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 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: aside 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 pay with 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 used 10,000 bitcoins to buy two pizzas. This was seen as a great beginning 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 sense 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 intensely dislike trouble. Cryptocurrency payments require you to securely manage a long string of garbled private keys; once 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 authorities, 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 currency 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 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, while 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 instantly transferred without anyone being able to 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 can be as high as $0.3, which cannot support such micropayments. However, through a 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 Singapore server can instantly pay an agent running in Tokyo.

A Status Code That Has Been Asleep for 30 Years

The most illustrative example of this paradigm shift is a metaphorical real 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 need to transmit not only information but also value. However, due to the lack of a native internet payment layer at the time, this 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 prompts a human to fill out a credit card form 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 like data at the underlying level of the internet.

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 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, as humans deeply ingrained in the concepts of "cash" and "bank accounts," how should we understand this new form of wealth? What is the relationship between our money and machine money?

In the past, wealth was explicit and physical. You pulled out a banknote or opened a banking app to see the changing balance, giving you 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 do not need to pay it a salary; you only 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 circulates, generates, and consumes at millisecond speeds within the underlying network. 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, net profit $50, 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 meant for flow; it is high-frequency, cold, and seeks extreme efficiency as a means of production; while human money (fiat currency) is meant for feeling; it is the final 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 invisible financial system exclusive to machines is silently reshaping the commercial rules of this world at the underlying level.