The crypto industry has been filled with many promoters touting dubious use cases of blockchain technology over the years. At various times in its history, crypto was supposed to revolutionize everything from supply chain logistics to the monetization of digital art, but for the most part, bitcoin as a long-term store of value is still the only use case that shows any actual promise. Centrally-issued stablecoins have also become more prominent in recent years; however, they’re also being issued on increasingly centralized rails, which throws into question whether this is really something new or just a new wrapper for traditional finance. Over the past few years, one of the new sales pitches from crypto promoters has been the combination of blockchain technology with artificial intelligence, and the good news is these promoters have the perfect crypto token to sell you to get rich quickly off this combination of two emerging innovations! However, a new report from researchers at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and other top universities found that crypto has “limited utility” for solving issues related to payments and trust in AI. The survey in question, known as the Crypto x AI Survey and associated with the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts, lays out the basis for that assessment in its review of potential overlaps. On whether crypto can help AI, the work describes mostly conceptual possibilities rather than proven solutions. Stablecoins and micropayment systems might let autonomous agents handle payments for data samples or compute access without relying on traditional financial intermediaries, while zero-knowledge proofs and trusted execution environments could support verifiable or private computations in AI pipelines. Decentralized physical infrastructure networks and data marketplaces receive attention as ways to distribute resources through token incentives.