BBW2025: CZ on Payments, Next-Cycle, & Life Perspectives

This episode features a public talk by OKX founder and CEO Star Xu at OKX NOW, the company's global product and ecosystem conference. Xu explores how the internet, crypto, and AI are converging to reshape financial services — from payments and investing to wealth management. He argues that the line between crypto and traditional finance will continue to blur, combining crypto's 24/7 markets, programmable money, global settlement, and self-custody with the liquidity and infrastructure of traditional finance. AI could accelerate that shift by transforming everything from software development and compliance to personalized financial services. In the future, Xu envisions AI agents that understand an individual's assets, risk preferences, and financial goals — potentially bringing private-banking-style services to a much broader audience. Timeline: 00:00 The Convergence of the Internet, Crypto, and AI 01:35 Why Financial Infrastructure Still Lags Behind the Internet 02:25 Why Cross-Border Payments Remain Expensive 03:20 From Early Experiment to Mainstream Finance: Crypto's Evolution 04:57 From Crypto Exchanges to Broader Financial Services 06:15 Four Trends Shaping the Next Generation of Finance 07:20 Could AI Give Everyone a "Private Banker"? 08:05 Why Global Finance Still Needs Regulation and Trust 09:21 Crypto and TradFi Are Moving Toward Convergence 10:55 How AI Could Change Financial Institutions 11:30 How AI Is Already Changing Software Development 12:15 AI in Customer Service, Fraud Prevention, and Compliance 13:46 AI Is Moving From Concept to Large-Scale Adoption 14:30 How the Internet, Crypto, and AI Could Reshape Finance 15:35 From Payments and Investing to AI-Powered Wealth Management

This episode features a public talk by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin at OKX NOW, OKX's global product and ecosystem conference themed "The Future Is Now." Vitalik explores how AI could reshape blockchain, privacy, and security. As zero-knowledge proofs and other cryptographic tools mature, he sees blockchains evolving beyond "programmable assets" toward "programmable data" — allowing users to prove facts without revealing the underlying information, a capability that could become increasingly important in the AI era. Vitalik also sees AI becoming a new interface for blockchain. Instead of relying on traditional apps, users could ask AI agents to write scripts and execute on-chain actions directly. But this creates new risks, from prompt injection to AI misinterpreting user intent. Looking ahead, he expects Ethereum to become cheaper and more private, with bots and AI agents playing a much larger role in how people interact on-chain — while security increasingly extends from software all the way down to hardware.

This episode features a public speech by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin at the 12th Global Blockchain Summit in Shanghai. Vitalik reviews how blockchain technology has evolved over the past 15 years, arguing that the industry is moving beyond blockchain alone toward a broader technological stack combining blockchains with zero-knowledge proofs, programmable cryptography, and other advanced tools. As data analytics and AI become increasingly powerful, the privacy assumptions of early public blockchains are no longer sufficient, creating a greater need for new cryptographic approaches to privacy, scalability, and security. Vitalik highlights technologies including SNARKs, STARKs, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and formal verification. He argues that zero-knowledge proofs are moving from long-term roadmaps into real protocols, while programmable cryptography could expand blockchain systems from determining "who can send what" to determining "who can see what." In this vision, blockchain will increasingly become a broader network encompassing L1s, L2s, off-chain computation, transaction pools, block building, and other components. He also argues that AI can accelerate the development, verification, and understanding of complex cryptographic systems. As zero-knowledge proofs become more efficient and technologies such as formal verification and quantum-safe cryptography advance, developers may gain new ways to build decentralized applications with stronger privacy, scalability, and security guarantees.

In this episode of WuBlockchain podcast, Mysten Labs co-founder Adeniyi Abiodun joins the show to discuss how Sui is positioning itself today, what's driving its growth, and where long-term value could come from. Adeniyi frames Sui as a high-performance blockchain built for global value transfer, highlighting its horizontal scalability, low-cost payments, onchain storage, and broader developer stack. He also argues that stablecoin payments and AI agent–driven automated transactions could become the biggest demand drivers for crypto going forward. The conversation also touches on Sui's TVL swings, tokenomics, institutional partnerships, ecosystem support, and the governance tradeoffs exposed during security incidents. At a high level, Sui is trying to move beyond the narrative of being just another general-purpose L1 and instead position itself as infrastructure for global payments and the agent economy. Timeline: 00:00 Intro 00:16 Sui's new positioning: a high-performance network for global payments and value transfer 02:42 Beyond market cycles: which metrics the team actually cares about 03:54 Why stablecoin payments are crypto's clearest real-world use case today 04:43 Why AI agents could become the next major driver of onchain growth 06:32 Why AI still needs blockchains: trusted data, payments, and automated execution 08:22 How AI is already changing Mysten Labs' engineering and security workflows 10:41 "A good chain doesn't always make a good asset": responding to unlock and token overhang concerns 12:40 Where long-term value accrual for SUI could come from: burn mechanics, staking, and stablecoin-related yield 16:00 Governance after security incidents: should validators ever freeze assets? 19:32 Sui's expansion across Asia, Africa, and other emerging markets 20:44 What to watch over the next year: stablecoin scale, agent payments, and institutional onboarding 21:10 Sui's long-term vision: becoming an alternative to traditional payment rails

In this episode of Friends of OKX Wallet, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin discusses the long-term convergence of AI and crypto. He talks about the role Ethereum could play in the agent era: rather than serving as a traditional “operating system,” blockchain is better understood as a public data layer, an on-chain computation layer, and an economic layer for multi-party coordination. As AI agents begin to interact on-chain at scale, Ethereum will need to offer more than lower costs and higher throughput. It will also need stronger privacy, verifiable security, minimal identity disclosure, and an L2 ecosystem tailored to different application needs. Vitalik argues that humans will remain the users, while AI becomes a new interface and execution layer. Wallets may evolve from standalone products into secure software capability layers that AI can call and orchestrate. For identity, users should avoid revealing who they are in full, and instead prove only what is necessary, such as reputation or source of funds, through zero-knowledge proofs. On scaling, Vitalik says L2s should not simply copy the EVM. Instead, they should start from application needs and provide specific functions such as order matching, low-cost execution, or privacy. For Agent product experience, he emphasizes local AI, privacy, security, formal verification, and alignment with user interests. He also points to ZK Payments and ZK API as promising foundations for Agent-native payments and interaction standards.