SAN FRANCISCO, CA – As artificial intelligence races forward, some crypto executives believe it could become the force that finally pushes blockchain infrastructure into widespread use. Others aren’t convinced the leap is so straightforward.
In a recent panel discussion at NEARCON 2026, Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley described AI as “an unstoppable freight train,” arguing that its pace of development is unlike anything crypto has experienced. “AI is achieving a quarter of the roadmap every two weeks right now,” he said, suggesting that projections based on past crypto adoption cycles may already be outdated. “You have to dump the last six years of data and cut it fresh from the last six months.”
For Horsley, the implication is that public blockchains could benefit disproportionately from the rise of AI. “If there is one area that will be an unqualified benefactor for the adoption of AI, it will be public blockchains and cryptoassets,” he said.
As autonomous agents begin to act on behalf of users, he suggested, crypto-native tools could provide practical benefits. “Agents, of course, you don’t want to authorize OpenClaw with your credit card… You want to fund them with stablecoins. They want to trade confidentially,” Horsley said, pointing to stablecoins and onchain infrastructure as potential roadblocks to machine-driven activity.
Diogo Monica, general partner at Haun Ventures and co-founder of Anchorage Digital, pushed back on the assumption that agent trading automatically requires new rails.
“There is a chance that agent payments trading will resemble current payment trading for the foreseeable future,” Monica said. “You’re telling me that a superhuman intelligence can’t use the current payment rails, the current credit cards, the current instant settlement, to pay for things and figure it out on their own.”
“You can’t tell me AGI is coming and agents will be super smart … and tell me they won’t be smart enough to figure out different systems,” he added.
Yet Monica recognized a deeper alignment between the technologies. “AI creates digital abundance and crypto versus digital scarcity. These are actually complementary technologies,” he said, adding that crypto’s privacy and verification tools can help mitigate some of the risks AI introduces.
Whether blockchains will become the standard rails for autonomous commerce is still unclear. But as AI accelerates, the debate over crypto’s role in that future is clearly intensifying.
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