AI is sweeping everything; why are crypto builders the most stable?

In the midst of panic, those who persist in building will define the next era.

Written by: YQ

Translated by: Chopper, Foresight News

A current debate on crypto Twitter is: “Should I stay or should I leave?” The question itself is flawed; it assumes there is a safe place to go, but in reality, there isn’t.

Goldman Sachs states that 300 million jobs worldwide will be impacted by AI. Anthropic’s CEO says that 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs will disappear within five years. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, 45,000 tech workers were laid off.

This isn’t a problem unique to the crypto industry; it’s the fourth industrial revolution arriving at everyone’s doorstep.

The panic you feel is real and widespread. Those who find the next direction to build will shape the next thirty years.

What I see is: the crypto industry hasn’t made you fragile; it has instead forged you into the fastest learners, most cross-disciplinary, and most adaptable builders on Earth. The real question is: are you using this ability well, or neglecting it to chase an illusory sense of security?

Confront the real issues

“The death of cryptocurrency for builders” was somewhat true in 2022. That market no longer exists today.

Behind the same anxiety lies a harsher, more universal truth: AI is turning all work based on pattern matching with existing knowledge into a commodity.

This is the real fear—not that “cryptocurrency has no use cases.” What’s truly unsettling is that Claude Code, Codex, Gemini Code Assist are so powerful that most entry-level software development jobs are being replaced.

Stanford research confirms: since ChatGPT’s launch, employment rates for 22-25-year-old developers have dropped by 20%. 60% of companies plan to replace employees with AI by 2026. A competent code AI is approaching zero marginal cost.

This isn’t a crypto issue. It’s a challenge facing all human civilization, impacting every industry simultaneously.

Three groups profit, others panic

Cutting through the hype, who is truly making money from AI right now?

First: NVIDIA. With annual revenue of $216 billion, Jensen Huang aims for AI chips to generate $1 trillion annually by 2027. This is classic “selling shovels” logic—always effective during revolutions.

Second: Large model companies. OpenAI’s annual revenue is $12.7 billion, aiming for $54 billion by 2027. Anthropic’s recurring annual revenue is approaching $9 billion, with a target of $20-26 billion in 2026. They sell API calls, have ongoing income, and real profits.

Third: Anxiety merchants. Short video creators, course sellers—making money by telling you “AI will replace you.” Their content is fear, their product is a $99 course, with high profit margins.

Everyone else is searching for a moat but finds none. A good idea, once launched, can be copied by hundreds of companies within days. If profits are high enough, OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google will launch similar products themselves.

Manus is the first general AI agent, followed by Claude’s Cowork, then OpenClaw, which open-sourced the entire concept, earning 219,000 stars on GitHub. The window for “innovation” to “commoditization” is now measured in weeks.

A warning sign: if your moat is just “a nice interface over a large model,” then you have no moat at all. The marginal cost of wrapping large models is approaching zero. The real barrier in AI is mastering the infrastructure that large models depend on, not stacking features on top.

Why crypto builders have a unique advantage

Putting aside shallow claims like “crypto is dead,” ask yourself: where else can other fields go?

Compared to SaaS? All features can be copied overnight by AI. Compared to consulting? Intelligent agents are replacing analysts. Compared to entry-level dev jobs? Employment rates have fallen 20% in two years.

Crypto builders possess structural advantages that other tech sectors lack.

One especially important point: crypto communities are the most information-dense groups in tech. They follow cryptography, distributed systems, macroeconomics, geopolitics, oil, gold, AI, biotech, longevity tech, SpaceX, and all cultural trends.

Why? Because they are betting on them. Meme coins, prediction markets, new token launches—speculation isn’t a flaw but the fastest human learning mechanism. When traditional industries react to a trend, crypto builders have already built the infrastructure and are moving to the next hot spot.

Moreover, technical barriers are measurable, not just talk. The Ethereum Foundation has prioritized post-quantum cryptography security at the highest level. Vitalik’s “Simplified Ethereum” roadmap places “full quantum resistance” at its core. Zero-knowledge proofs, Poseidon hash functions, lattice cryptography…

Claude Code can easily outperform CRUD apps, but when it comes to writing recursive SNARK circuits or designing verifiers with game-theoretic penalties, it’s far less effective.

All the overlooked facts

Focus on actions, not emotions. Those truly building are giving answers opposite to the doomsayers on crypto Twitter.

Stripe won’t integrate a dying protocol. BlackRock won’t launch a staked ETH ETF in a stagnant market. Cloudflare won’t initiate a payment foundation for an industry with no future.

Hype doesn’t equal demand; real-world application does. These giants are voting with their feet.

Pandora’s box is open

Sam Altman can’t predict what GPT-6 will bring. Dario Amodei built a safety-focused lab, still admitting that half of entry-level jobs will disappear. Sundar Pichai is restructuring Google, shifting entirely to AI.

The creators of these technologies don’t know what the future holds—no one does.

Only three things are certain:

• The box won’t close. AI will grow stronger, code intelligences will become more useful, and white-collar automation will accelerate. We can’t go back to an era of all manual coding. The question isn’t how to escape, but how to position yourself.
• New tools will create new careers. In 1995, no one foresaw “social media manager”; in 2005, no one predicted “cloud architect.” Today, no one can predict AI-native careers in 2030. But every industrial revolution has created more jobs than it destroyed, without exception.
• Builders during times of panic will lead the next era. Amazon was born amid skepticism of the internet bubble; Stripe was founded when payments were considered “solved”; Coinbase started when Bitcoin was just a joke.

When everyone feels “it’s not the right time to act,” that’s precisely the signal to act.

Your choice

Doing old things is the worst in this era. Trying new things is the best.

Don’t leave the industry just because crypto Twitter is full of anxiety. Everyone is anxious—financial analysts, SaaS founders, Google engineers.

The difference is: crypto gives you a set of abilities most builders lack—around-the-clock cross-domain pattern recognition, an unpermissioned experimental playground, lean teams that can deploy quickly without approval, and a community that absorbs new tech faster than anywhere else.

Follow your instincts. Not because it’s comforting advice, but because in a world where the future is unknown, the only reliable signal is whether you truly care about this and are willing to persist through tough times.

And tough times will come to everyone, in every industry.

Pandora’s box is open and cannot be closed. Pick up new tools, move to the frontier. Those who persist in building amid panic will define the next era.