The modern financial 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, that human-centered design is starting to look less like a feature and more like a bottleneck, said the co-founder of cryptocurrency company Alchemy.
“You can argue that cryptocurrencies were created for AI agents, not humans,” said Alchemy CEO and co-founder Nikil Viswanathan.
The mismatch is everywhere. Banks have opening hours because humans do. Payments are tied to countries because people live in them. Credit cards assume identity and physical presence, he said.
AI agents operate differently. They don’t sleep. They don’t live anywhere. They do not enter banks or carry cards. And increasingly, they not only help with tasks, but carry out transactions.
“All broker transactions are done online. They are inherently global,” Viswanathan, who will speak at Consensus Miami next month, told CoinDesk in an interview.
That’s where cryptocurrencies start to look less like an alternative financial system and more like the native infrastructure of a new type of economic actor, he said.
Alchemy is a crypto infrastructure company that provides the underlying tools and services that developers need to create blockchain-based applications. It offers APIs, node infrastructure, and data services that power everything from financial applications to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and games, allowing companies to build and scale on-chain products without managing the complexity of the blockchain systems themselves.
Created for the wrong user
Traditional finance involves friction. Paying someone in another country involves currency exchanges, middlemen, delays and fees. For humans, that is normal. But for AI agents, it is unusable.
Agents need to make cross-border transactions seamlessly, at any time, often in small increments. They need programmability, direct control over money through code, and systems that don’t depend on physical infrastructure or identity.
Cryptocurrencies offer exactly that: a global, always-on financial layer where value moves as easily as data, he said.
“Cryptocurrencies are the global infrastructure for money that agents need,” Viswanathan said.
Complexity changes
What has long made cryptocurrencies difficult for humans, including seed phrases, private keys and direct interaction with code, is exactly what makes them powerful for machines, Viswanathan said.
Unlike humans, agents operate natively in code.
“The officers read in zeros and ones. That’s their native language,” he said. “That’s also the language of cryptocurrencies.”
For years, cryptocurrencies have tried to abstract themselves and become something more human-friendly. But its underlying architecture was never built for humans in the first place.
Viswanathan compared the shift from cryptographic tools built primarily for humans to cryptographic tools used by AI agents to an earlier epochal shift from the postal system to the Internet. While it used to be that people had to physically write a letter, buy a stamp, and mail it to share messages around the world, communication in the modern era is much faster.
“Email is much more powerful than the postal system because it is designed for computers,” Viswanathan said. “Cryptocurrencies are similar.”
Agent-led financial system
Viswanathan said that in the future, AI agents will sit on top of crypto infrastructure, automatically handling complexity, managing wallets, executing transactions and optimizing capital flows in real time, allowing people to control their own funds more easily.
“You can write code to manage a crypto wallet,” Viswanathan said. “You can’t write code to manage a bank account in the same way.”
The result would be a more global, more programmable and more autonomous financial system.
Viswanathan said he sees a layered future: traditional finance and cryptocurrencies as the base, a layer of agents operating on top, and a human interface on top.
“Just as computers operate the Internet and humans use it, agents will operate finance,” he said.
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