Zhou Hang, the founder of Yidao Yongche: Cryptocurrency has finally arrived at its time to shine

Author: Zhou Hang

In the past decade, if you mentioned "cryptocurrency" to an average person, the words that likely came to their mind were: getting rich quickly, being scammed, hackers, or some kind of incomprehensible geek toy.

From the emergence of Bitcoin (BTC) to the smart contract revolution of Ethereum (ETH), and the clamor of various public chains and stablecoins, this world has been noisy for over a decade. Countless brilliant minds and vast amounts of capital have poured in, trying to build a decentralized utopia.

Yet in real life, we still feel confused: apart from being a highly volatile speculative asset, aside from buying low and selling high on exchanges, what exactly is the use of cryptocurrency? When we go downstairs to buy a cup of coffee, we still scan WeChat or Alipay; for international transfers, we still have to go through cumbersome bank wire processes.

It claims to disrupt finance, yet it seems unable to even handle the most basic "payment."

Until today, with the arrival of the A2A (Agent to Agent) intelligent economy, this confusion finally has an answer: cryptocurrency has not failed; it has simply targeted the wrong users over the past decade.

Why Cryptocurrency Cannot Become "People's Money"

When Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper in 2008, the title boldly stated: "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System." His original intention was to create a tool for everyday payments.

In 2010, a programmer named Laszlo bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins. This was seen as a great start for cryptocurrency payments. However, the subsequent narrative took a different extreme.

There are three insurmountable real-world obstacles that prevent cryptocurrency from becoming a currency for everyday human use:

First is volatility. When something is worth $1 today, it might drop to $0.5 tomorrow or rise to $2; no one dares to use it for pricing. There is a common understanding in economics called "good money being hoarded." When you expect Bitcoin to rise, you absolutely hesitate to use it to buy pizza.

Second is the anti-human experience. Humans are creatures that detest trouble. Cryptocurrency payments require you to securely manage a long string of garbled private keys; if lost, your assets are instantly wiped out, and no customer service can help you recover them. You also need to understand what Gas fees are and endure long waits during network congestion.

Finally, there are regulations and taxes. In many countries, buying a cup of coffee with cryptocurrency is considered a "sale of assets" in the eyes of the tax office, and you need to calculate and report capital gains tax for it.

What humans need are stable, simple financial services with customer support and legal protection. Although traditional banks and fiat systems have friction, they perfectly meet the human need for security.

Cryptocurrency attempts to pull humans into a cold, absolutely rational, risk-bearing world of code, and the result is naturally rejection by humans, ultimately becoming a form of "digital gold" and speculative chips.

Machine's Money: When Agents Become Consumers

But what if we shift our perspective from "humans" to "machines"?

In the A2A intelligent economy, billions of AI Agents will call APIs, purchase computing power, obtain data, and even negotiate rental contracts daily in the background. The CEO of Coinbase pointed out succinctly: "AI cannot go to the bank with an ID to open an account, but they can seamlessly control a cryptocurrency wallet."

For AI Agents, the advantages of the traditional financial system are all disadvantages, and the disadvantages of cryptocurrency are all advantages.

Machines do not need customer service; they only trust code. Traditional contracts require lawyers to draft, courts to enforce, and banks to settle, taking days or even months. In the world of Agents, they use "smart contracts"—essentially a program stored on the blockchain. When conditions are met, funds are automatically transferred in an instant, and no one can default. This is the true "machine-native contract."

Machines require millisecond-level micropayments. Imagine an AI Agent generating a report for you; it needs to pay another Agent for real-time data at a price of $0.001. The transaction fee for a traditional credit card network is as high as $0.3 per transaction, which cannot support such micropayments. However, through the cryptocurrency network, Agents can complete low-cost settlements in a few hundred milliseconds.

Machines have no borders and no identities. They do not require complex KYC (Know Your Customer) verification. As long as there is a private key, an Agent running on a server in Singapore can instantly pay an Agent running in Tokyo.

A Status Code That Has Been Asleep for 30 Years

The best illustration of this paradigm shift is a metaphorical true history in the internet world.

If you frequently browse the internet, you must have encountered "404 Not Found." In the original design of the HTTP protocol, there was actually a status code called 402 Payment Required.

The pioneers of the internet foresaw that the future network would not only need to transmit information but also transmit value. However, due to the lack of a native internet payment layer at that time, the 402 status code was left unused for 30 years.

Until 2025, a payment protocol designed specifically for AI Agents was born, named x402.

Through the x402 protocol, when one Agent requests data from another server and payment is required, the server no longer pops up a credit card form for humans to fill out, but directly returns a machine-readable "402 Payment Required" instruction. Upon receiving the instruction, the Agent instantly calls USDC (a stablecoin pegged to the dollar) from its cryptocurrency wallet to complete the payment, and the entire process ends within a few hundred milliseconds, opening the data channel.

No registration, no scanning, no password verification. Value flows seamlessly at the underlying level of the internet, just like data.

Human Money vs. Machine Money: The Folding of Wealth

According to data from blockchain analytics firms, in just a few months from late 2025 to early 2026, AI Agents have completed millions of payments using stablecoins. Cryptocurrency no longer needs to prove itself as better than Alipay; it has sunk into the depths of the internet, becoming the silent blood that runs between countless machines.

But the story does not end here. When machines begin to have wallets and start earning and spending autonomously, how should we, as humans deeply ingrained with the concepts of "cash" and "bank accounts," understand this entirely new form of wealth? What is the relationship between our money and machine money?

In the past, wealth was explicit and physical. When you pulled out a banknote or opened a banking app to see the changing balance, you had a visceral sense of "spending."

But in the future, wealth will be folded.

Imagine you hire an AI Agent to manage a social media account for you. You don't need to pay it a salary; you just need to recharge its "Agentic Wallet" with 100 USDC (equivalent to $100) in the initial stage.

Next, this Agent begins its autonomous run: it pays another data Agent 0.05 USDC to obtain trending topics; it pays a drawing Agent 0.1 USDC to generate images; after the article is published, it automatically deposits the earned advertising revenue (possibly 0.5 USDC) into its own wallet.

In this process, machine money flows, grows, and consumes at millisecond speeds within the underlying network. And as the human owner, you cannot see these dense micropayment bills. You do not need to understand what x402 is, nor do you need to know what a smart contract is.

What you see is a minimalist report sent to you by this Agent every week: "This week invested $10, netted $50, and profits have been withdrawn to your fiat bank account."

This is the ultimate division of labor in wealth between humans and machines: machines handle friction, while humans enjoy the results.

Machine money (cryptocurrency) is for fluidity; it is high-frequency, cold, and seeks extreme efficiency as a means of production; while human money (fiat currency) is for feeling; it is the ultimate destination for buying coffee, paying rent, and carrying the sense of security in life.

Cryptocurrency has not eliminated bank accounts; it has merely pushed complex financial transactions down a layer. While humans enjoy the extreme convenience brought by AI at the front end, an unseen financial system exclusive to machines is silently reshaping the commercial rules of this world at the underlying level.