#CircleIPO

Alec Goh is Head of HTX Ventures, the global investment arm of cryptocurrency exchange HTX. In this Op-Ed, Alec argues that the convergence of AI Agents and Web3 holds transformative potential, but requires the industry to avoid common crypto pitfalls.

Building Sustainable Value in Crypto + AI

I have navigated through multiple market cycles in the digital asset space—most were driven by narratives and authentic technological advancements. Only a few changed the game entirely.

In the last six months, it has become clear to me that the intersection of AI Agents and Web3 has the potential to encompass both elements, but only if the sector can move past early speculation and build for long-term value for end users.

We’ve seen this story before. In 2017, the ICO boom outpaced any meaningful product development. In 2021, NFTs exploded into the mainstream before many platforms had even built the underlying infrastructure for creators and collectors. In 2017, the ICO boom outpaced any meaningful product development. In both cases, the correction was as swift as the rise. And in both cases, the correction was as swift as the rise.

The recent explosion of AI Agent tokens followed a similar arc. Dozens of projects launched under the banner of “Crypto + AI”, attracting large inflows of capital and attention. Some achieved billion-dollar valuations within weeks. But as with past cycles, speculative capital alone does not create sustainable ecosystems. As investor enthusiasm cooled, so did user engagement—and most early token economies have struggled to retain relevance.

Yet amid that volatility, something changed.

In Q4 2024, Deepseek introduced a technical breakthrough that caught the attention of our team at HTX Ventures: a large-scale model trained entirely through reinforcement learning, with no reliance on human-labeled data. In practical terms, this dramatically reduces the cost of developing autonomous, intelligent agents.