Recently, the Wall Street research firm Citrini Research released a thought-experiment report titled “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis”, sparking intense debate across markets. At the heart of the report lies a ruthless logic of business disruption: AI agents will remove the “friction” in human interaction, ultimately dismantling every legacy business empire built on information asymmetry and intermediary models.
Coincidentally, just as this Wall Street’s “doomsday report” was going viral across the internet, Justin Sun, an iconic figure in the Web3 industry, was making a series of eye-catching statements on social media. He described 2026 as “the year miracles happen”, and even urged young people: “If you can talk to AI, don’t talk to humans… embrace the future wholeheartedly!”
For many people, this may have been yet another episode of Justin Sun’s signature flair for capturing attention. But if we look beyond the emotional surface and place his remarks alongside the macro projections of “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis”, we would get a glimpse into a more thought-provoking reality: the “collapse of the old order” that Wall Street fears in its macroeconomic models is precisely the “new Web4.0 era” that Justin Sun is championing at the micro level and actively working to accelerate.
In the face of the same future, pessimists see an abyss, but Justin Sun sees a staircase leading to the singularity.
Compute, Electricity and Tokens: The Predestined Convergence of AI and Crypto
The “frictionless future” envisioned in “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis” is, at its core, an AI-driven, ruthless revolution of disintermediation.
The report argues bluntly that when omniscient, omnipotent AI agents can match supply and demand, execute transactions, and deliver services at near-zero marginal cost, the protective moats that underpin modern commerce will be irreversibly breached.
For an extended period, from traditional financial intermediaries and advertising distribution platforms to law firms and consulting agencies that charge exorbitant fees, countless business models have effectively preyed on human cognitive limitations, decision-making delays, and informational blind spots. Once AI erases these artificially sustained frictions, these legacy business empires could collapse one after another like dominoes.
This trajectory resonates strikingly with the banner of “decentralization” that blockchain has carried since its inception.
If the Web3.0 movement that flourished over a decade ago sought to dismantle centralized institutions’ monopoly over trust through cryptography and distributed ledgers at the architectural level, then the rise of AI agents represents an even more radical and efficient shift, one that removes the need for trust altogether in many scenarios – because intelligent agents can not only verify facts autonomously but also execute value exchanges independently.
At a deeper level, the material foundation underpinning this dual revolution is essentially identical.
Both the reasoning tokens generated by AI models and the cryptographic tokens circulating within blockchain networks conceal an often underestimated yet uncompromising physical truth: they are digital embodiments of electricity.
Every inference performed by a large AI model consumes real computational power. Likewise, every on-chain transaction confirmed and every smart contract executed depends on the energy continuously burnt by mining rigs or validator nodes. Tokens are not magic; they are receipts of energy conversion, projections of value in the digital realm after electricity has passed through chips, algorithms, and protocols. In this sense, Justin Sun’s earlier assertion that “in the short term, chips are scarce; in the long term, energy is scarce; and storage is always scarce” forms a perfectly coherent closed loop.
We are therefore witnessing the convergence of two seemingly opposed forces that are in fact born of the same origin: On one side, capital elites foresee the collapse of their own power structures through modeling. On the other, crypto natives are actively embracing, through code and conviction, a new civilizational protocol defined by no intermediaries, no friction, and no redundancy. The narrative of this “post-intermediary era”, jointly shaped by AI and blockchain, may only just be beginning.
Why Is AI Destined to Settle in Crypto?
However, this grand historical convergence is not confined to merely philosophical or physical resonances. Once the narrative translates into real-world business operations, a pressing practical question emerges: In a new world where machines increasingly take over execution, who will provide financial services for these intangible, silicon-based entities?
Centralized payment networks were designed for humans.
McKinsey & Company categorizes AI-driven business automation into six levels. From Level 0 to Level 4, systems can still operate within the existing financial framework because every transaction ultimately ties back to a human identity. But at Level 5, agents begin transacting directly with one another without human instruction. At that stage, there is no human identity to inherit, nor can traditional KYC processes apply. Payments must be programmatic, triggered by conditions, and settled in milliseconds, while the reputation of these agents must also be portable across platforms. Under such conditions, blockchain becomes indispensable.
Without a physical form, AI certainly cannot stand in line holding an ID card for KYC verification. For an AI agent, a string of asymmetrically encrypted private keys is effectively an account. A blockchain capable of near-instant settlement, negligible fees, and programmable smart contracts is the ideal clearinghouse.
The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis offers a particularly vivid projection: There was only so much price-matching and aggregating to do. When agents started transacting among themselves, the most direct and effective way to save the user money was to eliminate fees. Agents went looking for faster and cheaper options than cards. Most settled on using stablecoins via Solana or Ethereum L2s, where settlement was near-instant and the transaction cost was measured in fractions of a penny.
For this reason, crypto wallets are destined to become the “native banks” of AI agents.
This also fundamentally shatters the long-standing stereotype surrounding crypto: token issuance is not merely about speculative trading in secondary markets. In an AI-dominated future, crypto tokens and peer-to-peer payments will truly crystallize into the underlying financial infrastructure that enables high-frequency collaboration among agents.
Justin Sun’s All-In Gambit: Where Does His Confidence and Ambition Come From?
Justin Sun’s decision to bet on Web4.0 is underpinned by a highly sophisticated business logic and strategic considerations.
First, TRON’s stablecoin hegemony naturally positions it as the settlement layer for Web4.0.
It is widely known that the TRON network carries the largest circulating supply of USDT in the world. As discussed earlier, the core of Web4.0 lies in machine-to-machine payments. What AI systems require are payment networks that offer fast transfers, low fees, and deep liquidity. TRON’s USDT payment infrastructure aligns almost perfectly with the underlying financial needs of AI agents. Justin Sun could continue to generate value effortlessly in the Web4.0 era just by building a set of payment APIs on TRON that AI systems can seamlessly access.
Second, identifying the breakthrough point for the post-Web3 era.
Traditional Web 3.0 has already entered a phase of competition within a fixed market, with few new narratives capable of breaking out beyond the existing audience. By contrast, AI has become the world’s most certain growth frontier and the largest magnet for capital. Justin Sun has keenly recognized that the future of crypto must be deeply intertwined with AI. By going “all in on Web4.0”, he can redirect the capital and attention flowing into AI across the traditional tech sector back into the crypto market. TRON’s previously announced $100 million AI development fund was already a clear signal of this strategic positioning for Web 4.0.
Third, creating a closed-loop decentralized network ecosystem.
Justin Sun controls BitTorrent (decentralized storage and transmission), the TRON public blockchain (underlying settlement), and HTX’s massive base of crypto users. If decentralized computing power and AI models are further integrated into this ecosystem, he would have the opportunity to build a full-stack Web4.0 infrastructure that operates without relying on Amazon AWS or Google Cloud.
History often unfolds with irony: while the guardians of the old order are still meticulously calculating the losses from crumbling walls, the pioneers of the new world have already laid foundations atop the ruins.
The transformation jointly driven by AI and crypto is far from complete, but its direction is increasingly clear. The real question is no longer whether AI will reshape the business landscape, but who will claim the core infrastructure position first in this restructuring.
