San Francisco, CA – Cryptocurrencies have a habit of declaring the future early. In recent months, that instinct has focused on autonomous AI agents, autonomous wallets and trading systems that can move capital without human supervision.
At NEARCON 2026, Dragonfly’s Haseeb Qureshi and Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi engaged in an intense debate over when such agents can be trusted with real money.
The central disagreement was not over whether agents will eventually manage capital; both believe they will, but about timing and risk tolerance.
“Something that runs on money 90% of the time is unusable for real economic activity,” Qureshi said. Even 95% reliability, he argued, is not enough. “It’s very much nothing, nothing, nothing… then something, and then everything. And right now, we’re still in the nothing phase.”
Qureshi suggested that the industry may be overstating how ready the technology is. He warned against extrapolating viral demonstrations on social media, pointing to examples of autonomous systems malfunctioning. “You have to be very cautious when trying to assimilate your view of the world of technology by reading Twitter hype people and watching Twitter demos,” he said.
For Qureshi, impressive demonstrations are not the same as systems robust enough to manage significant capital. To major consumer platforms, he added bluntly: “You can’t do that shit.”
Sethi, on the other hand, argued that the pace of improvement is exponential and is already reshaping the financial infrastructure. “We think we know what’s going to happen,” he said. “The speed and level of innovation… is exponential.” Kraken, he noted, is already building agent-like capabilities for customers “within weeks and months, not years.”
While Qureshi sees a high reliability threshold before widespread deployment, Sethi sees rapid iteration narrowing the gap. “The attack surface grows as much as the security surface grows,” he said, suggesting that defensive capabilities will grow along with risk.
The debate crystallized during a rapid round. When asked what percentage of his own portfolio could best be managed by an AI today, Qureshi cautiously replied: “Five percent.”
Sethi’s response: “One hundred.”
When pressed further on whether he would put all his cryptocurrencies into a freelance broker within a year, Sethi did not hesitate.
“Everything,” he said. “In the next six to twelve months.”
The exchange underscored a broader divide emerging in the cryptocurrency space: whether autonomous finance is a near-term inevitability or remains a frontier experiment, and how much risk the industry is willing to tolerate to find out.
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