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

Goodbye to Bleeding Manual Trading Desks

Most ordinary people's fear of cryptocurrency doesn't stem from market volatility, but rather from the extremely inhumane trading interface. Imagine how you typically buy an asset on a decentralized exchange: you must carefully wake up your cold wallet, repeatedly verify against a long string of seemingly random hexadecimal address codes, terrified that one wrong letter will send your money into the void. Then, you have to estimate like an actuary the constantly fluctuating "slippage tolerance"—it's like when you're in a rush to get to the airport, willing to let the taxi driver take a longer route as long as it doesn't make you miss your flight, but you set a maximum fare limit.

If within those few seconds after you press confirm, the Ethereum network suddenly congests, or market volatility exceeds your "detour fee limit," you not only fail to get the tokens you want, but also waste expensive "toll fees" (Gas Fees) to miners. This tightrope-walking experience on the cliff edge is called the "dark forest survival rule" of the Web3 era. In this jungle filled with hackers, arbitrage robots, and complex smart contracts, humans' meager neural reflex speed and brain computing power have already become the biggest weakness in the trading chain. While you're sweating over decimal points, machine code hidden in the darkness has already completed the entire loop of position-building, price manipulation, and harvesting. A premeditated prison break is underway.

Just recently, Binance founder CZ threw out a spine-chilling yet tempting prophecy on social media. He revealed that he is using open-source frameworks combined with artificial intelligence to build a fully automated payment system, asserting that in the not-too-distant future, over 90% of crypto transactions in the market will no longer be executed by human fingers tapping keyboards, but will be entirely delegated to AI Agents for automatic execution. This is far from just the late-night fantasy of a Silicon Valley tycoon. The wildly pulsing data behind stablecoin giant Circle is living proof of this silent revolution.

In just the past nine months, over 100 million transactions have been independently completed by AI Agents. Why is Circle so closely monitoring and promoting this trend? The reason is simple: the fiat settlement channels of traditional financial systems are simply too slow and too closed-off. Traditional banks not only have strict real-name authentication walls, but are also constrained by nine-to-five business hours and cumbersome cross-border settlement networks. When a machine program needs to instantly pay a fraction of a cent to obtain certain data, it could never line up to apply for a Visa credit card, let alone wait for SWIFT's multi-day international transfer. Circle has keenly realized that USDC, the stablecoin running on high-speed blockchains, is naturally the "digital blood" custom-tailored for the machine economy.

Tens of millions of dollars in real cash are silently flowing through smart contracts in cyberspace without any human fingerprints or face recognition. This doesn't just mean machines have learned to spend money; it announces that the old paradigm of financial interaction has been completely torn apart.

Intent Economy: Using Your Voice Instead of Private Keys

To truly understand the disruptive nature of this revolution, we need to completely demolish our existing concept of "wallets" in our minds. In the past, crypto wallets were like complex old aircraft instrument panels, filled with various knobs, switches, and warning lights that needed manual adjustment. Now, this obsolete machine has been forcibly stuffed into an extremely intelligent "silicon-based brain," which has birthed the sexiest narrative in the crypto world today—the "intent economy."

In this new world, natural language is the most powerful API. In traditional workflows, a newcomer wanting to swap their stablecoin holdings for Ethereum had to go through a long and painful initiation. They had to force themselves to learn what an automated market maker is, what a liquidity pool is, switch back and forth between different decentralized exchanges to compare prices, and even pray on cross-chain bridges that their assets don't get stuck halfway.

After going through all these tedious steps, it's enough to deter 99% of outsiders. But in the future where AI Agents take over, you only need to lazily type into your phone screen: "Use one hundred USDC to buy some Ethereum for me." Just this casual chat, and your exclusive silicon-based butler awakens in milliseconds. Like an tireless and sophisticated top Wall Street trader, it instantly scans liquidity depth across Uniswap, Sushiswap, and various aggregators, precisely calculating the most economical trading route.

What's even better is that it understands the dangers of the dark forest and will automatically set a reasonable slippage interval for you to prevent being "sandwiched" by malicious arbitrageurs hiding in the mempool. It even plays meticulous accountant, specifically monitoring network congestion and picking the cheapest moment to execute the trade. Throughout the entire process, you don't need to understand any obscure financial jargon, nor do you need to know how the underlying code works. Your "intent" is the most powerful execution command. This experience of completely downgrading complexity is precisely the ultimate killer that will drive crypto assets toward mass adoption across billions of people. Only when ordinary people no longer risk losing their life savings by pressing the wrong zero or entering a wrong address, will genuine trust in decentralized networks truly take root in the public's hearts.

Dark Net Trading Between Machines

If you only think AI Agents are an advanced version of voice assistants that can help you buy and sell tokens, you're drastically underestimating the grand ambitions of this technological revolution. What truly excites artificial intelligence giants like OpenAI and payment oligarchs like Circle—so much so they're willing to spend big on alliances and acquisitions of related startups throughout the Web3 space—is the underlying logic: AI can finally possess independent economic agency.

For a long time, artificial intelligence has faced an absurdly ridiculous predicament. They can write Shakespearean sonnets, can code extremely complex underlying systems, can even easily pass humanity's strictest lawyer or medical licensing exams, but they alone cannot buy themselves the cheapest cup of coffee or pay even a cent in bills for the massive computing power they consume. Fundamentally, traditional banks and financial systems only serve "natural persons" with blood and flesh or "legal persons" with registered licenses, and absolutely won't open accounts for a piece of virtual code. The combination of cryptocurrency and smart contracts perfectly cleaves the iron shackles imprisoning AI's evolution.

OpenAI's strategic layout is already starting to show, whether through its executives' frequent outreach to crypto-native payment startups or founder Sam Altman's personal involvement leading the crypto-native Worldcoin project—all sending a clear signal: future superintelligent AI (AGI) must possess its own native treasury. Relying on a new machine payment protocol called HTTP 402, AI Agents can not only manage their own money, but also engage in extremely high-frequency micro-commercial transactions with other machines. To illustrate vividly, when your AI butler is executing an extremely complex quantitative investment strategy for you and discovers it needs to obtain millisecond real-time price data from an authoritative decentralized oracle.

In this entirely new framework, it no longer needs to prompt system windows or send emails to apply to you for a data purchase budget, but can directly draw fractions of a cent in cryptocurrency from its own exclusive treasury, instantly buying the data and feeding it to the model. If it feels computing resources are stretched thin during large-scale operations, it can even use Ethereum to directly rent additional computational resources from idle GPUs in decentralized computing networks.

In this micro and high-frequency process, "service" is completely stripped of human society's formalities and manual review, becoming a pure commodity that can freely circulate between machines and machines. Correspondingly, several critical upgrades to Ethereum's underlying architecture have become powerful catalysts for this machine economy revolution. The core weapon is the maturation of Account Abstraction (ERC-4337) technology. This technology is like giving your AI butler an infinite overdraft "corporate subsidiary credit card," allowing the AI to directly use any token in your account to cover transaction fees when running errands for you—you no longer need to agonizingly stockpile specific native tokens in advance just to pay for a transfer. This undoubtedly removes the most counterintuitive barrier standing before ordinary users, making smooth operation by machine proxies a reality.

Taming Your Silicon-based Money Printer

When all complexity is hidden behind the scenes, system execution efficiency naturally produces exponential bursts. This burst manifests not only in personal wealth management, but in dramatically reshaping the organizational forms of the entire decentralized world. Take Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) for example—past community governance was truly an unsolvable disaster. Asking a bunch of retail investors motivated by speculation to read tens of thousands of words of extremely tedious, jargon-filled proposals every day and vote is equivalent to forcing people to attend endless, joyless homeowners meetings. This resulted in most projects' voting rates languishing at a dismal 10-15%, turning so-called decentralized democracy into a game of oligarchy for a few whales. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin keenly perceived this breakthrough path and strongly advocated letting AI serve as governance butler.

Real on-chain data proves the stunning efficacy of this strategy: when users tell AI their values, risk preferences, and interests in plain language, and AI reviews those long proposals on their behalf and automatically triggers voting logic, community participation instantly surges several times. In the bloodthirstier high-frequency quantitative trading field, arbitrage robots have started understanding human natural language instructions, constantly adjusting long/short strategies based on their masters' casual chatter, like a special forces team always on standby.

However, the other side of the coin forever bears the skull of risk. Completely handing over the treasury keys to a tireless, fearless, amoral silicon-based creature is an extremely dangerous gamble in itself. For ordinary people desperately desiring wealth yet terrified of being robbed by hackers, embracing the intent economy absolutely doesn't mean closing your eyes and handing over all control. You must clearly understand that although AI Agents possess independent wallet addresses and execution rights, absolute ownership of assets must remain locked down under your supreme authority by smart contracts.

It's like you hired an extremely smart Wall Street fund manager with big money to go battle in the market for you, but you must put an ankle monitor on him, strictly limiting his range of activity. In this respect, the delegation standard named ERC-7710 provides a near-perfect on-chain contract. As a user, when using various custodial Agent tools, you must set up a protective moat for permissions like you would guard against bandits. You can explicitly specify through smart contracts that this AI can only use up to a thousand dollars in trading volume per day, and is only allowed to touch relatively safe blue-chip stablecoins, absolutely cannot touch your Bitcoin or Ethereum holdings kept in reserve. Any fund movement exceeding the threshold or cross-chain behavior must trigger forced multi-signature notification mechanisms, ensuring every breath of this cold machine stays under your absolute control.

For Web3 developers and projects trying to strike it rich in this new blue ocean, pure technical self-indulgence has completely stopped working. Simply letting AI understand "swap a hundred for Ethereum" is far from enough—you must translate the AI's obscure and complex execution logic, potential slippage losses, and smart contract vulnerabilities into risk summaries that humans can grasp at a glance. An even deeper reason is that in this ultra-fast system where fund flow speed far exceeds human regulatory limits, without complete operational log tracking and automatic interception mechanisms for suspicious large transactions, this AI-led financial utopia will quickly degenerate into a lawless haven for hackers, criminal syndicates, and money launderers, ultimately inevitably inviting devastating strikes from global financial regulators.

The Ultimate Web3 is Web3 Without Web3

The history of fintech development is essentially a history of constantly pushing underlying complexity to the backend black box while leaving users with minimalist experiences on their screens. Looking back now, those early crypto days filled with code, requiring you to memorize twelve seed words like scripture, constantly worrying about private key leaks and slippage losses, are destined to become as archaic and absurd as dial-up internet with its piercing electrical sounds.

This wallet infrastructure revolution initiated by AI Agents is violently dismantling the tallest wall of sighs in the Web3 world. It reveals a naked truth to everyone: true mass adoption has never come from patronizingly educating users to understand what blockchain is or what hash algorithms are, but by letting users feel the blockchain's absence while enjoying ultra-fast financial services. In the not-too-distant future, when you open your phone, you'll no longer face a cold, technically-gated collection of decentralized applications, but rather a round-the-clock online, absolutely rational, eternally loyal digital wealth butler. You only need to lounge on the sofa and nonchalantly say: "The market looks good this month, help me manage my assets conservatively." All the turbulent waves and complex game theory remaining—whether resisting hacker attacks or finding the network's optimal returns—will be ruthlessly blocked by the silicon-based brain's firewall.

By then, the real problem troubling you might no longer be how to carefully operate your wallet or memorize those twelve words. Perhaps the ultimate standard for measuring one's financial freedom in the future won't be how many bitcoins are lying dormant in your cold wallet, but rather how many 24/7 tireless silicon-based avatars you possess, crazily making money for you in cyberspace's dark networks.