SAN FRANCISCO, CA – As artificial intelligence advances, some cryptocurrency executives believe it could become the force that ultimately drives widespread use of blockchain infrastructure. Others are not convinced that the jump is so easy.
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 cryptocurrencies have ever experienced. “AI is fulfilling a quarter of the roadmap every two weeks right now,” he said, suggesting that projections based on previous cycles of cryptocurrency adoption may already be outdated. “You have to get rid of the data from the last six years and cut it 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 space that will be an absolute benefactor of the proliferation of AI adoption, it will be public blockchains and cryptoassets,” he said.
As autonomous agents begin to act on behalf of users, he suggested, crypto-native tools may offer practical advantages. “Agents obviously won’t want to authorize OpenClaw with their credit card… They’ll want to fund them with stablecoins. They’ll want to transact confidentially,” Horsley said, pointing to stablecoins and on-chain infrastructure as potential security barriers to machine-driven activity.
Diogo Monica, general partner at Haun Ventures and co-founder of Anchorage Digital, rejected the assumption that agent trading automatically requires new rails.
“There is a chance that agent payments commerce will be exactly the same as current payments commerce for the foreseeable future,” Monica said. “You’re telling me that superhuman intelligence can’t use today’s payment methods, today’s credit cards, today’s instant settlement, to pay for things and solve them on its own.”
“You can’t tell me that AGI is coming and that the agents are going to be super smart… and tell me that they’re not going to be smart enough to figure out different systems,” he added.
Still, 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 cryptocurrency verification and privacy tools could help mitigate some of the risks that AI introduces.
Whether blockchains will become the default rails for autonomous commerce is yet to be resolved. But as AI accelerates, the debate over the role of cryptocurrencies in that future is clearly intensifying.
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