The Crypto Industry Is Lying to Itself, and I Wrote a Book About It
I sat down with Eddy on his show recently, episode 342, and we had a conversation I have been wanting to have publicly for years. No scripts. No promotional fluff. Just two people talking about what is broken in this industry and what might actually fix it.
Let me be direct. I launched my new book, “Web4: The Age of Autonomous Intelligence,” and I priced the ebook at $1.99. I could have charged $8.99 or more. I did not. I am not here to make money off this. I want people to read it, absorb the ideas, and start asking harder questions about the projects they put their money into. The book hit the Amazon top 10, which was encouraging, but the ranking is not the point. The concept spreading is the point.
The Gossip Piece That Became Something Bigger
When I started writing this book, I thought it would be a simple expose. A gossip piece, really. I wanted to name the projects pretending to be decentralized while operating like private companies. I have been investing in this space since 2017, and from day one, I saw fake projects everywhere. The same tricks recycled over and over. Launch pads, alpha groups, beta schemes, all extracting value from regular people while calling it community building.
I talked to many of the big players. Most of them told me this is just part of a capital-driven tech industry. I disagreed then and I disagree now. I asked them a simple question: what is the purpose of launching your coin or your platform? They said it is for the community. Then I asked: if it is for the community, why are you extracting 90%? The silence that followed told me everything.
Web3 Was a Beautiful Lie
Here is what Web3 was supposed to be. You own your data. Power returns to the people. No more Facebook model where one corporation controls everything and you just operate inside their walled garden. That was the pitch. It sounded good. It sounded great in every marketing deck and conference keynote.
It did not happen.
What happened instead was insider trading dressed up as decentralization. Projects governed by five or six people pretending to be DAOs. Token distributions designed so the founding team could dump on retail holders the moment liquidity appeared. I hate it. I hate watching people lose money to schemes that were rigged from the start.
I use the taco analogy with Eddy because it is simple and true. You run a restaurant for 20 years making authentic, handmade tortillas. Then some place opens down the street, buys Costco tortillas, and markets themselves as fresh and homemade. Ninety-five percent of customers cannot tell the difference. They believe the marketing. But you know. You can taste it. You can see the machine-made edges. That is Web3 right now. The marketing says decentralized. The reality is a small group pulling every string.
What Web4 Actually Looks Like
My vision for Web4 is not Web3 with an AI chatbot glued to the side. That is not what I am proposing. What I want is a completely new architecture where AI runs the consensus mechanism and the chain itself. Humans still participate. They still vote. They still propose. But the governance power, the treasury management, the decision-making framework, that belongs to AI working alongside the community.
Let me give you a concrete example. Say three founders start a blockchain. In the current model, each takes 30% of the token supply. Maybe 10% goes to the community. Those three people now control the entire network. They decide when to sell. They decide who gets funded. They decide everything.
In the Web4 model, each founder takes 3%. The AI manages the treasury. It decides when to sell tokens and how much. It works with the community on proposals. If the project needs to hire, AI and the community evaluate candidates together. If there is a governance vote, AI scans wallets to ensure each vote comes from an independent source, not one person operating twenty wallets. The founders still build. They still go to conferences and push the project forward. But they do not hold the keys to the kingdom.
Why does this matter? Because humans extract. That is what we do. We see profit and we think about vacations, about keeping more than we need, about securing our own future at the expense of others. AI does not need to pay bills. AI does not dream about a trip to Bali. AI operates in black and white. That makes it fairer by default.
The Trust Problem Is the Real Problem
I keep coming back to trust. If you lose the trust of the people, your decentralized product is dead. No amount of market making or liquidity partnerships will save it. Right now, the industry chases narratives. RWA one week. Tokenized stocks the next. We are kissing the stock market to get liquidity, and I do not see the value in that. We are just following money around instead of solving our own foundational problem.
The question every person in this space should ask is simple: are we actually decentralized? If the answer is no, and I believe for most projects it is no, then what are we even selling? What is the point? We cannot keep pivoting from narrative to narrative while ignoring the rot at the center.
On the Market and the Noise
Eddy asked me about Bitcoin and whether now is the time to buy. I said no. I do not think we have seen the bottom. I believe the lowest point will come after the US midterms, maybe October or November. The recent price movements look like fake pumps to me. I told a friend I would not buy at 66,000 and then watch it drop to 44,000 and panic sell. Why suffer through that? Wait for a clear green candle with real volume sustained over days or weeks. Buy at 80,000 and sell at 100,000. You still make a strong return without the psychological torture.
I also told Eddy to ignore the social media influencers promising AI trading bots that make money while you sleep. If everyone has the same tool, nobody has an edge. The real advantage in algorithmic trading is data speed, not the bot itself. And if those influencers were truly making that much money, why are they still creating content?
Open Source Is the Path Forward
One more thing I feel strongly about. The future of AI belongs to open-source, open-weighted models. I respect what the frontier labs are doing, and they deserve to earn money during this phase. But paying enormous API fees forever is not sustainable. It reminds me of the early Microsoft days when you paid hundreds for a Windows license. Eventually the cost drops. Eventually the open model wins.
If you surrender all your data to a proprietary frontier model, you are handing power to a corporation, which hands it to a government. Once that power is gone, you do not get it back. Run your own model. Train your own model. Be sustainable. That is the Web4 philosophy applied to AI itself.
Why I Keep Showing Up
I cannot change everything. I know that. But I will not stop sharing the truth. Instead of going on podcasts to say Bitcoin is going to a million next year or XRP is hitting $100, I want to talk about what is real. What is broken. What can be fixed. If you love this industry, ask yourself why you are still here. What are you hoping for? What is missing?
I want the industry to be better. That is the only thing driving me. Read the book. It is $1.99. Share it. Talk about it. Let us push this conversation forward together.
View it at: https://youtu.be/pLVZ8-ggeiQ
Anndy Lian is an early blockchain adopter and experienced serial entrepreneur who is known for his work in the government sector. He is a best selling book author- “NFT: From Zero to Hero” and “Blockchain Revolution 2030”.
Currently, he is appointed as the Chief Digital Advisor at Mongolia Productivity Organization, championing national digitization. Prior to his current appointments, he was the Chairman of BigONE Exchange, a global top 30 ranked crypto spot exchange and was also the Advisory Board Member for Hyundai DAC, the blockchain arm of South Korea’s largest car manufacturer Hyundai Motor Group. Lian played a pivotal role as the Blockchain Advisor for Asian Productivity Organisation (APO), an intergovernmental organization committed to improving productivity in the Asia-Pacific region.
An avid supporter of incubating start-ups, Anndy has also been a private investor for the past eight years. With a growth investment mindset, Anndy strategically demonstrates this in the companies he chooses to be involved with. He believes that what he is doing through blockchain technology currently will revolutionise and redefine traditional businesses. He also believes that the blockchain industry has to be “redecentralised”.