After 18 years, blockchain has finally started to head towards the main channel

Author: Gu Yu, ChainCatcher

At the beginning of this month, the established crypto venture capital firm Variant announced the completion of a new fundraise totaling $222 million, expanding the fund's theme from the previous "digital ownership" to "autonomy."

This may seem like a routine fundraising effort, but the signals behind it are anything but ordinary.

Variant partner Jesse Walden stated that in the future, the label "crypto investor" may gradually disappear, becoming akin to "internet investor." In other words, crypto is no longer an independent and closed investment track, but more like an underlying technological paradigm embedded within major domains such as AI, finance, social, robotics, data, content, and consumer products.

This may also be the most realistic response from crypto VCs facing the impact of AI: not competing for the narrative with AI, but attempting to become the underlying financial track of the AI world.

I. Crypto VCs Begin to Blur Boundaries

In recent years, the fundraising logic of crypto VCs has primarily been based on one premise: blockchain will give rise to a batch of new platforms, protocols, and applications independent of the Web2 world.

When narratives like DeFi, NFT, GameFi, Layer1, Layer2, modularization, re-staking, DePin, and RWA emerged in succession, this logic was once highly persuasive. As long as funds entered new narratives early enough, they could potentially achieve returns far exceeding traditional equity investments in the secondary market of tokens.

However, this logic is now failing, primarily due to the significant weakening of the wealth effect in the crypto market itself. Bitcoin has seen a substantial decline this year, with multiple market perspectives attributing the withdrawal of funds from crypto ETFs, macro liquidity pressures, and investors shifting towards AI and large tech IPOs as important reasons. Meanwhile, AI and hard tech companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic continue to attract the attention of LPs and the secondary market, significantly diminishing the scarcity of crypto assets in terms of "growth stories."

This means that crypto funds are not only competing with other crypto funds but are also competing with all assets that can represent future growth. AI, robotics, space, defense technology, and energy infrastructure are all vying for the same pool of LP risk budgets.

In this context, "only investing in crypto" has gradually transformed from a professional label into a potential constraint.

If LPs believe that AI is the most important technological variable for the next decade, then it will be difficult for a fund to prove its irreplaceability solely by saying, "We understand token economics better." Especially in the past few cycles, many crypto projects have not demonstrated real revenue, user retention, or application scenarios, instead leaving behind structural issues such as high FDV, low circulation, airdrop mining, and on-chain zombie applications.

This is why more and more crypto VCs are beginning to actively blur boundaries.

YZi Labs has expanded its investment scope to three major areas: Web3, AI, and biotechnology, and this year participated in a $52 million financing round for the AI industrial robotics company RoboForce.

According to a report by The Wall Street Journal in February this year, Paradigm is seeking to raise up to $1.5 billion for its next fund, expanding its investment scope from crypto to "frontier technologies" such as AI and robotics, while still continuing to invest in the crypto space. In May of this year, AI manufacturing company SendCutSend completed a $110 million financing round, with Paradigm participating.

In May, Haun Ventures announced the completion of a new fundraise of $1 billion, expanding its investment scope to the AI agent field. Its founder, Katie Haun, stated that artificial intelligence will "increasingly represent us in economic activities," and services will need to adjust accordingly to adapt to this future.

II. AI Agents May Be the True Large-Scale Application of Crypto

In the past, crypto projects often tried to get users to use products for the sake of "decentralization," but reality has proven that the vast majority of users do not change their behavior due to ideology.

Today, the crypto industry finds itself in an awkward situation: it still possesses unique capabilities such as globalization, open finance, composability, asset issuance, and censorship resistance, but these capabilities have long lacked truly high-frequency, essential, and scalable application entry points.

What is more likely to happen in the future is that users may not even realize they are using crypto, but AI agents, robots, financial applications, games, or content platforms are calling stablecoins, wallets, smart contracts, and on-chain identities in the background.

In Variant's view, autonomy is not just automation. Automation addresses whether machines can complete tasks for humans, while autonomy focuses on whether users truly control their assets, identities, data, and decision-making power. Variant stated in the article that building autonomous systems requires addressing a series of issues such as incentive mechanisms, laws, governance, security, verification, policies, and geopolitical interfaces in adversarial markets, with digital ownership being an important pillar of autonomy.

"The ideas driving the Web3 movement will find new momentum in the age of artificial intelligence. We have conducted many experiments, and cryptocurrencies were initially intended to be seen as products themselves. But ultimately, we found that cryptocurrencies are the tracks supporting numerous products, and their growth story is just beginning," Jesse Walden stated.

This may be the most significant cognitive correction in the crypto industry in recent years.

Crypto does not necessarily have to become a front-end application that users open every day; it can become the economic settlement layer between machines and machines, humans and machines, and applications and applications in the AI era.

If AI agents are to represent users in completing tasks, they will need wallets; if they are to autonomously purchase APIs, call computing power, pay for data, and subscribe to services, they will need a low-cost, global, programmable payment network; if they are to carry identities, reputations, and assets across multiple platforms, they will need an open account system; if they are to make the external world believe in the results of their actions, they will need verification and auditing mechanisms.

These issues are precisely within the scope of capabilities that crypto has accumulated over the past decade.

III. Tether's Investment Case

The investment by crypto giant Tether in NEURA Robotics is a typical case of this trend.

On June 10, the German robotics company NEURA Robotics completed a $1.4 billion financing round, with investors including Tether, Amazon, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Bosch, Schaeffler, and the European Investment Bank. NEURA stated that this funding will be used to expand the commercialization scale of cognitive robots and humanoid robots, with plans to produce millions of robots by 2030. The company also disclosed that its backlog of orders has exceeded $1 billion.

On the surface, this is an investment in AI robotics; but for Tether, it is clearly more than just a financial bet.

According to relevant press release information, NEURA's robotics platform is expected to integrate Tether's wallet development kit (WDK), embedding self-custody wallet functionality directly into the robotic systems. This means that in the future, robots may earn micropayments by completing tasks, transact with other systems, or execute economic behaviors within parameters preset by humans.

This is one of the most imaginative new scenarios for stablecoins.

In the past, the largest users of stablecoins were traders, cross-border payment users, gray arbitrageurs, and some residents of emerging markets. It addressed the issues of transfers, settlements, and value storage between humans. However, if AI agents and robots begin to become economic entities, the frequency and scenarios of stablecoin usage may be significantly amplified.

A robot can take orders, complete transportation, and receive micropayments in USDT; an AI agent can automatically purchase data, call models, and pay for SaaS services; an automated supply chain system can automatically settle after goods arrive, sensors verify, and contracts confirm. Compared to traditional banking systems, on-chain payments are inherently suitable for such high-frequency, small-amount, cross-regional, machine-readable economic activities.

This is also why AI is not just in competition with crypto. AI has drawn away capital attention from crypto, but it may also create the real demand that crypto has long been missing.

IV. AI + Crypto Is Not a Universal Formula

Of course, AI + Crypto does not naturally hold.

In the past two years, the market has seen too many projects that are brutally stitched together: integrating ChatGPT into Telegram groups and calling it an AI agent, packaging a model calling interface as token economics, cramming data labeling, computing power leasing, and agent platforms into white papers. Many projects face issues similar to those of the last round of GameFi and SocialFi: grand concepts, minimal revenue, heavy tokens, and light products.

Truly valuable AI + Crypto projects should meet at least one condition: they cannot exist without crypto, or they are significantly better with crypto.

For example, agents need self-custody wallets and permission management; AI-generated content requires verifiable sources and ownership; markets for models, computing power, and data need open settlement and incentive mechanisms; the robot economy requires machine-readable payment networks; autonomous organizations need transparent governance and enforceable rules. In these scenarios, crypto is not just a marketing label stuck on the outside but a foundational component necessary for system operation.

This is also the question that crypto projects and VCs need to answer next.

If they simply change their fund introduction page to AI + Crypto because it is easier to raise funds, this will not change the industry's predicament. The market will eventually discover that most so-called fusion projects have neither AI barriers nor crypto necessity.

But if they can find the real intersection between AI agents, robots, data markets, financial automation, and on-chain identities, the crypto industry may indeed usher in a new application cycle.

This time, growth may not come from more retail investors rushing into exchanges to buy new coins, but rather from more machines, applications, and enterprises using on-chain tracks in the background.

V. Conclusion

In the face of the impact of AI, the answer given by crypto VCs is already clear: do not treat crypto as an isolated track anymore, but reinterpret it within the larger wave of technology.

This is both a proactive evolution and a forced turnaround.

As LP funds flow towards AI, as entrepreneurs' attention shifts to AI, and as the risk appetite of the secondary market moves towards AI, if crypto funds continue to only discuss Layer1, DeFi, NFTs, blockchain games, and airdrop growth, their survival space will only become narrower.

But this does not mean the story of crypto has ended. On the contrary, if AI agents truly become the new internet users, if robots truly become new economic participants, and if automated systems begin to represent humans in executing more and more transactions, then the wallets, stablecoins, smart contracts, on-chain identities, and open financial networks that crypto has built over the past years may finally welcome high-frequency, essential, non-speculative use cases for the first time.

The crypto industry needs new narratives more than ever, but it needs new real demands even more.