Alchemy CEO Claims Crypto Was Designed for AI, Not Humans

The existing financial system was not created with machines in mind. Instead, it was built around human limitations such as geographical location, sleep patterns, paperwork, and physical presence. However, as AI agents begin to participate in the economy, this human-centric design is becoming a bottleneck, according to Nikil Viswanathan, co-founder of the crypto firm Alchemy. Viswanathan argues that cryptocurrency was essentially built for AI agents, not humans. The disparity is evident everywhere: banks have limited hours because humans do, payments are tied to countries because people live in them, and credit cards assume physical identity and presence. In contrast, AI agents operate differently. They do not sleep, they do not have a physical location, and they do not walk into banks or carry cards. Moreover, they are increasingly capable of performing transactions on their own. All transactions for agents are online and inherently global, Viswanathan explained in an interview with CoinDesk. This is where cryptocurrency starts to look less like an alternative financial system and more like the native infrastructure for a new type of economic actor. Alchemy, a crypto infrastructure company, provides developers with the necessary tools and services to build blockchain-based applications, including APIs, node infrastructure, and data services. Traditional finance assumes friction, such as currency exchanges, intermediaries, delays, and fees, which is normal for humans but unusable for AI agents. Agents require seamless transactions across borders, often in small increments, and need programmability, direct control over money via code, and systems that do not depend on physical infrastructure or identity. Crypto offers exactly that: a global, always-on financial layer where value moves as easily as data. The complexity that has long made crypto difficult for humans, including seed phrases, private keys, and interacting directly with code, is exactly what makes it powerful for machines. Unlike humans, agents operate natively in code and read in zeros and ones, which is also the language of crypto. For years, crypto has tried to become more human-friendly, but its underlying architecture was never really built for humans. Viswanathan compared the shift from crypto tools being built primarily for humans to crypto tools being used by AI agents to the shift from the postal system to the internet. Just as email is more powerful than the postal system because it is designed for computers, crypto is similar. Moving forward, AI agents will sit on top of crypto infrastructure, handling complexity automatically, managing wallets, executing transactions, and optimizing flows of capital in real time, allowing people to control their funds more easily. The result would be a financial system that is more global, more programmable, and more autonomous, with a layered future consisting of traditional finance and crypto as the base, an agent layer operating on top, and a human interface above that.