The cryptocurrency market has witnessed a significant shift in recent times, with investors increasingly turning their attention to Artificial Intelligence (AI) for potential gains. This trend has led economists to predict that crypto returns will remain muted, as investors continue to chase AI gains. The intersection of AI and crypto is expected to form a mega-trend that could add as much as $20 trillion to the global economy by 2030.

The AI-crypto mega-trend is expected to have a significant impact on the global economy, with some experts predicting that it could add as much as $20 trillion to global GDP by 2030. This forecast aligns with a PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) estimate that AI and crypto could add $15.7 trillion and $1.8 trillion, respectively, to the global economy by 2030. The synergistic effect of their integration could drive the combined value to $20 trillion or more.

Bitcoin miners are diversifying into AI, as the race for AI supremacy is causing an unprecedented shortage of data centers, AI chips, and electricity. Bitcoin mining operations are specifically designed to process and store massive amounts of data, possessing the very resources—powerful chips, state-of-the-art cooling systems, and essential infrastructure—that AI companies desperately need. This diversification is expected to expand their revenues, following April’s bitcoin halving, which cut miners' block subsidy rewards by 50%.

High-frequency traders are now leveraging AI to execute decentralized finance (DeFi) trades in milliseconds. This automation will significantly impact DeFi and DAO operations over the next decade. AI automates complex trading strategies and predictive analytics models to forecast market trends and optimize trading without human interference. Over the next decade, AI will integrate into DeFi, improve DAO operations, while maintaining transparency.

The growth opportunity around the AI and Web3 space combines early interest, potential, and hype. While it's true that there may be some hype surrounding AI intervention in the crypto space, we are seeing the emergence of innovative and compelling use cases. The current AI trend is still pretty speculative, leading to a jump for tokens like OCEAN, ALI, AGIX. Some of the tokens with more buzz and followings have pumped, and it's less about the actual tech behind it.

The likes of Khanduri say token-based usage while scaling AI software is a hard problem to solve. "Say an AI tool gets to 250 million users. Then what will its infra look like? How will people use it? How will the data be trained? Where does the token fit in? Can you even have a way to reward people for their data if you used it to train your models?" he said. Meanwhile, some market watchers remain cautious about the AI token hype. "