $93 billion), with institutional funds pouring in through compliant channels. Simultaneously, the AI field witnessed an even more dramatic leap: the release of GPT-5.3 Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 marked AI's evolution from "auxiliary tools" to "independent executors"—capable not only of writing code but also of autonomously testing, iterating, and deploying applications.
I think we're currently in a phase in the crypto market that's a bit over the top, and the scale of this event will far exceed the DeFi summer of 2020 or the ETF rollout in 2024.
I've been observing the intersection of AI and encryption for six years now. I'm writing this for those in my life who aren't in this industry—my family, friends, and people I care about. They keep asking me, "What's really going on with AI and encryption?" And my answers have never truly reflected what's happening. I always give a polite version, a cocktail party version. Because if I told them the truth, it would sound like I'm crazy.
But now, what I've been saying is so far out of touch with reality that it can no longer be ignored.
II. Three "Unrecognizable" Moments in the Crypto Market in 2025
Moment 1: Structural Reversal in ETF Fund Flows
In early 2025, Bitcoin ETFs saw a net inflow of $4.5 billion in a single month, with institutions strategically allocating BTC as "digital gold." However, after November 2025, the flow of funds underwent a fundamental reversal—monthly outflows reached billions of dollars, with net outflows exceeding $3 billion in January 2026 alone. Meanwhile, the integration of AI and blockchain has moved from conceptual hype to infrastructure implementation: the agentic economy has become a viable reality, with the x402 protocol enabling AI agents to trade autonomously in USDC.
Moment Two: From "Fabrication" to "Independent Operation"
If you used ChatGPT to analyze candlestick charts in 2023 and thought "it talks nonsense" or "it's just so-so," you weren't wrong. Those earlier versions were indeed limited in their capabilities.
But that was two years ago. In the timescale of AI, that's almost prehistoric.
Today's AI models are completely different from even versions from six months ago. On February 5, 2025, when OpenAI released GPT-5.3 Codex, it explicitly acknowledged: "This is the first model that has played a key role in its own creation"—AI participated in its construction [^original text]. What does this mean in the cryptography field?
This means that AI agents can already:
• Independently analyze on-chain data to identify abnormal fund flows
• Write, test, and deploy smart contracts without human intervention.
• Automated arbitrage between DeFi protocols, executing complex multi-step strategies.
• Adjusts portfolios based on real-time market fluctuations, far faster than human traders.
Moment Three: From "Code is Law" to "Hint Words are Strategy"
Traditional quantitative trading requires teams, infrastructure, and millions of dollars in investment. Now, an independent investor can describe a strategy in natural language, and AI can generate a working trading bot within hours. Bittensor's dynamic TAO upgrade redefines it as "the Bitcoin of AI," NEAR's chain abstraction brings real-world intent trading volume, and decentralized AI computing networks are validating the feasibility of hybrid AI architectures.
This is no longer incremental improvement; it's something completely different.
III. Why Your Trading Strategy May Be Failing
The AI lab made a very clear choice: they prioritized making AI good at writing code. The reason is simple—building AI itself requires a lot of code. If AI can write that code, it can help build its next generation.
Now, that step is complete. And they are moving on to financial modeling, market forecasting, and risk management.
The feeling that tech workers have experienced over the past year—watching AI go from a "useful tool" to "doing my job better than I do"—is about to become the experience of every trader. Not in ten years. Those who build these systems say one to five years. Some say even less.
Specific scenarios:
Technical Analysis: AI can now handle multi-timeframe chart recognition, sentiment analysis, and comprehensive judgment of on-chain indicators, reaching a level approaching that of professional analysts. A partner at a large hedge fund spends several hours a day using AI to scan the market, saying it's like having an entire team of junior analysts at all times.
Quantitative strategies: AI can handle modeling, backtesting, parameter optimization, and report generation, and it's improving rapidly. Complex, multi-day strategy development has been largely automated.
Risk management: In multiple fields, AI has approached or even surpassed human risk control experts in portfolio optimization, stress testing, and black swan event simulation.
Customer service and investment research: Truly capable AI research assistants—not the maddening robots of five years ago—have begun to be deployed, capable of handling complex, multi-step investment research tasks.
Many people still believe that certain things are safe: market feel, intuition, macro-level judgment, and a subtle grasp of market sentiment. I used to say that too. But now, I'm not so sure.
The latest generation of models can now make decisions that feel like "judgments," exhibiting something akin to "taste"—an intuition about "what is the right choice." A year ago, this was simply unimaginable.
IV. METR data tells you: less time than you think.
There is an organization called METR that uses data to measure the autonomy of AI. What they track is how long a real-world task a model can complete without human intervention (measured by the time it would take a human expert to complete the task).
About a year ago, that number was 10 minutes; then it was 1 hour; then several hours. The most recent measurement (November 2025, Claude Opus 4.5) shows that AI can already complete tasks that would normally take human experts nearly 5 hours. And that number roughly doubles every 7 months, with the latest data even suggesting that it may be doubling every 4 months [^Original text].
If you extrapolate this trend to the crypto market:
Within a year, AI may be able to independently monitor the market and execute strategies for several days.
Within two years, AI will be able to manage investment portfolios continuously for weeks, autonomously adjusting positions.
Within three years, AI will be able to handle asset management projects that last for several months.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that the AI will be significantly better than almost all humans in almost all tasks, with a timeline of 2026 or 2027.
Consider this judgment. If AI is smarter than most quantitative analysts, do you really think it can't do most trading work?
V. AI is building the next generation of cryptographic infrastructure
The most important, yet least understood, development is that AI has participated in its own development as well as in the development of cryptographic infrastructure.
OpenAI states in its technical documentation that GPT-5.3-Codex is used for "debugging its training process, managing deployments, and diagnosing test results and evaluations" [^original text]. In the field of cryptography, this means that AI is:
• Optimize consensus algorithm
• Design a more efficient zero-knowledge proof system
• Automated auditing of smart contract vulnerabilities
• Predict network attack vectors
One generation helps build the next, and the smarter next generation builds the next generation even faster—researchers call this the intelligence explosion. And those who understand all of this best are precisely those who are building it themselves, and they believe that this process has already begun.
6. What does this mean for your crypto assets?
I'll be blunt, because you deserve honesty, not just comfort.
Dario Amodei once publicly predicted that AI would eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. Many industry insiders believe this assessment is conservative. Based on the capabilities of the latest models, the technological conditions for large-scale disruption may already be in place by the end of this year.
This is unlike any previous round of market transformation. The reason is that AI does not replace a specific skill; it is a universal replacement for cognitive labor. Moreover, it becomes stronger in all aspects simultaneously.
What you should really do:
1. Start using AI tools seriously, don't just treat them as search engines.
Subscribe to a paid version of Claude or ChatGPT for $20 per month. Make sure you're using the strongest model available (currently GPT-5.2 or Opus 4.6). Don't just ask random questions—that's a mistake most people make. Instead, integrate it into your actual investment work:
• Throw the white paper in and let it find all the technical vulnerabilities and token economic risks.
• Give it a messy set of on-chain data, let it model and identify anomalies.
• Paste your portfolio history into the file so it can analyze the reasons for drawdowns and propose optimization strategies.
The leaders aren't just playing around with AI; they're actively seeking opportunities to automate research that would otherwise take hours.
2. Reconfigure your asset structure
Based on your previous gold and Bitcoin allocation strategy, it needs to be upgraded in the current environment: gold as the risk control anchor (30%-40%), Bitcoin as the core of digital assets (30%-40%), but more importantly, reserve 10%-20% of the position for infrastructure tokens related to the AI agent economy (such as Bittensor, Render, NEAR, etc.).
This is not speculation, but a hedge against the possibility of a "smart explosion".
3. Manage your liquidity situation.
Since November 2025, Bitcoin ETFs have experienced continuous net outflows, indicating the market has entered a period of high volatility. If you even partially believe that your income structure may face significant shocks in the coming years, then financial resilience is far more important than it was a year ago. Increase your stablecoin reserves as much as possible, be cautious about taking on new leverage based on the assumption that "current returns are guaranteed to be stable," and consider whether your fixed expenses provide flexibility or lock you in.
4. Consider which tasks are harder to replace.
Years of built on-chain reputation and trust, final decisions requiring private key signatures, compliant operations in highly regulated regions, and adoption of traditional financial interfaces whose speed is slowed by institutional inertia—these are not permanent shields, but they can buy you time. And right now, time is the most valuable asset—provided you use it to adapt, rather than pretending none of this exists.
5. Give your child a different education
The traditional path—good grades, a good university, and a stable professional job—points precisely to those positions most vulnerable to AI disruption. The most important skill for the next generation is learning to work with these tools and pursuing what they truly love. No one knows what the crypto market will look like ten years from now, but those most likely to thrive are those who are curious, adaptable, and adept at using AI for what they care about.
6. Your dream is actually closer to you.
Having discussed many risks, let's look at the other side: if you've always wanted to do something but lacked the technology or funding, that barrier has essentially disappeared. You can describe a DeFi strategy to AI and have a working version within an hour; if you want to write an investment research report but are stuck on data analysis, you can complete it with AI; if you want to learn smart contract development, the world's best mentors are now available for $20 a month, 24/7, with unlimited patience.
Knowledge is virtually free, and creating tools is cheaper than ever before. Things you've always thought were "too difficult," "too expensive," or "not in your field" are now worth a try.
7. Cultivate the habit of adapting to change
The specific tools themselves aren't that important; what matters is the ability to quickly learn new tools. AI will continue to change rapidly. Today's models will be outdated in a year; today's strategies will be overturned. Ultimately, the most stable players are not those who are proficient in a single metric, but those who adapt to change itself.
Make a simple commitment to yourself: spend one hour each day actually using AI to analyze the market. Not reading the news, not scrolling through stock charts, but using it. Try making it do something new every day, something you're unsure if it can accomplish. Stick with it for six months, and your understanding of the future will surpass that of 99% of the people around you.
VII. A Larger Picture
I've always focused on investing because it has the most direct impact on my life. But the scope of this matter goes far beyond that.
Imagine a new "nation" that emerges overnight in 2027: 50 million AI agents, each smarter than any trading master in history, thinking 10 to 100 times faster than humans, never sleeping, and able to access all on-chain data, control wallets, execute transactions, and participate in governance.
What do you think regulators in different countries will say?
If done correctly, the rewards are staggering: AI could compress a century of financial research into a decade. Market efficiency, financial inclusion, even wealth distribution—these are issues that researchers genuinely believe can be redefined in our lifetime.
If mistakes are made, the risks are equally real: unpredictable and uncontrollable AI agents; automated tools that lower the threshold for financial crime; and the ability of authoritarian governments to build on-chain surveillance systems that can never be dismantled.
The people building this technology are also among the most excited and fearful people on Earth. They believe it's so powerful that it can't be stopped, and so important that it can't be abandoned.
VIII. Conclusion: The future has arrived, it just hasn't knocked on your door yet.
I know this isn't just a passing fad. The technology is effective, progress is predictable, and the wealthiest institutions in human history are investing trillions of dollars in AI.
I know that the next 2-5 years will leave most crypto investors feeling lost, and that's already happening in my world. It will come to yours too.
I know that those who ultimately succeed are those who start participating now—not out of fear, but out of curiosity and a sense of urgency.
We've moved beyond the stage of "chatting about the future at the dinner table." The future has arrived; it just hasn't knocked on your door yet.
But it will happen soon.
If these words resonate with you, please like, comment, and share them with others in your life who should also start reflecting on this. Most people realize this too late. You can be the one who helps those you care about stay one step ahead.
Leave your thoughts in the comments section:
Have you started using AI to assist with investing? How's the experience?
• How long do you think it will take for AI agents to dominate the crypto market?
• How do you plan to adjust your strategy in the face of this change?
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