The New Economy of the Future

"Grown from AI and blockchain." By Ran Wang, ECM Capital

On September 11, blockchain-based financial infrastructure platform Figure officially listed on Nasdaq, becoming the world's first publicly traded platform with Real World Assets (RWA) at its core.

As a blockchain-based lender, Figure's IPO marks a deepening convergence of traditional finance and the crypto economy. Some observers also see it as a potentially significant signal that blockchain asset tokenization is entering mainstream financial markets.

History's needle is once again pointing to a critical inflection point. Today's technological transformation is no longer a single-dimensional, linear evolution. It is a multidimensional revolution — different dimensions, multiple lines of advance, weaving together simultaneously.

Where exactly will opportunities emerge across different societies? And what profound impacts will the challenges bring to our world?

A year after publishing the widely circulated essay Reawakening China's Primary Market on An Yong Waves, Ran Wang, founder of ECM Capital, returns with fresh reflections. At this transformative juncture, in what he calls the "post-mobile internet era," this entrepreneur and investment banker who was once tightly bound to China's new economy is now exploring and redefining "the new economy of the future." May his thinking offer some inspiration to you, too, at this turning point.

Part 01

What Is the New Economy of the Future

I still remember founding ECM Capital 25 years ago, right as the internet wave was rising and the term "new economy" was in full ascendancy — so much so that our company logo carried, for a long time, a tagline that looks slightly pretentious in hindsight: "ibanking the new economy." Back then, new economy was practically synonymous with internet economy. Later came mobile internet, which fundamentally transformed human lifestyles, yet people gradually stopped using the term "new economy." Today, a quarter century later, we have arrived at another critical node where technology reshapes humanity and the world. A future-oriented "new economy," built upon the new economy born 25 years ago, is now breaking through the soil.

While "the new economy of the future" is difficult to define precisely, I believe its core essence can be roughly captured in a formula:

Future New Economy = (AI + Embodied Intelligence + Brain-Computer Interface) × (Blockchain + Cryptocurrency + Tokenization of Real World Assets (RWA)) × (Existing World + Existing Humanity + Existing Economy)

In this formula, the two foundational building blocks are AI and blockchain; everything else is built upon them. In other words, the future-facing new economy is grown from AI and blockchain.

AI gives humanity thinking and acting partners for the first time, shifting the orientation of technological innovation from efficiency gains and human purpose-fulfillment toward the transcendence and replacement of individual humans. Blockchain gives humanity entirely new asset forms and trust systems, granting users unprecedented privacy and property rights protection while enabling cross-border asset transactions to be completed instantaneously.

Over the past 25 years, traditional economy evolved from being 100% offline to roughly two-thirds offline and one-third online. That was the new economy of the past. The economy of the future will likely evolve into two-thirds off-chain and one-third on-chain. High integration between on-chain and off-chain, with mutual stimulation and reinforcement — this is the first dimension of the future new economy.

Traditional economy creates value through human-to-human interaction,博弈, and demand satisfaction. The internet merely made human-to-human interaction smoother and more efficient. In the future economy, human-to-human interaction will still create some economic value, but an increasingly large proportion of value creation will occur through human-to-machine (AI and embodied intelligence) interaction and machine-to-machine interaction. This is the second dimension of the future new economy.

The paradigm leap brought by these two dimensions will usher human society into a more complex and uncertain new era — one with immense space for value creation and improvement of human welfare, but also with real and severe risks that shadow every opportunity.

Part 02

The Paradigm Leap of the New Economy Grown from AI and Blockchain

Decentralization of Value Creation

Decentralized AI, especially agentic AI, will dramatically reduce the cost of trial and error — and trial and success — across entrepreneurship, business, and social practice, thereby making value creation more decentralized.

Two years ago I wrote an essay titled "Small Companies," "Short Companies," and the Future of Venture Capital and Young People, in which I noted: "In domains that don't require labor intensity, 'small yet big' companies will spring up like mushrooms after rain. Such companies certainly won't have the capacity to build foundational AI models, but they can generate enormous value for users or clients by simultaneously understanding AI, understanding scenarios, and understanding data. Historically, there have been cases overseas where tiny companies of just twenty or thirty people, or even a dozen or so, were acquired by platform companies for over a billion or even several billion dollars — but they were few and far between. In the future, such cases will likely increase substantially. Many tasks that previously required large numbers of people — such as software development and testing, data analysis, text and blueprint generation — can now be handled by AI, providing far broader possibilities for small companies to create outsized value."

With the rapid advancement of AI, especially agentic AI, the "small yet big" startups I described are now emerging in batches. According to incomplete statistics, over the past year there have already been more than 100 companies with under 200 employees valued at over $1 billion. Going forward, an increasingly large share of commercial and economic value creation will shift from today's pyramid distribution of large, medium, and small companies to an umbrella distribution of "a handful of super-companies + millions of 'small yet big' teams." These "small yet big" teams may not even need to exist as formal companies to create value — "corporate communitization" will become a very clear and very important evolutionary direction for AI-native entrepreneurs.

Disintermediation

Although institutions like ours have long played the role of capital intermediary in financial markets, disintermediation in economic activity is an inexorable trend with the development of AI and blockchain. In the past, the value of any intermediary in any market derived largely from information asymmetry and the mismatch between capabilities and capability needs. In the future, intermediary-type economic entities will continue to exist for a long time, but their commercial value will be increasingly difficult to extract from information asymmetry and capability mismatch. Instead, they will have to rely on serving as credit backstops for both parties in certain scenarios and as providers of deep services in specific directions. Their business models will also gradually shift from pure transaction-value-based commission models to hybrid models of "commission + specialized fees + transaction participation."

It should be pointed out that the core value of blockchain lies precisely in shifting trust mechanisms from reliance on intermediaries to reliance on mathematics and smart contracts. Therefore, for all manner of intermediaries, the function of providing credit backstops will face challenges in the long run. But Rome wasn't built in a day — for a considerable period, this credit-backstopping capacity will still provide some guarantee, oversight, and lubrication for the smooth completion of transactions.

De-physicalization

From the agricultural age to the industrial age and then to the information age, humanity has mainly created value through three means: physical labor, large-scale collaboration, and creativity. In the future, the development of AI-based embodied intelligence will cause the share of human physical labor in value creation to decline continuously. Much of the grueling, dirty, and dangerous work will be taken on by increasingly intelligent and multifunctional embodied intelligent agents. At the same time, the share of creativity in value creation will gradually rise. Human creativity will not be threatened or replaced by AI; on the contrary, it will achieve exponential leaps because of AI and brain-computer interfaces.

The core of future basic education will have only one focus: cultivating creativity in young people. The value of any educational content unrelated to creativity cultivation will trend toward zero.

Large-scale collaboration will remain important in the future, but it will likely no longer be based on fixed organizational forms. Instead, it will take a "water has no constant shape" on-chain form, following the operational logic of "initiated instantly for a task, existing in phases, automatically dissolving upon task completion, with continued value accrual possible even after dissolution."

More importantly, on top of the three above-mentioned means, future human value creation will add a fourth: value created through the interaction and coordination between robots and intelligent agents, which we discuss below as the "robot and intelligent agent economy."

Robot and Intelligent Agent Economy

The robot and intelligent agent economy discussed here does not refer to economic activities related to the R&D, production, and sale of robots and intelligent agents. Rather, it refers to robots and intelligent agents (whether physical or digital, tangible or intangible) following certain rules and logic to complete mutual博弈 and collaboration through autonomous decision-making with minimal human intervention, or even independently of human intervention, thereby creating value for humanity in the process.

Compared with past human value creation methods, the robot and intelligent agent economy represents both quantitative change and qualitative change. The Earth will have another group of intelligent entities comparable to humans in number and intelligence (or even surpassing humans in certain respects), operating and working in parallel with humans 7x24, generating and satisfying needs and creating value. As far as today's world economy is concerned, this will be an enormous incremental market.

Real World Assets On-Chain and Equity-Token Convergence

Today, the total value of cryptocurrencies on-chain globally is roughly $4 trillion — still less than the market cap of Nvidia alone. The total value of Real-World Assets (RWA) on-chain globally is only a little over $20 billion. By contrast, in the off-chain physical world, global financial assets (stocks, bonds, bank deposits, etc.) total roughly $400 trillion, real estate roughly another $400 trillion, plus $150-300 trillion in natural resources, $20-25 trillion in gold, $2-3 trillion in art, and so on. Global off-chain real world assets amount to at least $1,000 trillion.

The much-discussed tokenization of Real-World Assets (RWA) essentially means transferring a portion of off-chain asset value to on-chain by issuing tokens corresponding to real world assets, thereby recreating an on-chain world and on-chain economy that runs parallel to the off-chain world and is interoperable, integrated, and fluid with it.

The driving force for off-chain assets to migrate on-chain is that, compared with off-chain transactions, on-chain transactions have inherent advantages of greater convenience, lower cost, decentralization, disintermediation, and privacy protection.

Of course, not all off-chain real world assets are suitable for transfer to on-chain, but a significant portion of RWA is indeed suitable for on-chain trading — such as securities, futures, money market funds, reverse repos, real estate, energy assets, art, content IP, and innovative drug IP. If 20-30% of real world asset value is transferred on-chain in the future, this would mean over 10,000x growth space for today's RWA token market.

More and more companies in the future will exist in an equity-token convergent and equity-token coexistent manner. While equity financing won't be completely replaced, in future value creation and value realization processes — especially in ventures related to the intelligent agent economy and directly consumer-facing projects — equity-token convergent or even token-dominant financing models will gradually erode and squeeze the market share of pure equity financing.

How to respond to such a new world will be a shared challenge for all entrepreneurs, investors, and financial service institutions. Any service institution still focused on off-chain financial needs today, if it does not simultaneously possess professional capabilities to serve on-chain and on-chain needs, will one day become a one-legged creature abandoned by the times.

Part 03

What I'm Bullish and Bearish On

Finally, a brief word on what I personally am bullish and bearish on.

• Bullish on top-tier crypto assets represented by Bitcoin and Ethereum. This is because global sovereign capital and major institutions have not yet entered at scale; even when they do, it will only be dipping a toe in the water. Their entry and increased crypto holdings are only a matter of time, and there aren't many crypto asset categories for them to choose from — at least initially, they can only select from top-tier crypto assets.

• Bearish on stablecoins issued by most enterprises and market-oriented institutions. This is because stablecoin issuers' profit models are very fragile: on one hand affected by interest rate environments, on the other by competitive environments. What can be comfortably pocketed today may well disappear tomorrow.

• Bullish on tokenization of real world assets and equity-token convergence achieved through RWA token issuance. This is because real world asset transactions have excessively high costs, too many restrictions, and overly cumbersome processes that don't match participants' expectations. Tokenization of real world assets can effectively address these problems, making this an inexorable trend.

• Bearish on most listed companies making their sole core business a "Digital Asset Treasury" (DAT) strategy of crypto selection and hoarding. In my view, for most companies trying to imitate MicroStrategy, this so-called "equity-token linkage" is more like a stock price hype tactic, merely exploiting the still-existing entry barriers to crypto for ordinary users. Just as a listed company with a failed core business cannot transform itself into an asset management company or make holding another listed company's stock its core business, if a listed company is doing nothing essentially different from an ETF or crypto fund manager, then there is no need for it to exist in corporate form, and it will be difficult to form long-term core competitiveness and unique sources of value. Therefore, in the long run, as ordinary users' barriers to entering crypto markets continue to fall, listed companies implementing DAT strategies with only specific crypto hoarding functions will likely decline. To be the exception, a listed company must possess unique core capabilities and value contributions in developing the crypto ecosystem of the assets it holds.

• Bullish on the creator economy in the AI and blockchain era. This is an important direction where AI and blockchain can jointly contribute, and it will inevitably gestate increasingly magnificent economic value. AI gives creators wings of imagination and enables their visions to be realized easily and at low cost; blockchain can provide institutional arrangements for creators' rights confirmation and long-term value sharing, allowing IP created by creators to receive more direct and fuller protection and rewards.

• Bearish on any form of information-asymmetry economy. With the development and advancement of AI and intelligent agents, all businesses based on information asymmetry will face severe survival tests, with the vast majority gradually disappearing within five years. All market intermediaries must shift from feeding on information-asymmetry dividends to feeding on credit dividends and high-value-added deep services.

• Bullish on players who use AI and blockchain technology to reimagine and fundamentally reconstruct existing usage scenarios from the ground up. Although players with scaled usage scenarios have certain user and data advantages, the great achievers of the AI and blockchain era will certainly be those who, based on new technologies, dare to reimagine and fundamentally reconstruct usage scenarios.

• Bearish on startup enterprises that stick to existing scenarios for localized optimization. Such enterprises can easily be overtaken by incumbents in those scenarios using follower strategies, leveraging existing user and data advantages to弯道超车.

• Bullish on the mutually reinforcing positive feedback between stablecoins and the fiat currencies of countries and regions with high openness and inclusiveness toward crypto markets. Facts have proven that the more open and inclusive a country or region is toward market-oriented crypto, the more flourishing its crypto ecosystem becomes, the stronger the market demand for stablecoins pegged to that country/region's fiat currency, and consequently the greater the demand for that corresponding fiat currency's government bonds, forming a positive, sustainable, and self-reinforcing cycle that stabilizes and strengthens the corresponding fiat system. In this regard, China faces a very important strategic choice concerning its position in global financial markets and the future of its financial industry.

Image source | IC Photo

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