AI is the only thing that can push encryption technology to the sky

Recently, legendary investor Mary Meeker released a detailed AI trend report.

There is a set of trend data in this report that aroused my interest. This set of data points out:

In the Internet era, TikTok is the fastest-growing application, and it took about 9 months for it to reach 100 million users. When ChatGPT appeared, it took less than 3 months for it to reach 100 million users.

The speed of AI's popularity exceeds any new technology in human history.

The speed of AI's popularity is so fast that on the one hand, it makes all mankind feel the huge impact it has on our lives; on the other hand, it also continuously attracts the world's best talents to invest in this field for innovation and revolution.

This makes AI the focus of global attention in science and technology.

Compared to the brilliance of artificial intelligence, encryption technology seems less brilliant.

Are there any differences in the data behind this?

I checked the user data of the encryption ecosystem on the Internet:

Bitcoin was launched in 2009, and it took 15 years for the number of activated addresses to reach 100 million until December 2024.

Ethereum was launched in 2015, and it took 8 years for the number of activated addresses to reach 100 million until the end of 2023.

The number of activated addresses is 100 million, but in fact many users have multiple addresses, so it is very likely that the number of Bitcoin and Ethereum users may not have really reached 100 million until now. But even if these 100 million addresses really represent 100 million users, their popularity speed is slow compared to ChatGPT.

I checked the number of daily active users again:

ChatGPT's current number of daily active users is about 120 million to 180 million.

The maximum number of daily active addresses for Bitcoin is 1 million, and the maximum number of daily active addresses for Ethereum is 1.2 million.

In terms of daily active users, encryption technology is also not comparable to artificial intelligence.

The popularity and daily active users of a technology are important indicators of its influence on the whole society. A technology without user popularity and high-frequency daily active users cannot be a great technology in any case.

In this regard, current artificial intelligence completely kills encryption technology.

This is probably an important reason why the public has a very low perception of encryption technology and does not pay much attention to this technology for so many years.

Why is this the case?

One ​​of the reasons we all know and is a commonplace is that the threshold for ordinary people to use encryption technology is too high.

From 2009 to now 2025, a full 16 years, I estimate that the number of real daily active users of encryption applications is only a few million at most. In these 16 years, a large number of teams, a large number of applications, and a large number of standards have been trying to improve the user experience of crypto applications and lower its usage threshold.

However, so many efforts have achieved little so far, especially when compared with the speed of popularization of artificial intelligence, it is simply vulnerable.

Seeing these data and thinking back on the history of these 16 years, I have such a feeling:

All our efforts to improve the user experience of crypto applications may be fundamentally meaningless.

I am not saying that these efforts have no effect, but I think that the effect of these efforts is almost negligible.

I have expressed this view before:

Cryptocurrency may not be prepared for humans at all, but for AI.

In the future, the number of AI Agents will definitely far exceed the number of humans.

Thinking about these two viewpoints in combination with the above data, I think it is easy to understand:

The poor experience and high threshold that humans feel when using encrypted applications are not a problem for AI at all. AI uses encrypted wallets, memorizes private keys, digital signatures, and on-chain transactions as naturally and simply as we breathe air.

Cryptocurrency is prepared for AI, and AI Agents are the real users of cryptocurrency. One day in the future, when the number of AI Agents exceeds that of humans, the number of daily active "users" of encryption technology will definitely exceed the number of daily active users of all the above human applications. It's just that the "users" at that time are not humans but AI Agents.

Thinking this way, all the above contradictions and confusions can be solved.

Therefore, in the field of encryption + crypto, how to enable AI Agents to use smart contracts and allow AI Agents to fully trade on the blockchain is the only way to push encryption technology to the sky and make it truly explode and subvert society.