Adult financial market players will use the widespread belief in 4-year BTC cycles to extract from you the asset that has the best CAGR. Even if the cycles are real, will you take the risk and sell your BTC?
Citadel Securities just put institutional weight behind what the AI bulls won't say out loud.
In a new macro note titled "Tokenomics," Citadel makes the argument plainly: even the most powerful technology on earth still has to pass through the boring discipline of cost curves, capacity limits, and marginal returns.
The evidence is piling up:
– Amazon removed its token usage leaderboard
– Microsoft cancelled Claude Code subscriptions
– Multiple companies reporting unexpectedly massive token bills
Their conclusion is the part that matters.
Adoption is no longer about what AI can do in principle. It's becoming about the price and scarcity of the inputs needed to run it at scale. Compute. Power. Cooling. Memory bandwidth. Inference budgets. All real, all binding constraints.
And here's the kicker from the chart.
The Silicon Data LLM Token Expenditure Index, a benchmark for how much the market is actually spending on AI tokens, has started rolling over. Citadel reads it as a shift toward cheaper models. Companies substituting away from expensive frontier AI toward "good enough" alternatives.
That's economics 101 doing what it always does. When the price of something rises, people use less of it, or find a cheaper version.
Citadel sees a bifurcation forming. Frontier AI concentrated among a few firms with the balance sheets to absorb the cost. Everyone else quietly downgrading to simpler, cheaper models.
This is the part of every technology revolution the early narrative ignores.
The technology being real was never the question.
The question was always whether the economics could carry the valuations.
When one of the most sophisticated trading firms on earth starts writing about AI in the language of cost curves and rationing instead of limitless demand, the conversation has quietly changed.
The hype was about what AI could do.
The reckoning is about what it costs.
Creating a GPT-like front to $TAO powered by the subnets.
https://t.co/mI1uKeg2wJ , new feature are step-by-step guides to mining the subnets. Current features:
- text inference (powered by Chutes)
- image generation (powered by Chutes)
- search (powered by Desearch)
- AI fake detection (powered by BitMind)
- Embedding BlueTAO into your website
- post-training (to help with embedding)
- persistent memory so you can call back old chats
All at 1/100th the price of ChatGPT. (Free at first).
@const_reborn We can imagine that everyone has inside some kind of ai interconnected to our body(neuralink) and could be hacked by cebtral ai(god anthropic) and we are fu..d. S-f? Not so in near future. What to do? Instal private guards.
@minenergybiz Taking profit and waiting for IPO, Boj, Fed. Tarders trade. $silj and $sbsw are good pics. I'm sure the price will rebuild next year.
Look at uranium mining companies. The same pattern. Money rotates.
This seems to be a contrarian take, but I agree with @TrustlessState: Ethereum ≠ ETH.
Dencun is a good example. It deliberately reduced transaction costs and increased scalability, even though it compressed fee revenue.
> Ethereum usage exploded
> Blob adoption grew
> L2 activity accelerated
> The network became cheaper and more efficient
However, ETH holders captured less value from that activity. If network growth would translate directly into ETH value capture, debates around Ethereum's business model wouldn't exist, and ETH would've broken its ATH in 2026.
I don't believe that Ethereum is a failed experiment. Adoption charts show, very clearly, that it's quite the opposite. At the same time, I also believe that improvements on ETH's value accrual mechanisms are required for ETH (the asset) to thrive. Data has already shown that usage alone won't get the job done.
Better value accrual mechanisms = Better ETH.
@DreadBong0 In not so distant future you can buy token of good project on dex. That will be pow, no ico, no cex, no perp, no leverage on binance project, no premine. Its price will not be connected sonstrictly to btc.
If...if...there will be enough tam for it.
Vitalik hitting three birds with one stone here:
- solves one of the biggest risks plaguing Ethereum's app layer (ie defi) - our reliance on fast oracles
- gives another example of why onchain composability is still extremely valuable
- proposes a design oriented around the post-AI-agent world we now live in (leaving behind the monolithic "world computer" protocol design paradigm)
I would like to wish everyone, including all haters and losers (of which, sadly, there are many) a truly happy and enjoyable Ethereum revival