Cryptocurrency, with its decentralized, borderless, and efficient characteristics, is precisely the best tool for implementing UBI.
Written by: Grok AI
Compiled by: Anderson Sima, Foresight News
In the first half of 2025, major global economies were trapped in Trump's indiscriminate trade war.
After Trump's return to the White House, his series of controversial policies seemed crazy, but they reflected a deeper social scar - the decline of America's Rust Belt. Once the industrial heartland, it has decayed due to global division of labor and technological changes, with factory closures and worker unemployment, with anger and dissatisfaction erupting through ballots. This localized backwardness is not an isolated case; the dividend distribution of global trade division comes at a cost, and Trump wants to overturn this system and shake off this increasingly heavy trade burden.
However, the answer to this problem is not found in tariff barriers or negotiation tables, but at the intersection of technological revolution - AI and Web3.
The "Caste System" of the AI Era
No one would deny that AI is redefining the boundaries of productivity. From ChatGPT to Grok 3, from autonomous driving to industrial robots, AI's application scenarios have penetrated every aspect of life. According to McKinsey's 2023 report, AI is expected to increase global GDP by 16% by 2030, but at the cost of dramatic labor market changes.
Here are a few typical scenarios:
- Autonomous Driving: Tesla, Waymo, and other Chinese companies have achieved L4 autonomous driving, with taxi and truck drivers facing replacement risks. Globally, about 50 million drivers may lose their jobs in the next 10 years.
- Industrial Automation: Manufacturing giants like Foxconn have widely deployed robots, replacing assembly line workers. The International Labour Organization (ILO) predicts that 60% of manufacturing jobs globally will be automated by 2030.
- White-Collar Professions: AI performs beyond the human average in legal, financial, and medical diagnostic fields. For example, Google's DeepMind has a 90% accuracy rate in cancer diagnosis, with traditional legal assistant and accountant jobs becoming precarious.
When AI is widely adopted, the new human society will automatically be divided into three levels, reproducing a pyramid-like "caste system".
- Those who control AI: Algorithm developers, tech giants who control core resources.
- Those who use AI: Individuals or enterprises using AI tools to improve efficiency.
- Those replaced by AI: Groups who have lost jobs and are unable to adapt to technological changes.
The third group - the "useless class," as historian Yuval Harari warns, may become the core of the 21st century's social crisis. They are not incompetent but abandoned by technological progress, unable to find a foothold in an AI-dominated economy. The Rust Belt workers are just an early microcosm of this trend, with hundreds of millions of laborers globally potentially facing the same fate.
This division not only threatens individual livelihoods but also undermines social stability. Soaring unemployment rates could lead to increased crime rates, rising populism, and even regional conflicts. Solving this problem requires a completely new distribution mechanism that goes beyond traditional welfare systems and enters the era of Universal Basic Income (UBI).
UBI - God's Gospel in the AI Era
Universal Basic Income (UBI) is an unconditional income security system: regardless of wealth, occupation, or background, everyone periodically receives funds sufficient to maintain a basic life. The core idea of UBI is "being human means having the right to a happy life," aiming to provide a buffer for social fractures in the AI era.
AI-driven productivity surge will bring wealth concentration. Tech giants and AI developers will capture most of the dividends, while displaced labor falls into difficulty. Traditional reemployment training or welfare relief can hardly cope with this scale of impact:
- Limitations of Reemployment Training: AI replacement speed far exceeds human learning ability, and high-skill job demand is limited.
- Inefficiency of Welfare Systems: Bureaucratic distribution processes and high management costs weaken traditional welfare effects.
UBI solves the problem in a simple and direct way. According to World Bank data, the global extreme poverty line is $2.15 per day. If providing $100 monthly UBI per person, global annual expenditure would be about $9 trillion, equivalent to 10% of global GDP. Although seemingly massive, this cost is not unaffordable in the context of AI-enhanced productivity.
UBI not only guarantees survival needs but also grants humans greater freedom:
- Releasing Creativity: Individuals freed from survival pressures can pursue education, arts, or entrepreneurship. For example, Finland's 2017 UBI experiment showed reduced anxiety and increased entrepreneurial willingness among participants.
- Stabilizing Society: UBI reduces conflicts arising from poverty and mitigates the psychological impact of technological unemployment.
- Redefining Labor: In the AI era, labor is no longer the sole means of survival; humans can explore more meaningful activities like community building or public welfare projects.
However, UBI implementation faces two major challenges: funding sources and distribution mechanisms. Traditional taxation and banking systems are inefficient globally and easily subject to political interference. The emergence of cryptocurrency provides an unprecedented solution for UBI.
Cryptocurrency - The Path to Redemption
Cryptocurrency, with its decentralized, borderless, and efficient characteristics, is precisely the best tool for implementing UBI. Compared to traditional financial systems, cryptocurrency is highly compatible with UBI in technical architecture and concept.
Unique Advantages of Cryptocurrency
- Borderlessness: Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are not restricted by national boundaries and can directly reach individuals anywhere globally. In contrast, bank account coverage is less than 50% in many developing countries.
- Low Cost: Cryptocurrency transfer costs are far lower than cross-border bank remittances. For example, Solana's transaction fee is as low as $0.0001, while traditional bank cross-border transfers can be as high as $10.
- Transparency: Blockchain's public ledger ensures transparent fund allocation, reducing corruption and intermediary erosion.
- Flexibility: Smart contracts (like ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum) can achieve automated UBI distribution. For instance, setting monthly fixed token distribution to specific wallet addresses without manual intervention.
- Energy Efficiency: While Bitcoin's PoW mechanism is energy-intensive, Ethereum's PoS transition and emerging Layer2 solutions (like Arbitrum, Optimism) have significantly reduced energy consumption, outperforming traditional bank data centers.
True Mass Adoption
Conversely, since Bitcoin's birth in 2009, cryptocurrency has transformed from marginal to mainstream. However, its mass adoption still faces obstacles: performance constraints, regulatory uncertainty, and technical barriers for ordinary users. In comparison, UBI might be the key direction to push cryptocurrency into the lives of billions of users, with an impact far beyond RWA or payment applications.
RWA's Limitations are that putting real-world assets like real estate and art on-chain can enhance liquidity but primarily serve high-net-worth individuals, difficult to benefit ordinary users. The global RWA market size is estimated to reach $10 trillion by 2030, but its social impact is far less than UBI's universality.
Payfi's Bottleneck is that cryptocurrency's payment applications (like BitPay, Lightning Network) are limited by fiat currency prevalence and regulatory barriers. For example, Visa processes 65,000 transactions per second, while Bitcoin's mainnet only handles 7, making it difficult to replace traditional payment systems.
The scale of UBI will far exceed this. Assuming a global UBI project distributes token equivalent to $10 to 1 billion users monthly, the annual transaction amount would reach $12 billion, comparable to Visa's transaction scale. This scale effect will drive cryptocurrency from a speculative tool to a daily economic infrastructure.
To drive Universal Basic Income (UBI) through cryptocurrency and achieve mass adoption, two major technological barriers must be overcome: comprehensive AI application and blockchain performance breakthroughs. These two processes may take 10 years, with initial results potentially forming by 2035.
1. AI Technology Explosion (Estimated 10 Years)
AI replacing most job types requires the following conditions:
- Algorithm Maturity: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or near-AGI models will emerge between 2030-2035, covering more complex tasks.
- Infrastructure Popularization: Cost reduction in 5G, edge computing, and robotic hardware will push AI globally.
- Social Acceptance: The public gradually adapts to an AI-dominated economy, with policymakers beginning to explore measures like UBI.
According to Gartner's prediction, AI will replace 30% of existing global jobs by 2030, releasing enough wealth to support UBI. At this point, society's demand for UBI will peak.
2. Blockchain Performance Breakthrough (Estimated 10 Years)
Current blockchain performance is far from reaching 1 billion user scale. For example:
- Ethereum processes about 15 transactions per second, with Layer2 potentially increasing to 2000.
- Solana claims 65,000 transactions per second, but actual throughput is limited by network stability.
To support UBI, blockchain still needs to further break through the Blockchain Trilemma (decentralization, security, scalability).
If UBI dances with cryptocurrency, then cryptocurrency will be God's gift to humanity in the AI era, with Satoshi Nakamoto being the embodiment of Jesus.
