Original author: Web3 Little Law
What impressed me most during the Hong Kong Blockchain Week this April was not any panel, but a scene.
At around ten o'clock at night, in a cha chaan teng in Wan Chai, four or five people were squeezed around a table, eating stir-fried beef ho fun while chatting about what they would do next. A friend who previously worked in stablecoin payments said that their team had fully shifted to AI; another who worked on on-chain data said he was now spending half his energy helping an AI company build data pipelines.
No one talked about coin prices, no one discussed narratives, and even the term Web3 hardly came up.
What I felt at the time was not surprise, but a strange sense of familiarity — these people had sat around the same table three years ago, and they were surely talking about DeFi, NFTs, and blockchain games. They were still the same people, with the same excitement, and the same full commitment.
This trip to Hong Kong and Bangkok for Money 20/20 made one phrase spin in my mind: the most crypto people are becoming the least crypto.
After the tide of Web3 recedes, what is left? After completing these two stops, I think I have my own answer.
1. Hong Kong: Familiar Faces, Strange Topics
First, let's talk about Hong Kong. This time at the carnival, there were noticeably fewer projects from the crypto space; the lively atmosphere of distributing T-shirts and sharing narratives everywhere from the previous two years has diminished.
This year's official theme was "Mountain, Wind, Cloud, Sea," with a clear positioning — bidding farewell to the narrative of speculating on coins. If this statement had been made three years ago, there would have been a chorus of boos from the audience. But this year, no one found it out of place, because everyone was simply not discussing coins anymore, rather reaching a kind of tacit understanding.
Walking around the exhibition, the faces were familiar: OKX Wallet, TRON, ZA Bank, HashKey, and New Fire. But the topics they discussed changed, focusing heavily on two words: RWA and AI.
RWA continued the heat from last year, but to be honest, everyone knows who is actually working on projects and who is putting on a show. I believe one judgment is valid: for Hong Kong, RWA essentially means the productization of wealth management and investment — moving real assets onto the chain for more efficiency and easier cross-border distribution. This is precisely what Hong Kong excels at: institutional design and financial productization. As the bubble recedes, Hong Kong feels more comfortable — the excitement that never belonged to it in the first place has finally dissipated.
The AI part is even more interesting. Almost every panel talked about the integration of AI and Web3, but after attending several sessions, I honestly found that most discussions stayed at the level of "these two things should be integrated." As for how to integrate and what problems to solve, no one could explain clearly.
My feeling is that the convergence of Web3 and AI is not due to a clear understanding, but because without this convergence, there really aren't any stories to tell. And the guests on stage probably also realize that they are just converging. But survival comes first, which is inherently the survival philosophy of this circle.
Stablecoin news, on the other hand, has little new information. Licenses have been issued, but after asking around, the two big banks each have their own pace and are not rushing to make a big deal out of it, resulting in the realization that nobody seems to care.
However, what truly touched me was the people in the audience. The busiest people in the venue were not the guests, but those casually dressed individuals wearing exhibitor badges, weaving back and forth in the negotiation area — doing business development, running communities, creating content, and helping projects connect with resources. They may not have impressive resumes, and their speech may not be "professional," but their understanding of the industry comes from countless meals and repeated setbacks. This understanding isn't gained by reading reports, but earned through time.
Whether an industry can cross cycles can't be judged solely by how many star companies are at the top, but also by how many people below are willing to continue grinding without applause.
The foundation of Web3 is still there. But what runs on that foundation has completely changed.
2. Bangkok: The Trojan Horse of Stablecoins
Flying from Hong Kong to Bangkok, the atmosphere shifts completely.
Money 20/20 is purely a B2B fintech exhibition, with an entry fee that isn't cheap, and attendees are dressed as if they are going to meet clients. The panel area often has empty seats, but the adjacent business negotiation area is full from opening to closing.
What surprised me was that stablecoins and crypto-native companies accounted for about one-third of the exhibitors. OSL, Circle, Ripple, Fireblocks, Cobo, Pyth... at least a dozen, many of which were exhibiting for the first time. This year, Money 20/20 also specifically added a section called Intersection, positioned as the intersection of TradFi and DeFi — stablecoins are no longer in the corner of fintech exhibitions; they are part of the main agenda.
What's interesting, though, is that — this one-third of crypto companies did not sell crypto at their booths.
They offered payment links, settlement channels, and asset custody. Some exhibitors even defined themselves as "Web 2.5 finance" — one foot in crypto-native, one foot in traditional payments. Those coming to discuss business didn't care what underlying chain was being used; they wanted three things: fast transaction times, low costs, and compliant solutions.
I spent two afternoons in the negotiation area, and every ten minutes, I could hear someone mention stablecoin at the neighboring table. No one discussed coin prices; it was all about how to build links, how to onboard merchants, and whose solutions are compliant. Everyone there had business to launch.
In one panel, the host directly challenged the guests on stage: Brazil's Pix already allows instant free transfers; what are you still doing with stablecoins? The response from the panel was straightforward — Pix solves domestic issues, but cross-border is still a challenge. This probably represents the most honest positioning of stablecoin payments: not to replace local payment systems, but to fill the gaps that traditional finance has always failed to handle in cross-border transactions.
Thanks to Finternet's invitation, I had an interview with Sumsub, which left a deep impression on me. This KYC/KYB company initially had all Web3 projects as its clients — exchanges, wallets, DeFi protocols. But now their biggest growth clients come from Web2: payment institutions, banks, and overseas enterprises. The extensive background of Web3 clients has become a credential, allowing them to enter traditional financial markets more smoothly. Web3 served as their training ground, and Web2 is the real market.
You see, this is the footnote to the phrase I mentioned: the most crypto people are becoming the least crypto. Stablecoins are no longer "entering" traditional finance; they have fully integrated — so much so that at the exhibition, it's hard to distinguish which company is a stablecoin company and which is fintech. Even those traditional financial institutions that don't engage in stablecoin business will be pressured by their clients to integrate.
Stablecoins did not penetrate traditional finance through the front door. They slipped in through the back door, and by the time people in the castle noticed, the passage had already been paved.
3. AI Label Inflation
With the passage paved, new labels were stuck on it.
At the Bangkok exhibition, I counted and found that about eight out of ten of the booths I passed had "AI" or "Agentic" printed on them — Agentic Payment, Agentic Wallets, Agentic Banking.
I asked a few products in detail: what is your AI module's most mature use case? The answers were vague, mostly pointing to A2A (Agent-to-Agent) future scenarios. As for the actual transaction volumes, everyone tacitly agreed not to provide numbers.
A company that dealt with stablecoin payments a few years ago made a choice that many people thought about but had not yet implemented. When the infrastructure layer is crowded enough, creating passageways means squeezing among a bunch of nearly identical passageways. Rather than waiting for water to come, they chose to flow into a river that already has water, venturing into the trendy sector of payment solutions for AI. It’s not about labeling AI but providing services for AI. Compared to those vague A2A concepts at the exhibition, this is a much clearer line of thought: don’t wait for when Agents will pay for themselves; first, address the payment pain points that AI companies have today.
But returning to the AI craze at the exhibition, this scene does resemble Web3 in 2021 — infrastructure comes first, but killer applications are still unknown. However, one difference is that in 2021, demand was fabricated out of thin air; today's agentic payment at least has a real premise — AI agents are indeed growing exponentially, and they will inevitably need to pay and receive payments themselves. The question isn't whether demand exists, but when it will arrive and in what form.
During the window period of "when will it arrive," placing labels first is the safest choice.
What if it arrives?
4. After the Passage is Paved, What Next?
Looking at Hong Kong and Bangkok together, the differentiation is clear.
Hong Kong focuses on financial productization — RWA, wealth management, asset management, competing on product design and distribution channels, along with the operational thinking of the crypto space. Bangkok focuses on payment channels — stablecoin cross-border settlements, competing on compliance licenses and local channels. Together, these two paths represent what truly remains after the retreat of Web3 — financial infrastructure.
It is not the profit craze of DeFi Summer, nor the FOMO of NFTs. It's the passageways, licenses, and partnerships.
Boring, but real.
The promise of Web3 at the time was the "decentralization to reconstruct everything." After the tide receded, what survived are patches and extensions of the centralized financial system. The revolution of crypto punks never occurred. But the pipelines have paved their way inside the walls — which might be more enduring than a revolution.
With the passage paved, three questions remain unanswered:
- Is there still time for stablecoin infrastructure? There are already too many companies doing infrastructure at the Bangkok exhibition, and the space for differentiation is rapidly narrowing. Newcomers need not build more passageways; instead, they should determine what should flow through them — whoever can embed stablecoins into high-frequency essential scenarios will be the winner in the next phase. It's not about those who build the passages, but those who use them.
- Application solutions are the direction. With the infrastructure layer thickening, value is beginning to migrate to the application layer. Companies laying broadband in the 2000s made the first wave of money, but the real big business came later from platforms like Taobao and WeChat that ran on top of it. Stablecoins are approaching that inflection point.
- What about Agentic Payments? I've been tracking this field for a while. Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe are all making moves, and the x402 protocol is also advancing. But the gap from protocol to implementation isn't technological; it’s a matter of trust frameworks and a sufficiently large cross-border transaction scenario, otherwise, it will remain at the demo and panel stage.
But to be fair, when someone first mentioned stablecoin cross-border payments in 2021, they probably received similar treatment — "The concept makes sense, but it's still early for implementation." Five years later, stablecoins have already integrated into the capillaries of traditional finance. Agentic payment may be in the same stage. This time, however, the window will be much shorter.
5. Final Thoughts
On the flight back, what repeatedly came to my mind was not the content of those panels, but the table in the cha chaan teng.
One has switched to AI, one is helping an AI company build data pipelines, and the rest are still discussing how to integrate stablecoin payments with more merchants. Three years ago, they were discussing another world, but one thing hasn't changed — they are still present, still working, and still throwing themselves into the pool.
The most unique aspect of the Web3 circle is not how cutting-edge the technology is, but that it inherently attracts such people — no matter how cold the water is, they jump in first. The tracks may change, and narratives may shift, but that wild sense of participation will not disappear. It has just changed its clothing.
After the tide receded, the revolution did not happen. But the most crypto people, carrying their strategies, speed, and survival instincts, are penetrating into larger battlegrounds such as traditional finance, AI, and cross-border payments. They no longer shout slogans but are more dangerous than before.
Because this time, they are wearing suits.
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