The Crypto Mafia of the AI Community
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The Crypto Mafia of the AI Community
Crypto did not turn into AI out of thin air; it simply transferred the resources left over from the previous cycle to the next industry that needed them more.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy: Xiao Bing
In Abilene, Texas, on a construction site of approximately 1,000 acres, eight H-shaped data centers are gradually being put into operation.
This is the first large campus of OpenAI's "Stargate" project. The entire project plans for 1.2 gigawatts of capacity; the first two buildings are already online, while the rest are still under construction.
The campus is operated by Oracle, and the developer behind it is called Crusoe, but it originally started with Bitcoin mining.
Founder Chase Lochmiller was formerly a partner at the crypto fund Polychain Capital.
In 2018, he and his childhood friend Cully Cavness discovered that U.S. oil fields were burning off large amounts of untransportable associated natural gas every day. The two moved power generation equipment and mining machines to the wellheads, using the natural gas that would otherwise be wasted to mine Bitcoin.
The logic of this business is very simple: find electricity in remote areas, and convert electricity into computing power within a very short time.
Seven years later, customers switched from the Bitcoin network to OpenAI. In 2025, Crusoe sold its Bitcoin business, which owned over 425 modular data centers, to NYDIG to focus on AI development.
Crusoe's transformation seems like a huge leap, but its core capabilities have remained unchanged: finding electricity, building data centers, and operations and maintenance.
Like Crusoe, there are many companies and people who have completed a gorgeous transformation from Crypto to AI. They do not come from the same company like the PayPal Mafia, nor is there a common organization. What connects them is three types of assets left behind from the previous Crypto cycle:
- Electricity, land, and grid connection permits held by mining companies;
- Engineers and entrepreneurs trained by Crypto companies;
- Capital accumulated during the previous bull market.
After 2022, these three types of assets began flowing to AI simultaneously.
What Mining Companies Sell to AI is Not Mining Machines, but Electricity
"The biggest contradiction in humanity's future is between growing data processing needs and limited computing power."
In 2019, Bitmain founder Wu Jihan wrote this in the article "The Beauty of Computing Power," stating plainly that this was the reason Bitmain invested in AI chips.
At the time, this statement looked like public relations speak; looking back six years later, it resembles a prophecy written in advance.
In February 2026, Wu Jihan's mining company Bitdeer announced it would clear all Bitcoin inventory to provide liquidity for building AI data centers, transforming from Crypto to AI with exceptional determination.
When Bitcoin mining companies transform to AI, it is often understood by the public as "converting mining machines into AI servers," but the actual situation is not like this.
Bitcoin mining machines are mostly ASIC chips that can only execute specific hash algorithms and cannot be used to train large models. Even GPUs left behind by Ethereum mining farms find it difficult to directly meet today's large AI clusters' requirements for networking, VRAM, liquid cooling, and reliability.
The truly valuable assets of mining companies are data centers already connected to the power grid.
Building an AI data center, the hardest part is often not buying GPUs, but finding hundreds of megawatts of stable power, and obtaining land, substations, transmission lines, and construction permits. This process may take several years; mining companies have already completed a lot of preliminary work in North America, Northern Europe, and the Middle East in the past to reduce mining costs and ensure compliance.
When Bitcoin mining profits decline and AI companies are willing to sign long-term high-price contracts, mining companies naturally begin to switch customers.
CoreWeave was the first to complete the transformation.
In 2016, three commodity traders placed a GPU on a pool table in their Manhattan office and started mining Ethereum. After the Crypto winter arrived, they acquired a large number of second-hand graphics cards while prices were falling, and subsequently expanded their business into film rendering and machine learning.
The company was originally called Atlantic Crypto and later renamed CoreWeave. Its listing documents show that before 2022, most of the company's revenue still came from cryptocurrency mining; thereafter, the Crypto business was completely stopped.
Today, CoreWeave is already a leading AI cloud company backed by NVIDIA, and its path is being replicated by the entire crypto mining industry.
In 2026, TeraWulf signed a approximately 401 megawatt, 20-year data center lease with Anthropic, with an initial contract value of about $19 billion;
Cipher Mining signed a 300 megawatt, approximately $5.5 billion 15-year agreement with AWS;
Core Scientific provides a large batch of data center capacity to CoreWeave long-term.
Hut 8 consecutively signed two 15-year leases at the Beacon Point campus in Texas, each with a base contract value of approximately $9.8 billion.
IREN, after reaching a $9.7 billion cloud service agreement with Microsoft, continued to disclose new contracts totaling $2.8 billion in July 2026.
According to CoinShares statistics, as of the first quarter of 2026, listed mining companies have announced over $70 billion in AI and high-performance computing contracts. At the same time, Bitcoin mining revenue per unit of computing power once fell to about $30 to $35 per PH/s per day, and a batch of mining farms using old equipment or having higher electricity prices were close to losses.
Mining companies have transformed from computing power facilities in the crypto era into computing power infrastructure in the AI era, remaining in the spotlight.
From OpenSea to OpenRouter
Besides mining farms, people in the Crypto industry are also migrating to AI.
Alex Atallah is the co-founder and former CTO of OpenSea. When NFTs were most popular, OpenSea's monthly trading volume once exceeded $4 billion. In July 2022, Atallah left the company to prepare for a new venture.
In 2023, he founded OpenRouter.
The problem OpenRouter solves is very direct: there are more and more large models, with different prices, speeds, and capabilities, and developers do not want to reconnect APIs for every model company. Through OpenRouter, they only need to connect one interface to call hundreds of models and automatically allocate requests based on price, performance, and availability.
In 2025, OpenRouter completed a total of $40 million in financing, with a valuation of about $500 million.
In May 2026, it completed a $113 million Series B financing led by CapitalG, with valuation rising to about $1.3 billion. In the past half year, the volume of Tokens processed by the platform weekly grew from 5 trillion to 25 trillion.
What OpenRouter and OpenSea do is not exactly the same, but the business structure is very similar.
OpenSea aggregates NFT buyers and sellers, while OpenRouter aggregates models, computing power suppliers, and developers. The former matches digital asset transactions, the latter matches inference requests. The product has changed, but the ability to build markets and integrate fragmented supply has not.
Some Crypto traces are even directly retained in the product. Opening OpenRouter's registration page, next to Google and GitHub login there is still MetaMask, and the platform also accepts USDC payments.
Fal.ai is another example.
Founder Burkay Gur previously participated in building a machine learning platform at Coinbase, started a business in 2021, and initially developed machine learning data pipelines and deployment tools.
After Stable Diffusion was open-sourced, they discovered that although image and video models were becoming more numerous, inference speed was slow, deployment was troublesome, and GPU utilization was low. So Fal.ai shifted its focus to generative media inference.
This choice paid off quickly.
By mid-2025, Fal.ai's annualized revenue was already close to $95 million. In December of the same year, the company completed a $140 million Series D financing led by Sequoia Capital, reaching a valuation of $4.5 billion. Companies such as Adobe, Canva, and Perplexity are all using its generative media infrastructure.
Using Crypto Money to Support AI
Mining companies provide electricity and data centers to AI, while capital accumulated during the Crypto cycle enters AI in another way.
The most direct example is Jed McCaleb.
He created the crypto exchange Mt.Gox, and later co-founded Ripple and Stellar, being one of the earliest billionaires in the Crypto industry.
In 2023, the Navigation Fund funded by McCaleb put out about $500 million to purchase 24,000 NVIDIA H100s at once, and established Voltage Park to rent GPUs to AI companies and research institutions.
He did not create another public chain, but instead exchanged the money earned from Crypto for the scarcest assets in the AI industry.
In 2026, Voltage Park merged with AI development platform Lightning AI, with the relevant transaction giving the merged entity a valuation of about $2.5 billion. The wealth accumulated in the previous crypto cycle thus became the balance sheet of an AI cloud company.
The investment portfolio left by SBF, founder of the already imploded crypto exchange FTX, provides an even more dramatic case.
In 2022, SBF invested $500 million in the then-unknown Anthropic, holding about 13.5%. After FTX went bankrupt, the liquidation team sold these shares in batches in 2024, recovering about $1.3 billion. Nowadays, Anthropic's post-investment valuation reaches $965 billion. Assuming FTX had not sold the shares, its shareholding ratio would still remain approximately 6.7%, corresponding to a value of about $65 billion, equivalent to about 130 times the initial $500 million investment.
The story of Cursor is even more extreme.
In April 2022, SBF's fund Alameda participated in Anysphere's early financing with $200,000; this company later launched the AI programming tool Cursor. After FTX entered bankruptcy proceedings, the liquidation team sold this stake for $200,000 in April 2023, almost entering at the original price and exiting at the original price.
In June 2026, SpaceX announced the acquisition of Anysphere in an all-stock transaction worth $60 billion. According to public reports, Alameda initially obtained equity of about 5%. If completely ignoring Anysphere's subsequent financing dilution, the paper value of this stake could reach $3 billion, equivalent to 15,000 times the initial $200,000 investment.
This certainly cannot be simply explained as SBF being an investment genius; a more accurate understanding is that before ChatGPT was released, the most aggressive and highest risk-appetite funds in the Crypto bull market had already started looking for AI projects.
When the Crypto market was prosperous, a large amount of capital believed in two judgments: computing power will become more and more valuable, and software networks can expand to the global scale in a very short time. AI happens to meet both of these conditions simultaneously.
Therefore, after Crypto capital entered AI, it purchased not just graphics cards, but also funded new technology and organizational experiments.
Nous Research is a typical case.
Hermes Agent developed by Nous is an open-source AI agent that can accumulate long-term memory and automatically generate skills. According to openrouter statistics, Hermes Agent Token call volume is first globally, exceeding Claude Code.
In 2025, Crypto investment firm Paradigm led Nous Research's $50 million Series A financing.
According to reports at the time, this financing corresponded to a valuation of about $1 billion for its yet-to-be-issued Token. Nous's previous investors also included crypto VC Distributed Global and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan.
Besides Hermes, Nous is also developing Psyche, a distributed model training network built on Solana.
Traditional AI labs need to concentrate a large number of GPUs in the same data center. Psyche wants to verify another route: connecting GPUs scattered in different regions and belonging to different participants to train models together, and then coordinating training progress, verifying participants, and distributing rewards through smart contracts.
At this stage, Psyche is still an experiment, and the testnet Token is also explicitly marked by the official side as having no economic value, but it represents another influence after Crypto capital entered AI.
OpenAI also seriously considered a similar direction in its early days.
OpenAI was established in 2015 as a non-profit organization, but the funds needed for frontier models quickly exceeded the scope that the donation model could support. By the end of 2017, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman had already started discussing new financing structures, one of which was an ICO.
Later released internal emails show that the team seriously studied issuing Tokens in early 2018. Musk explicitly opposed it, believing that an ICO would seriously damage OpenAI's credibility. OpenAI later added that by the end of January that year, the team itself gradually lost interest in this plan.
OpenAI finally chose to establish a for-profit entity and received huge investment from Microsoft, but Sam Altman did not leave Crypto.
In 2019, he co-founded Worldcoin with Alex Blania and Max Novendstern. This project uses the iris recognition device Orb to verify that a user is a real and unique human, and establishes an identity and payment network through World ID and WLD tokens.
From Crusoe, CoreWeave to OpenRouter, Fal.ai and Nous Research, these individual stories full of survivorship bias do not mean that Crypto companies transforming to AI have a greater probability of success.
Mining companies left behind electricity, land, and grid connection permits; exchanges and Web3 companies trained a batch of engineers familiar with distributed systems, GPU scheduling, and globalized products; the wealth created by token appreciation became capital for buying graphics cards, investing in model companies, and funding technical experiments.
Crypto did not turn into AI out of thin air; it simply transported the resources left behind from the previous cycle to the next industry that needed them more.
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