Ultraman Returns to Y Combinator to Invest in Tokenized Equity: Ostensibly an Ecosystem Collaboration, Actually a Strategy to Dilute Early-Stage Investors

According to Dynamic Observers Beating, the big model giants are directly harvesting the most foundational AI ecosystem through resource dumping. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in his capacity as a "former leader," announced at a Y Combinator event that he would provide each YC incubated project with a $2 million OpenAI Token allocation, directly in exchange for early-stage equity of these startups.

This indiscriminate investment is seen by the public as a historical reenactment of Yuri Milner's benevolent investment in 2011, causing a stir in the VC community. For YC, this cooperation means that startups do not have to use precious $500,000 in cash to pay API bills. The implicit "unwinding" of funds directly boosts team survival rates and allows YC to passively increase the value of their early-stage equity.

However, beneath the appearance of a win-win situation, this is fundamentally OpenAI's tactic of cannibalizing the early-stage VC community. Leveraging computational power, OpenAI is using a virtual token with extremely low marginal cost to exchange for highly scarce quality startup equity. As computational power becomes fully "fiat-ized," this implicit "Token Minting Tax" not only significantly reduces startups' cash needs from traditional VCs but also fundamentally closes off the spread channel of Anthropic or open-source ecosystems in the next generation of software at a physical source level.