Alchemy CEO Claims Crypto is Better Suited for AI Agents Than Humans

The existing financial system was not designed with machines in mind, but rather around human constraints such as geography, sleep patterns, and physical presence. However, as AI agents start to participate in the economy, this human-centric design is becoming a hindrance, according to Nikil Viswanathan, co-founder of the crypto firm Alchemy. Viswanathan argues that cryptocurrency was essentially built for AI agents, not humans. The traditional financial system is filled with limitations, such as operating hours, country-based payments, and credit cards that require physical identity and presence. In contrast, AI agents do not sleep, have no physical location, and do not use traditional banking systems or credit cards. They conduct transactions online and are inherently global. This is where cryptocurrency starts to look like the native infrastructure for a new type of economic actor. Alchemy, a crypto infrastructure company, provides the necessary tools and services for developers to build blockchain-based applications, enabling companies to create and scale on-chain products without managing the complexity of blockchain systems themselves. Traditional finance is based on the assumption of friction, with cross-border payments involving currency exchanges, intermediaries, delays, and fees. However, for AI agents, this is not acceptable, as they need to transact seamlessly across borders, often in small increments, and require programmability and direct control over money via code. Cryptocurrency offers exactly that: a global, always-on financial layer where value moves as easily as data. The complexity of cryptocurrency, including seed phrases, private keys, and interacting directly with code, is what makes it powerful for machines. Unlike humans, AI agents operate natively in code and can read zeros and ones, which is also the language of cryptocurrency. For years, cryptocurrency has tried to become more human-friendly, but its underlying architecture was never built for humans in the first place. Viswanathan compares 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, cryptocurrency is similar. Moving forward, AI agents will sit on top of crypto infrastructure, handling complexity automatically, managing wallets, executing transactions, and optimizing capital flows 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.