SAN FRANCISCO, CA – Crypto isn’t just building faster payment rails. It could be building the financial system for non-humans.
As AI agents become more autonomous, developers are already providing them with crypto-wallets, enabling software to store assets, pay for services, trade tokens, and even hire other agents. The technical pieces fall into place. The legal ones are not.
At a recent panel at NEARCON 2026, Electric Capital’s Avichal Garg framed the moment as historically significant.
“What happens if there is no human behind it at all?” Garg asked. “It’s a piece of code that owns a wallet that executes code to make more money… How does liability work in that case? I actually don’t know.”
Crypto makes this possible in a way that traditional finance cannot. Blockchains allow programmable money, instant settlement and global access. Couple that with AI agents capable of making decisions, and you get something new: software that can both think and act.
Garg compared the shift to the creation of the joint-stock company in the 19th century—a legal breakthrough that unlocked pooled capital and growth on an industrial scale.
“The cost of participating in the economy has come down so far,” he said. “You’re talking about anyone in the world, with relatively little money, being able to create value.”
But enforcement is still unclear.
“You can’t punish an AI,” Garg noted. “You can turn them off, but they don’t care.”
If autonomous agents begin to trade, lend, hire and scale businesses onchain, lawmakers may face a fundamental question: Who is responsible when software with its own wallet acts independently?
Read more: Kraken co-CEO could trust AI with 100% of his crypto – Dragonfly’s Haseeb Qureshi not convinced
