Author: Chloe, ChainCatcher

Peter Steinberger, founder of the open-source project OpenClaw, responded to a user question on X yesterday, “What advice do you have for young people in their 20s?” His answer was simply: “don't waste time with crypto.” This tweet was later retweeted by Lily Liu, chair of the Solana Foundation, who also posted the exact same sentence.

The two tweets combined attracted over a million views, and the comments section quickly filled with doubt. Was Lily Liu retorting sarcastically? Or does it mean the crypto industry is heading towards extinction?

Steinberger has reasons for his disdain for the industry, what about Lily?

OpenClaw has gone through two name changes, from Clawdbot to Moltbot, and was officially released under the name OpenClaw on January 30 of this year. The project has currently garnered over 200,000 stars on GitHub, becoming a rare phenomenal project in the recent open-source community.

After the project went viral, a flood of noise unrelated to technical development followed, with speculators flooding into the community urging the launch of tokens, attempting to capitalize on the project's popularity for speculation. Thus, Steinberger developed a strong aversion to the crypto industry; he even implemented a total ban on Discord, where any mention of “crypto” or “bitcoin” would result in immediate banning (regardless of whether it was promotion, spam, or pure technical discussion).

According to CoinDesk, the background and cause of the ban date back to January, when the project was originally named Clawdbot, and decided to rename due to a trademark warning from Anthropic. During the brief window of just a few seconds between releasing the old GitHub/X account and registering the new account, someone immediately hijacked the account and swiftly launched a fake $CLAWD token on Solana.

The fake token's market value surged to $16 million within hours, and after Steinberger publicly denied it, it plummeted by over 90%, leaving latecomers with total losses. Following this, he was continuously harassed by victims, leading him to publicly state: “Please, crypto community, stop harassing me. I will never issue a token, and anyone labeling me as a token holder is a scammer!”

In this context, his statement of not wasting time with crypto is a direct response to the harassment he faced, clearly pointing in a specific direction, and not a blanket denial of cryptocurrencies as a technology or asset class.

Lily’s situation is entirely different. In light of the market’s high attention to Steinberger’s original post, she chose not only to retweet but also to personally reiterate the same sentence. External interpretations roughly divide into two categories: one sees it as a pessimistic signal regarding the state of the industry; the other considers the statement to be ironic, pointing to specific behavioral patterns within the crypto industry rather than the entire industry.

However, regardless of Lily's intention, the reaction this statement generated in the market has been predominantly negative. Multiple industry figures publicly criticized her, arguing that this action is clearly inconsistent with her identity and responsibilities,the chair of the foundation, it’s equivalent to telling holders that what you are betting on is not worthwhile. Regardless of whether it was a joke, this signal itself is terrible”.

However, it must be acknowledged that in the current industry narrative, rapidly issuing tokens, creating short-term wealth effects, and lacking substantive technical development have become the core issues discussed in the industry for a long time. The long-term depletion of this ecosystem has accelerated the outflow of funds and talent, and the ones absorbing these resources are AI.

As funds and talent leave, where does the crypto industry head next?

Famed investor Stanley Druckenmiller mentioned in an interview with Morgan Stanley that the younger generation's interest is shifting from cryptocurrency to artificial intelligence.

This aligns with the current phenomenon in the crypto industry, where a large number of technical talents and early entrepreneurial capital are concentrating towards AI, and the narrative heat of the crypto market has plummeted to a freezing point.

Upon careful consideration, the current AI industry is still in the early stages of infrastructure development and technological capability expansion, characterized mainly by value creation. The technological dividends have yet to be fully released, the entrepreneurial window remains open, and the expected returns for early participants are relatively clear. The flow of young talent in this direction is a rational response to genuine opportunities, rather than an active rejection of cryptocurrencies.

Historically speaking, the development of mobile internet also experienced similar stages of evolution. In the later stages of the value creation cycle, when technological dividends tend to saturate and market competition intensifies compressing entrepreneurial returns, capital and attention begin to seek new outlets. The concentrated explosion of the cryptocurrency market in 2017 coincided highly with the maturity phase of the mobile internet, which to some extent corroborates that the initiation of the value redistribution cycle is often accompanied by new asset classes absorbing overflow capital.

It remains unclear whether the current development cycle of AI will follow a similar path. However, if we use this as a reference, when the homogeneous competition in the AI market begins to lower overall entrepreneurship returns and market attention starts to drift away from AI, the true opening of the value redistribution cycle will begin. In that phase, the crypto market—with its low asset thresholds and high liquidity—will still be attractive to the younger generation with limited capital accumulation, and will not be permanently ignored due to today’s short-term shift in attention.

For the crypto industry, the maturation process of any emerging industry can never bypass this stage: the loss of attention, valuation adjustments, and the clearing of speculative projects are all components of the industry cycle, not the endpoint.

The ebb and flow of the tide is simply the norm; what truly deserves attention is what remains after the low tide.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。