The crypto industry’s embrace of AI is less about chatbots and more about building financial infrastructure for autonomous machines, says Chappy Asel, a former Apple engineer and founder of AI nonprofit The AI Collective.
Speaking at Consensus Miami, Asel, founder of The AI Collective, a global nonprofit AI community with more than 200,000 members across 150+ chapters, argued that as software agents increasingly make financial decisions on behalf of users and businesses, they will need payment systems capable of handling programmable, low-latency transactions at scale.
“When agents make the majority of financial decisions, economic decisions, how do they act with each other?” Asel said during the panel. “You want them to be very systematic, mechanistic. You want very small microtransactions. You want very low latency.”
Asel, who previously worked on Apple’s Vision Pro and early Apple Intelligence efforts before launching The AI Collective, framed the convergence of crypto and AI through a practical lens.
“The most important thing I’ve heard throughout this conference… even my friends who only know about AI, they know nothing about blockchain, is that they’ve heard about agent payments,” he said.
Stablecoins already offer 24/7 settlement and smart contracts allow programmable execution. Marrying them together is the only logical way agent payments – without a human in the middle – can become mainstream.
Still, the thesis remains early. AI agents are still nascent, and many companies today rely on centralized APIs and conventional payment systems. Attempts to build “agent payments” infrastructure have so far generated little meaningful commercial activity, suggesting the narrative may be evolving faster than actual demand.
Even if machine-to-machine trading takes longer to materialize, Asel argued that the broader overlap between crypto and artificial intelligence may emerge elsewhere first.
“A lot of people will tell you, oh, it’s that the models aren’t good enough,” Asel said. “It’s none of that. It’s literally computers, data centers, energy that’s driving pretty much all the decision-making in AI right now.”
This framework reflects a broader shift in the AI economy, where access to chips, power and data center capacity is becoming the defining competitive advantage.
Parts of the crypto industry are already moving to capture that opportunity. Several bitcoin miners have spent the past year repositioning themselves toward AI hosting and high-performance computing, betting that infrastructure originally built for mining can be repurposed for AI workloads.
For Asel, the practical advice for founders who had to navigate the uncertainty was simple: experiment.
“When the world is more uncertain than it’s ever been… things are only going to get crazier,” he said. “It guarantees that you spend more and more time playing with the new technology.”
Crypto’s problem with consumer adoption has always been partly a usability problem.
But AI agents don’t need onboarding tutorials, aren’t intimidated by MetaMask, or need help remembering seed phrases. If autonomous software becomes a meaningful economic player, crypto may have found a user base that actually thinks in code.
