The crypto industry’s adoption of AI has less to do with chatbots and more to do with building financial infrastructure for autonomous machines, says Chappy Asel, former Apple engineer and founder of AI nonprofit The AI Collective.
Speaking at Consensus Miami, Asel, founder of The AI Collective, a global nonprofit AI community with more than 200,000 members across more than 150 chapters, argued that as software agents increasingly make economic decisions on behalf of users and businesses, they will need payment systems capable of handling programmable, low-latency transactions at scale.
“When agents make most financial and economic decisions, how do they transact with each other?” Asel said during the panel. “What you want is for them to be very systematic and mechanistic. You want very small microtransactions. You want very low latency.”
Asel, who previously worked on Apple’s Vision Pro and early Apple Intelligence efforts before launching The AI Collective, framed the convergence of cryptocurrencies and AI through a practical lens.
“The biggest thing I’ve heard throughout this conference… even my friends who only know about AI, don’t know anything about blockchain, is that they’ve heard about agent payments,” he said.
Stablecoins already offer 24/7 settlement and smart contracts allow for programmable execution. Matching them is the only logical way payments through agents (without a human being in the middle) can become commonplace.
Still, the thesis is still early. AI agents are still nascent and many businesses today rely on centralized APIs and conventional payment systems. Attempts to build an “agent payments” infrastructure have so far generated little significant commercial activity, suggesting the narrative may be developing faster than actual demand.
Even if machine-to-machine trading takes longer to materialize, Asel argued that the broader overlap between cryptocurrencies and AI may emerge elsewhere first.
“A lot of people will tell you, oh, the models aren’t good enough,” Asel said. “It’s nothing like that. It’s literally compute, data centers and energy that drives virtually all decision-making in AI right now.”
That framework reflects a broader shift in the AI economy, where access to chips, power and data center capacity is becoming the defining competitive advantage.
Parts of the crypto industry are already moving to take advantage of that opportunity. Several bitcoin miners have spent the past year repositioning themselves toward AI hosting and high-performance computing, betting that infrastructure originally built for mining can be repurposed for AI workloads.
For Asel, the practical advice for founders facing uncertainty was simple: experiment.
“When the world is more uncertain than ever… things are going to get crazier,” he said. “That ensures that more and more time is spent experimenting with new technology.”
The problem of consumer adoption of cryptocurrencies has always been in part a usability problem.
But AI agents don’t need onboarding tutorials, they aren’t intimidated by MetaMask, and they don’t need help remembering opening phrases. If autonomous software becomes a significant economic player, cryptocurrencies may have found a user base that actually thinks in code.
