$ETH The narrative for the next bull market—AI infrastructure

AI has become the main theme globally. After a deep correction in the crypto market, the community has started talking about "Web4.0," which essentially combines AI and Web3.0 to tell a new story.
Ethereum founder Vitalik has made it clear: if the future is AI-driven and humans and governance mechanisms can't keep up, the risks will be very high. The more powerful the technology, the higher the cost of losing control. But if AI is constrained by rules and on-chain governance frameworks, it can actually become a tool to amplify individual capabilities.
The true core of Web3.0 is not "token issuance," but production relations—who is authorized, how benefits are distributed, and whether rules are transparent. AI is responsible for increasing productivity, while Web3 handles rights confirmation and distribution. This is the logical closed loop.
Currently, the controversy in web3➕AI is: will the future be AI ruling, with the chain just a tool, or will AI + chain be relatively balanced, jointly building a decentralized system? There is no conclusion yet.
Looking toward 2026, an important variable is AI Agents. If many AI Agents require on-chain identity, payments, settlements, and collaboration, then ecosystems like ETH and stablecoins will become the underlying settlement layer. At that time, the narrative will no longer be about hype but about infrastructure needs.
This round of the bull market, ETH lacks a clear narrative. Meme coins have been taken over by $SOL chains, RWA narratives haven't materialized, and stablecoin narratives have been taken over by $TRX . That’s why ETH performed so poorly in this cycle. In the next bull market, the AI infrastructure narrative in the crypto space is very likely to happen on the ETH chain, so I remain confident in ETH's performance in the next bull cycle.
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