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

Saying Goodbye to the Bleeding Manual Operations Console

Most ordinary people's fear of cryptocurrency stems not from market volatility, but from that extremely anti-human trading interface. Imagine how you typically buy an asset on a decentralized exchange: you need to carefully wake up your cold wallet, repeatedly verify a long string of seemingly random hexadecimal address codes, terrified that one letter mistake will send your money into the void. Then, you have to estimate the constantly fluctuating "slippage tolerance" like an actuary—it's like when you're rushing to the airport, willing to let the taxi driver take a detour as long as you don't miss your flight, but you need to set a maximum extra fare limit.

If within seconds of pressing confirm, the Ethereum network suddenly becomes congested, or market volatility exceeds your "detour fee limit," you not only fail to get the tokens you want, but also waste an expensive "highway toll" (Gas Fee) to miners. This experience, akin to walking a tightrope on a cliff edge, is mockingly called the "dark forest survival rule" of the Web3 era. In this jungle filled with hackers, arbitrage bots, and complex smart contracts, humans' pathetic neural reflexes and computational abilities have 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, Binance founder CZ dropped a chilling yet tempting prophecy on social media. He revealed that he's using open-source frameworks and artificial intelligence to build a fully automated payment system, asserting that in the near future, over 90% of crypto transactions will no longer be executed by human fingers on keyboards, but will be entirely delegated to AI Agents for automatic execution. This is far from just a Silicon Valley mogul's late-night fantasy. The data frantically flowing through Circle's backend, a stablecoin giant, is proving this silent revolution.

In just the past nine months, over 100 million transactions have been autonomously completed by AI Agents. Why is Circle so intensely monitoring and promoting this trend? The reason is simple: the traditional finance system's fiat settlement channels are far too slow and closed. Traditional banks not only have strict KYC walls but are also constrained by nine-to-five business hours and cumbersome cross-border settlement networks. When a machine needs to instantly pay a fraction of a cent to acquire certain data, it obviously can't queue up to apply for a Visa credit card, nor wait days for SWIFT's cross-border transfer. Circle keenly recognized that USDC stablecoins running on high-speed blockchains are naturally the "digital blood" custom-made for the machine economy.

Tens of millions of dollars in real money flow silently through cyberspace via smart contracts without any human fingerprints or facial recognition. This not only means machines have learned to spend money, but 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 demolish our existing concept of "wallets." In the past, crypto wallets were like complex vintage aircraft instrument panels, filled with various manually-adjusted knobs, switches, and warning lights. Now, this outdated machine is forcibly stuffed into an incredibly intelligent "silicon-based brain," birthing the sexiest narrative in crypto today—the "intent economy."

In this new world, natural language is the most powerful API. In traditional workflows, if a newcomer wants to swap their stablecoins for Ethereum, they must endure a long and painful ordeal. They need to steel themselves to learn what automated market makers are, what liquidity pools are, learn to price-compare across different DEXs, and even pray on cross-chain bridges that their assets don't get stuck mid-flight. This tedious process is enough to deter 99% of outsiders. But in the AI Agent-managed future, you only need to lazily type on your phone screen: "Use 100 USDC to buy some Ethereum for me."

Just this casual chat, your exclusive silicon-based butler awakens in milliseconds. Like a tireless and cunning top Wall Street trader, it instantly scans liquidity depth across Uniswap, Sushiswap and all aggregators, precisely calculating the most cost-effective trading route. Even more impressive, understanding the dark forest's dangers, it automatically sets a reasonable slippage range to prevent malicious sandwich attacks from lurking in the mempool. It even monitors network congestion like a meticulous old-school accountant, timing the transaction for the cheapest gas fees.

Throughout the entire process, 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 dimensionally reducing complexity is the ultimate killer for driving crypto adoption among billions of people. When ordinary people no longer risk losing a lifetime's savings by pressing an extra zero or entering a wrong address, genuine trust in decentralized networks will finally take root in the hearts of the masses.

Dark Web Transactions Between Machines

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

For a long time, AI has faced an absurdly ridiculous predicament. It can write Shakespearean sonnets, code extremely complex system architecture, and easily pass humanity's strictest bar exams or medical certifications. Yet it cannot buy itself the cheapest cup of coffee or pay a single penny for the massive computational resources it consumes. Ultimately, traditional banks and financial systems only serve "natural persons" with flesh and blood or registered "legal persons," and will never open accounts for virtual code. The combination of cryptocurrency and smart contracts perfectly breaks through the iron shackles that have confined AI's evolution.

OpenAI's strategic positioning has already become apparent. Whether through its executives' frequent outreach to crypto-native payment startups or founder Sam Altman personally leading the crypto-gene Worldcoin project, they're sending a clear signal: future AGI must have its own native treasury. Leveraging an emerging machine payment protocol called HTTP 402, AI Agents can not only manage money themselves but conduct extremely high-frequency micro-commercial transactions with other machines.

To illustrate vividly, when your AI butler executes an extremely complex quantitative investment strategy and discovers it needs millisecond-level real-time price data from an authoritative decentralized oracle, under this new framework, it no longer needs to pop up system dialogs or email you requesting a data purchase budget. Instead, it can directly pull a few cents of crypto from its exclusive small treasury, instantly buy this data and feed it to the model. If it finds its computational resources tight during large-scale operations, it can even directly rent additional GPU computing resources from decentralized computing networks using Ethereum.

In this micro and high-frequency process, "services" are completely stripped of human society's red tape and manual review, 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 crucial weapon is the maturation of Account Abstraction (ERC-4337) technology. This technology is like issuing your AI butler an unlimited corporate supplementary credit card, allowing AI to directly use a certain token in your account to reimburse transaction fees while helping you with tasks. You no longer need to painfully hoard specific native tokens in advance just to pay for transfers. This undoubtedly removes the most counter-intuitive wall standing before 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 explodes exponentially. This explosion manifests not only in personal wealth management but in violently reshaping the entire organizational structure of the decentralized world. Take Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) for example. Past community governance was an insoluble disaster. Expecting a group of speculative-minded retail investors to read tens of thousands of words of extremely tedious, jargon-filled proposals daily and vote is like forcing people to attend endless, joyless homeowners' meetings. This results in voting rates for most projects perpetually struggling at a miserable 10% or so, with supposed decentralized democracy devolving into dictatorial games by a few whales.

Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum's founder, keenly recognized this breakthrough opportunity and strongly advocated letting AI serve as governance butler. Real on-chain data validates this strategy's surprising effectiveness: when users tell AI in plain language their values, risk preferences, and interest demands, and AI reviews lengthy proposals and automatically triggers voting logic, community participation instantly skyrockets several times. In even more bloodthirsty high-frequency quantitative trading, arbitrage bots have begun understanding human natural language instructions, ready to adjust long/short strategies based on the owner's casual remarks, like a special forces unit on standby.

However, the flip side of the coin is eternally etched with the skull of risk. Completely handing the keys to your treasury to an tireless, fearless, amoral silicon-based creature is itself an extremely dangerous gamble. For ordinary people desperate 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 understand that although AI Agents possess independently executable wallet addresses, absolute asset ownership must remain rigidly bound to your supreme authorization through smart contracts. It's like hiring an incredibly smart Wall Street fund manager with serious money—you can give him funds to wrestle in the market, but you must put an electronic ankle monitor on him, strictly limiting his activity range. In this regard, the ERC-7710 delegation standard provides what could be called a perfect on-chain contract.

As users, when using various custodial Agent tools, you must set up permission moats like guarding against bandits. You can explicitly specify through smart contracts that this AI can mobilize at most a thousand dollars in daily trading volume and only touch relatively safe blue-chip stablecoins, absolutely cannot touch your Bitcoin or Ethereum reserves. Any transaction exceeding thresholds or cross-chain behavior must trigger mandatory multi-signature notification mechanisms, ensuring this cold machine's every breath remains under your absolute control.

For Web3 developers and project teams trying to strike it rich in this new blue ocean, pure technical self-indulgence no longer works. Simply enabling AI to understand "swap 100 for Ethereum" is far from enough. You must translate the AI's obscure 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 system where fund transfer speeds far exceed human regulatory limits, without thorough operation logging and auto-blocking mechanisms for suspicious large transactions, this AI-dominated financial utopia will quickly devolve into a lawless carnival for hackers, cybercriminals, and money launderers, inevitably inviting devastating strikes from global financial regulators.

The Ultimate Web3 Is Where Web3 Doesn't Exist

The development history of financial technology is essentially the history of constantly pushing underlying complexity to backend black boxes while leaving minimalist experiences on user screens. Looking back now, those early crypto eras filled with code, requiring memorizing twelve mnemonic words like Bible verses, constantly worrying about private key leaks and slippage losses—these are destined to become as ancient and absurd as those screeching dial-up internet sounds once were.

This wallet infrastructure revolution initiated by AI Agents is violently demolishing Web3's tallest wall of sighs. It reveals a naked truth to everyone: true mass adoption never comes from patronizingly educating users about blockchains and hash algorithms. Instead, it comes from users enjoying ultra-fast financial services without even feeling the blockchain's existence. In the not-distant future, when you open your phone, you'll face not a cold, technically-gated collection of decentralized applications, but a 24-hour online, absolutely rational, eternally loyal digital wealth butler. You only need to lazily lounge on your couch and casually say: "The market looks good this month, help me manage my wealth conservatively." All the turbulent waves and complex games—whether defending against hacker attacks or hunting the network's optimal returns—will be mercilessly blocked outside silicon brain's firewalls.

By then, the problems troubling you may no longer be how to carefully handle wallets or memorize those twelve words. Perhaps the ultimate measure of someone's financial freedom in the future won't be how many bitcoins lie in your cold wallet, but how many tireless silicon-based clones you possess, working 24 hours to make you money in the cyber dark web.