AI agents will become more relevant than humans on the Internet within the next decade, a shift that is already forcing Google, Facebook and Amazon to respond, Charles Hoskinson said.
In his keynote at Consensus Miami 2026 on Wednesday, Hoskinson also said that “by 2035, the majority of searches, commerce and activity on the Internet will be AI agents instead of humans.”
He said the change threatens existing business models. “Amazon, Google, Facebook, they’re afraid of the agent revolution,” Hoskinson said, adding that companies are investing heavily because “all their business models are going to be disrupted.”
AI agents don’t click ads or have brand preferences, Hoskinson explained, saying this “threatens the ad-driven models of platforms like Google, Amazon and Facebook.”
“Why do you think Google is interested in x402?” he asked his audience about the Coinbase-backed protocol that enables AI agents and applications to make direct, programmatic payments over the Internet using stablecoins and cryptos.
Hoskinson noted that this shift will change how crypto is used, adding that artificial intelligence (AI) will increasingly handle tasks such as due diligence, transaction execution and interacting with decentralized finance.
The Hoskinson AI agent forecast echoes Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who said “very soon, there will be more AI agents than humans making transactions” and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who predicted they “will make a million times more payments than humans.”
On the other hand, Hoskinson said that AI agents are “the single best thing that ever happened to cryptocurrencies” because it simplifies the user experience.
The Cardano founder warned crypto users against relying on middlemen rather than maintaining direct control over their assets, which is the principle, he said, crypto was built on.
“You have to own your data. You have to own your identity. You have to own your money,” he said, adding that users are “outsourcing it to wallets,” “authorized networks” and “third parties that they’re going to regret trusting when they get their account closed.”
He also pointed to fragmentation across blockchain ecosystems as a barrier to progress, saying it has slowed development. “There have been 11 million tokens issued over the years. We have enough of those,” Hoskinson said. “What I want is cooperation. What I want is the mission to be accomplished.”
User experience remains a key issue limiting user adoption, said Hoskinson, who described current crypto onboarding processes as complex and prone to failure. “It’s the user experience of 2026,” he said. “Is it like a product you want to use?”
He said technologies such as account abstraction and chain abstraction could simplify how users interact with cryptosystems while maintaining control over assets and identity.
Hoskinson highlighted changing attitudes among financial institutions, noting that JPMorgan has moved from restricting crypto-related activity to developing blockchain-based products. “When we started, JPMorgan was cutting off people’s bank accounts, and now they have a blockchain product,” he said.
