My friends, you're going to dive into the crypto and AI stack that Coinbase put out, except I'm going to tell you one key thing they didn't mention, and it's really important to understand. If you want to be ahead of the game, if you want to understand the one thing you really need to know about AI and crypto, I think this is going to be super helpful for you. Coinbase put out an article about demystifying the crypto AI stack, and we're going to dive into it deeper.
I've got to be honest, and I'm always honest. I've got to say the thing that's going to sound contrary, but I'm not seeing how this is demystifying the crypto AI stack at all. To me this just looks like shilling a bunch of coins. But look at what they said. The future of AI, in their words, can be built on blockchain technology. The convergence of crypto's efficiency, borderless nature, and programmability with AI has the potential to transform how humans and machines interact with the digital economy, including enabling users to have sovereignty over their personal data. And this includes the rise of the agentic web, where AI agents operating on crypto infrastructure can drive economic activity and growth. I absolutely agree with all of that. But how they've laid it out is ridiculous, and I'm going to explain why.
Look at more of what they said, because what they're saying is accurate in terms of where I see the future and the technology going. The way they've laid it out, though, is a pile of nonsense. The future of AI can be built on blockchain technology. It absolutely can, because crypto can help increase accessibility, transparency, and use cases. Absolutely. The convergence of crypto's efficiency and borderless nature has potential. Yes. So what does this look like now? Here's where things get screwed up. AI agents making transactions? Yes. Software code created by AI? Yes. Leveraging AI? Yes.
The good-information PSYOP
This is the kind of thing that's going on. It's good information, good information, and you're nodding your head and saying yes. Then here's their thesis: they say they do not believe crypto is required to advance a capability. Wait, what? This is where things are screwed up. They do not believe it's required to advance or solve emerging challenges in every layer of the AI tech stack. Rather, they say, crypto can play a major role in bringing more. That's the problem right there. Because if you don't have every layer of the AI tech stack on-chain, you get a mess.
The rest of it I would agree with. AI can give rise to the agentic web, with crypto as the preferred payment. Generative AI can create software code. Yes to all of that. But no on that one core claim. This is why you need people like me, so you can point your fingers at where they're screwed up. First, they don't believe blockchain is required to advance every layer of the tech stack. In my view, this is either naive and ignorant, or it's blatant misdirection that is convenient for them to put out.
Look at what a mess the stack is
So let's look at what they put out as the crypto AI stack. Look at what an absolute mess it is, and look at the disclaimer: it contains Coinbase Ventures portfolio companies. That means companies they've invested heavily in. And understand this: you can build all of this stuff on Internet Computer Protocol. All of it. You have identity set up and proof of personhood with Decide AI. That's already done.
Now, I will say that at least at this point, you might not need to do every single thing on there fully on-chain. For now, in certain instances you can take a model like DeepSeek that's been trained off-chain, then put the model on-chain and run it on-chain. That's where ICP is today. But this is where Coinbase is fundamentally screwed up, and they have to be screwed up here, because the whole rest of their portfolio is junk if they change their thesis to say that they do believe blockchain technology is required to advance and solve emerging challenges in every layer.
And think about how they put this at the very first line of the article. They know about Internet Computer Protocol, and they've put it up there right away, in my view, to stop people from trying to go that direction. Because here's what happens when you go the direction Coinbase is trying to go: you end up with all these coins that, to me, are junk coins. And why are they junk coins? Because this crypto AI stack is a mess. Look at all of it.
Building a game: ICP versus the Coinbase stack
Right here, if you want identity and proof of personhood, Internet Computer Protocol has it all set up already on-chain, and it's very easy to use. By comparison, let's say I want to make a game that verifies real people and has a chat component in it, and I want to use AI to help me build that game. With Coinbase's AI stack, look at all the stuff I'd have to use. One, I need to use Worldcoin or something else to try to stop the bots from just scraping all my crypto. I'm going to need a trading DeFi platform to swap my token. I'm going to need some kind of gaming platform to run the game itself. But then I'm going to need some general-purpose compute to actually run my game. And then I might need other things too, like if I want to put a little AI chat in my game, I'll need to use an LLM. If I need more resources, I may need to pull one of those in. And if I want to keep things private, or label the data and stop people from spamming, or if I need price feeds from somewhere else. Then, if I want to show off what I'm doing and how great my adoption is, I need these tools. For having a chat, I need to plug some social in. And then for dev tooling. Do you see what a mess this is?
But this is a profitable mess for insiders. It's an extremely profitable mess for insiders. Because what almost all of these have in common is that they are tokens. As I shared in my video I filmed a day or two ago comparing stocks versus crypto, which compares stocks to cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, and ICP, the big difference is this: if all of these were stocks and I could buy a share in each company, then I'd have some real ownership in the things they're building. But the fact is, almost all of these are simply tokens on things like Ethereum, Solana, or Coinbase's Layer 2 Base. Almost all of these are just tokens. The tokens have no legal ownership. They have no ownership by code either.
Why centralized tech makes most of this junk
This is the major problem with Coinbase's little thesis, and to me it's the thing that's going to change in the next few years. There are a lot of people who want to push AI without upgrading the technology, because that's easier and faster, and it keeps allowing centralized control behind the scenes. The problem is that when you're building all this stuff, and to me almost all of it is absolute junk, it's all built back on centralized tech. The websites for these projects are built on centralized cloud. They use oracles and APIs. They connect with third-party, additional third-party stuff. They're doing all the computation on centralized cloud, and the data storage is back on centralized cloud.
So all this stuff built on centralized cloud isn't doing anything at all that meaningfully decentralizes AI. And in that case, if you're not doing real decentralization, you might as well just invest in centralized AI like Grok, OpenAI, or Google. You might as well invest in the companies pouring huge amounts of money into building these big, centralized AIs. Because to me, what this is, is fraud. All of this is fraudulent in my view, because what you're presenting to users are all these different coins, and none of these coins have ownership by law or by code.
So all the people buying coins for these projects, and I've reviewed some of these projects specifically and absolutely shredded them, are getting nothing real. In my opinion, Akash is junk going to zero. Flux is junk going to zero. Aleph.im is junk going to zero. ChainGPT, to me, is a blatant fraud coin; they filed a fake copyright strike to try to take my video down, I got it put back up, and I'd take that thing to trial. Fetch.ai I see as absolute junk too. I've gone over a bunch of these, and in my view all they're doing is extracting value from you. That's their real goal, to extract value, and they're able to do it because of collective ignorance. You don't realize that by buying these coins you're not getting a real investment. You're getting what is basically a meme coin that you're hoping the people doing the work with the code off-chain, which you don't control, are going to add value to, when the coin itself has no ownership by law or by code.
Why this mess doesn't work
This crypto AI stack is an absolute mess, and because it's a mess, it's very complex and expensive to work with. That's why it absolutely is not working. The liquidity is all fragmented. Look at all of it. How many people even know what hardly any of these projects are? And if I'm a developer and I want to build a game with AI and chat in it, it is expensive and difficult.
Compare that to Internet Computer Protocol, and this is where Coinbase is blatantly wrong, because of what the developers who are actually building on Internet Computer will tell you. They'll tell you it's easier, because you can do everything in the same infrastructure. When you can run the AI fully on-chain, then you can do all your computation, your data storage, your chat, your game, your website, your user data, and your token swaps fully on-chain. Then it's all secure. And if you do a service nervous system DAO, something like OpenChat or Decide AI, when you've got a project like that on the blockchain itself, then your tokens have real ownership, because your tokens can vote on proposals. For example, all the token holders with Decide AI voted to give me 222,000 tokens in exchange for endlessly talking about the project, because this is fully on-chain. The website that does this is on-chain. It's all on-chain. The voting is fully on-chain.
As soon as token holders vote, the tokens immediately execute the decision. And then there are all kinds of other proposals that make the different changes to the application. That is what gives the token real value. It is not simply a speculative meme coin where people hope the price will go up. Look at OpenChat. To verify a community there, you need to make a proposal. To upgrade the canisters, you need to make a proposal. To set the topics, to transfer, to pay the team, you need to make a proposal. I made a similar proposal for OpenChat myself. To do anything, almost anything, you need to vote and have it executed on-chain.
This environment on the Internet Computer Protocol means you don't need all the extra layers. You can build your entire AI project right there. Now, yes, the Internet Computer Protocol right now is still in the earlier stages. You cannot run something like the full-blown newest version of ChatGPT directly on the Internet Computer. But somebody already got DeepSeek running on the Internet Computer Protocol. And yes, right now you can't train huge models on the Internet Computer Protocol, but you can take a model that's been created by a centralized training process and then run that model on the Internet Computer Protocol.
With DeepSeek being just as powerful as OpenAI's models while only using something like 10% of their resources, and with models in general getting smaller and more efficient, you can now run them fully on ICP. That means ICP already gives you all these tools fully on chain. You have Decide AI, for example, which is already here. In my understanding, they use a kind of facial recognition model that can verify you're a real human. And this is outstanding for airdrops. You can do all of this directly on chain.
Why on-chain verification matters for giveaways
It is easier this way. When I want to do a giveaway in my channel and give people a whole bunch of ICP or Bitcoin, I don't want to get ripped off by a bunch of bots. I gave people a thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin earlier this year. When I give away that thousand dollars of Bitcoin, I use Decide AI to make people verify their face in a way that's decentralized, so that OpenChat doesn't end up holding your face ID. All they have is a token from Decide AI showing that you verified. That is extremely valuable, and it is providing real use.
I do these big giveaways, and I need to make sure they don't get caught up by bots. The one where I gave away $1,000 of Bitcoin went to people who all went through Decide AI and verified their face. That helps me drastically cut down on the bots, although it's still possible that someone could have a bunch of different people verify on their behalf.
The real turn comes with Caffeine AI
In my view, the way this is going to take an amazing turn in the future is when DFINITY releases Caffeine AI and lets you build your applications just by talking to the AI. Then individuals with no developer experience are going to be able to build all of this. You're going to be able to build your own identity, proof of personhood, governance, trading, DeFi, gaming, and social applications fully on chain. And because it's fully on chain, there are so many additional ways you can monetize it.
Trying to do this across separate platforms is a mess to monetize, because these tools often don't play nice together. If you do your computation on one of these services and try to integrate it with all the other ones, they don't all work together, because they all rely on different centralized tech. They have to specifically code things to go back and forth between each other. If there isn't an integration for your specific tool, then you can't do it. If you try to launch a token, there might not be an Oracle set up for it. If you try to run it on compute that doesn't have a plugin for your identity protocol, you're stuck. And if you're trying to run a game on top of all that, it's an absolute mess. So the fact is that it's simpler, easier, and faster for developers to build everything fully on chain on the Internet Computer Protocol.
Pre-bunking and who stands to lose
But Coinbase stands to lose a lot from you knowing that. So at the very front of their messaging, they're already doing what I'd call pre-bunking. They put an idea out there prominently. And yes, in many individual instances you don't strictly need the blockchain, and for running AI models you can train them off-chain, although I believe on-chain training is going to be the future. With pre-bunking, they put out an idea and they hope you see it first, because then when you encounter the opposite of it, what I'm saying, that it does matter to have everything fully on the blockchain, they've already gotten their version into your head first. And often whatever you've heard first is what you'll believe most easily.
From what I see, crypto and AI are not going to have a viable agentic web when Coinbase holds the keys to your AI agent. Right now they set it up so you can spin up AI agents super easily on Coinbase, but they hold the keys. And what use is it to spin up an AI agent when someone else has the keys and access to all the data? On top of that, it's hard to even connect that with the rest of everything else.
This is exactly how the world and communication generally work. You'll be given some very clear truths, things we can all see. Future AI can be built on blockchain technology. And this is how most things get twisted in life: you're given some core truths, and then at the critical points, the deception and misdirection get slipped in. I'm here to help you spot that. If you want to go deeper on all of this, I've gathered my thinking in my ICP Crypto playlist.
I'm a full-time YouTuber and Twitch streamer, and I filmed this live on Twitch with the community. I also run a crypto reviews channel where I go through and review all these junk coins, the ones that are just ripping you off, including the kinds of projects that Coinbase sits on and puts in their portfolio. It often takes me about 10 minutes to go through one and see what an absolute dumpster fire of a useless project it really is. The pattern is always the same, and once you see it, you can't unsee it.