Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) launched a blistering critique of the current AI token landscape, dismissing 99.99% of these digital assets as “useless” in a market increasingly saturated with speculative offerings.
His assessment comes amid a proliferation of AI-themed tokens that mirror the early e-commerce era’s pattern of numerous failures preceding eventual sector consolidation.
CZ’s criticism centers on the fundamental disconnect between token issuance and tangible utility, particularly as CoinMarketCap now tracks over 14 million listed tokens.
The explosive growth of tokens without corresponding usefulness exposes the hollow foundation of today’s speculative AI market.
Rather than merely condemning the situation, he outlined a vision where AI agents could serve practical functions in risk monitoring, customer support, and portfolio management—all powered by purpose-built tokens that directly benefit users rather than merely enriching creators.
The Binance chief emphasized blockchain’s unique capacity to enable verifiable data ownership for AI training, positioning crypto wallets as natural identity systems for AI agents. He argued for the development of AI agents with real utility functions that could revolutionize the cryptocurrency sector.
This intersection, he argues, creates symbiotic possibilities: AI requires crypto for frictionless machine-to-machine payments, while crypto infrastructure benefits from AI-enhanced user experiences and automated risk management.
Europe’s comparative lag in crypto-AI integration emerged as a concern, though CZ noted ongoing discussions with a dozen nations regarding regulatory frameworks.
This jurisdictional competition underscores the evolving compliance landscape necessary for functional token economies to flourish across borders.
Despite market volatility’s gradual decline and increased institutional interest in crypto derivatives, community frustration with low-quality token offerings continues mounting.
CZ’s stance reflects an industry reaching an inflection point: either develop meaningful utility for AI tokens or watch them fade into irrelevance.
The vision of tokenized AI agents managing portfolios, providing customer service, and operating within decentralized marketplaces represents the aspirational endpoint of crypto-AI convergence.
Whether the current generation of tokens can evolve toward this utility-focused paradigm remains the sector’s defining question—one that CZ has unambiguously framed as existential rather than optional.
This perspective aligns with recent statistics showing that Solana dominates 62.31% of market share for newly created cryptocurrencies, indicating a significant shift in where developers are choosing to build new projects.
His vision seems to align with platforms like Bittensor that employ a Mixture of Experts approach where collaborative AI systems work together to solve complex challenges more efficiently than isolated models.
