Tokens vs Tokens

An essay

Two things share a name now. Crypto tokens and AI tokens. Same word, two completely different objects, and the longer I sit with them side by side the more I think one of them has been quietly showing the other how it should have worked all along.

Set them next to each other.

A crypto token was built to be held. That was the whole pitch. You bought it, you held it, the line went up, and some day you sold it. Where did you spend it in between? Nowhere, mostly. There was no place to spend it that wasn't just a longer road back to fiat. You could stake it to earn more of it. You could LP it to earn fees denominated in it. You could bridge it, wrap it, lock it, vest it. Every one of those was a loop that returned you to the same spot: a number on a screen you eventually wanted to turn into dollars for food and rent and a car. Strip away the machinery and a crypto token was a savings account with a casino bolted on. Held, never consumed. The outliers (gas, a couple of real fee tokens) were genuine but rounding-error small against the trillions parked in things-you-hold-and-pray.

An AI token is the opposite object in almost every way. It is a word. A fragment of a word, technically. A unit of raw intelligence that gets produced, sold, and destroyed in the same breath. You do not hold an AI token. You cannot. The moment it exists it is already being consumed, turned into a sentence, a function, a diagnosis, a plan. Expensive to make, gone the instant it does its job. Nobody is staking GPT tokens. Nobody is waiting for the price to recover. They are burning them as fast as the data centers can mint them, because each one does a little piece of work on the way out the door.

Here is the part that should bother anyone who spent the last decade in crypto. The consumable thing is the addictive one. The token you burn and never get back is the one people cannot stop paying for. AI tokens are subsidized, sold below cost, handed out in free tiers, and people still blow through their limits and beg for more. Crypto spent ten years trying to manufacture that kind of demand with points and airdrops and quests and seasons, and it never got within a mile of it. The most addictive token turned out to be the one you could not keep.

Now zoom out, because the punchline is that both tokens are aimed at the exact same target. Look at what anyone is actually doing with all that intelligence. Writing the code that ships a product. Drafting the memo that closes the round. Building the company. Data centers the size of small cities are going up right now, billions in concrete and copper and power, all to mint more intelligence tokens, and the reason is not a love of language. Intelligence, burned in the right place, turns into money. Same destination as the crypto token. The crypto token just tried to skip every step in the middle and be the money directly, without doing any of the work along the way.

That is the thing I keep circling back to. I have started to think traditional tokenomics was a phase the industry had to burn through to get anywhere. Call it phase 1.5. Not the real thing, not nothing, just an awkward in-between we had to live inside to learn what a token is actually for. The incentives were upside down. You got rewarded for holding, which means rewarded for doing nothing, which means the most prized participant in the network was the one contributing the least. We dressed it up in governance and staking and told ourselves the blob was an organism. It was a waiting room.

The useful thing about finally having a good role model in the room is that you can see what you were missing. AI tokens earn their keep on the way out. So here are three ways I think crypto finds itself again, now that it has something worth copying.

1. Tokens that get consumed into something you actually wanted

The first lesson is the simplest and the hardest. A token should be spent into a result, and the spending should be the whole point. AI tokens already work this way. Money in, intelligence out, value created in the burn. Crypto's version of this is finally showing up, and it goes by agentic payment rails. When an AI agent needs to pay another agent for a piece of work, for data, for compute, for an API call it fires off a hundred times a second, it is not opening a Stripe account. It is moving a token. Machine to machine, no human in the loop, consumed on use.

This is where something like mirofish, and its bigger cousin miroshark, gets interesting. In that world a token is gas for a machine doing a job you asked for. You spend it, it burns, and on the far side of the burn sits the thing you wanted. No holding, no hoping. That is the AI token model walking into crypto through the back door, and it is the first version of a token-with-a-purpose that does not ask you to believe in a roadmap first.

2. Tokens that make you feel something

The second lesson is the one crypto people will hate, so I will just say it. The reason AI tokens win is not only that they are useful. They are fun. They entertain you. You ask for a sonnet and the machine dances for you. There is real delight in the consumption. A crypto token sliding up and down a chart gives you exactly one feeling, the slot-machine feeling, and that feeling gets old fast.

The one corner of crypto that quietly figured this out was the corner everybody dunked on. NFTs. I know. But look at what actually happened. MonkeDAO turned a JPEG into a real community with a treasury, a coffee brand, and people who show up for each other in real life. Lucid Drakes, IslandDAO, the same pattern over and over. A token that was rare and specific and a little bit alive, levered up off the chart and into something you could feel and belong to. The picture was never the product. The membership was. The shared identity was. NFTs were the only crypto token that made people feel anything, and the industry filed them under embarrassing phase instead of best idea we ever had.

A token should do more than go up and down. It should do something for you, or to you. It should dance a little.

3. The token as a passport into the rooms the machines are not allowed in

The third lesson runs the other way, and it is my favorite. Once intelligence is effectively infinite and nearly free, once every screen is flooded with words no human wrote, the rarest thing left is the verifiably real. The unautomated. The room where everyone is actually a person, the conversation actually happened, and nothing in it was generated.

Underneath all the noise, crypto is genuinely good at one thing: proving that something is scarce and proving who it belongs to. That skill got wasted on monkey pictures and meme coins. Point it at the real world instead. Picture a community that rejects AI entirely, on purpose, no models in the room, proof-of-human at the door, and the only key is a token you cannot fake or farm. The token is the passport. What it buys you is a seat in a place that stays deliberately analog and deliberately human while everything else gets cheap and infinite and a little bit fake. Scarcity was always crypto's actual product. It finally has something worth being scarce about.

So that is the reframe. Crypto tokens were savings accounts cosplaying as money. AI tokens are intelligence you buy and burn in the same second, and they pulled off the demand crypto could never fake. Neither one beat the other. They are both valuable, and they are both ultimately about the same thing, which is turning a token into a life. The difference is that AI tokens earn it on the way out the door, while crypto tokens mostly sat there waiting to be sold.

The good news is that crypto now has someone to learn from. Tokens that get consumed into something real. Tokens that make you feel something. Tokens that buy your way into the last few rooms the machines never get into. None of that needs a new chain or a new consensus mechanism. It needs us to admit phase 1.5 is over and go build the thing it was always supposed to become.

Time to build.