The modern economic system was never designed for machines. It was built around the limitations of human life: geography, sleep cycles, paperwork and physical presence. But as AI agents begin to act as economic participants, human-centered design begins to look less like a feature and more like a bottleneck, said the co-founder of crypto firm Alchemy.
“You could argue that crypto was built for AI agents, not humans,” said Alchemy CEO and co-founder Nikil Viswanathan.
The discrepancy is everywhere. Banks have business hours because people do. Payments are tied to countries because people live in them. Credit cards assume physical identity and presence, he said.
AI agents work differently. They don’t sleep. They don’t live anywhere. They don’t go into banks or carry cards. And increasingly, they don’t just help with tasks, they act.
“All transactions for agents are online. They are inherently global,” Viswanathan, who will speak at Consensus Miami next month, told CoinDesk in an interview.
This is where crypto starts to look less like an alternative financial system and more like the initial infrastructure for a new kind of economic actor, he said.
Alchemy is a crypto-infrastructure company that provides the underlying tools and services that developers need to build blockchain-based applications. It offers APIs, node infrastructure and data services that power everything from financial apps to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and games, enabling companies to build and scale onchain products without having to manage the complexities of blockchain systems themselves.
Built for the wrong user
Traditional financing assumes friction. Paying someone in another country involves currency exchange, intermediaries, delays and fees. For humans, this is normal. But for AI agents it is useless.
Agents need to trade seamlessly across borders at all times, often in small increments. They need programmability, direct control of money via code, and systems that don’t depend on physical infrastructure or identity.
Crypto offers exactly that: a global, always-on financial layer where value moves as easily as data, he said.
“Crypto is the global infrastructure for money that agents need,” Viswanathan said.
Complexity reverses
What has long made crypto difficult for humans, including seed sentences, private keys and interacting directly with code, is exactly what makes it powerful for machines, Viswanathan said.
Unlike humans, agents operate embedded in code.
“Agents read in zeros and ones. It’s their native language,” he said. “It’s also the crypto language.”
For years, crypto has tried to abstract itself into something more human-friendly. But its underlying architecture was never really built for humans in the first place.
Viswanathan compared the shift from crypto tools built primarily for humans to crypto tools used by AI agents to an earlier era shift from the postal system to the Internet. While people once had to physically type out a letter, buy a stamp and mail it to share messages across the globe, communication in the modern era is much faster.
“Email is far more powerful than the postal system because it was designed for computers,” Viswanathan said. “Crypto is similar.”
Agent driven financial system
Viswanathan said that going forward, AI agents will sit on top of the crypto infrastructure, handle complexity automatically, manage wallets, execute transactions and optimize flows of capital in real-time, allowing people to more easily control their own funds.
“You can write code to manage a crypto wallet,” Viswanathan said. “You can’t write code to manage a bank account the same way.”
The result would be a financial system that is more global, more programmable and more autonomous.
Viswanathan said he sees a layered future: traditional finance and crypto as the base, an agent layer operating on top and a human interface above that.
“Just as computers run the Internet and people use it, agents will run finance,” he said.
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