MIAMI BEACH, Fla. Crypto wallets are being retooled for AI agents, executives from Trust Wallet and Mesh said Thursday, as companies scramble to give autonomous software a way to hold value, prove identity and transact on-chain.
Speaking at CoinDesk Miami, Arjun Mukherjee, chief technology officer at Mesh, said the shift is driven by what he called the cold-start problem for AI agents.
“An agent can’t do anything until it has a wallet funded,” he said. “It’s very difficult for the agent to trade until it has a wallet to do something and it has value to trade with. And suddenly you have to enter crypto. Crypto has kind of found its niche, its killer app.”
Mesh, which builds a connection layer across exchanges, wallets, smart contracts and decentralized exchanges, has launched a product called Smart Funding that directs payments across chains, networks, accounts and tokens to both human and agent users.
Felix Fan, CEO of Trust Wallet, said the company is taking a deliberate two-pronged approach to agent integration. On its consumer crypto app, where users hold the keys, agents act as a copilot to simplify navigation and reduce friction without taking custody.
“The users always have the keys and all these permissions. Every single step they have to give consent,” Fan said. The agent’s role on the consumer side is to “speed up the process and also help them better understand how to navigate the chain.”
On the developer side, Trust Wallet has taken a more aggressive stance. The company recently launched an agent kit that lets agents autonomously make trades, transfers and other on-chain actions, and it implements EIP-8004, an Ethereum proposal that gives agents on-chain identity and credit-style scores.
“On the crypto app side, we enable humans to have superpowers with AI, while on the developer side, we enable agents to do something like humans,” Fan said.
As for where the responsibility lies, Mukherjee said Mesh is wary of importing the friction of traditional finance into agent payments.
“AI should augment human judgment, not replace human responsibility or accountability,” he said, adding that responsibility for an agent’s actions rests with the institution that implements it.
Both panelists said they expect AI labs to launch their own wallets. X has already been vocal about X Money, Fan noted, and “Grok will very likely have a wallet inside.”
“Claude and all these players, they can ride the chain maybe just tomorrow,” Fan said. “So we are open to that challenge.”
Mukherjee said Mesh’s strategy is to remain agnostic across wallets, networks and tokens.
“If there’s Web3-based e-commerce on any network, on any token and all connected funds, we all win,” he said.
