San Francisco, California – Crypto has a habit of declaring the future early. In recent months, that instinct has fixated on autonomous AI agents, self-driving wallets and trading systems that can move capital without human oversight.
At NEARCON 2026, Dragonfly’s Haseeb Qureshi and Kraken’s co-CEO Arjun Sethi delivered a sharp debate about how quickly these agents can be trusted with real money.
The central disagreement was not about whether agents will ultimately manage capital; both think they will, but about timing and risk tolerance.
“Something that works with money 90% of the time is useless for actual economic activity,” Qureshi said. Even 95% reliability, he argued, is not sufficient. “It’s a lot of nothing, nothing, nothing… then something, and then everything. And right now we’re still in the nothing phase.”
Qureshi suggested that the industry may be overestimating how ready the technology is. He cautioned against extrapolating from viral demos on social media and pointed to examples of autonomous systems not working. “You want to be very careful about trying to form your worldview of technology by reading Twitter hype people and watching Twitter demos,” he said.
For Qureshi, impressive demonstrations are not the same as systems robust enough to handle meaningful capital. For major consumer platforms, he bluntly added, “You can’t do that villain**.”
Sethi, on the other hand, argued that the pace of improvement is exponential and is already reshaping the financial infrastructure. “We think we know what’s going to happen,” he said. “The speed and the level of innovation … is exponential.” Kraken, he noted, is already building agent-like capabilities for customers “weeks and months away — not years away.”
Where Qureshi sees a steep reliability threshold before widespread implementation, Sethi sees rapid iteration narrowing the gap. “The attack surface is growing as much as the security surface is growing,” he said, suggesting that defensive capabilities will scale along with risk.
The debate crystallized during a rapid-fire round. Asked what percentage of his own portfolio an AI could manage better today, Qureshi replied cautiously: “Five percent.”
Sethi’s answer: “Hundreds.”
When pressed further on whether he would commit all his crypto to an autonomous agent within a year, Sethi didn’t hesitate.
“Everything,” he said. “For the next six to twelve months.”
The exchange underscored a broader divide emerging within crypto: whether autonomous finance is a near-term inevitability or still a frontier experiment, and how much risk the industry is willing to tolerate to find out.
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