According to Alchemy's CEO, Crypto Was Designed for AI, Not Humans

The current financial system was not designed with machines in mind. It was built around human limitations such as geographical location, sleep patterns, paperwork, and physical presence. However, as AI agents start 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 built for AI agents, not humans. The discrepancy is evident everywhere: banks have limited hours because humans do, payments are tied to countries because people live in them, and credit cards require physical identity and presence. AI agents, on the other hand, do not sleep, do not have a physical location, and do not use banks or credit cards. They also do not just assist with tasks, but transact. All transactions for agents are online and inherently global, Viswanathan said in an interview. This is where cryptocurrency starts to look like the native infrastructure for a new kind of economic actor, rather than an alternative financial system. Alchemy is a crypto infrastructure company that provides developers with the tools and services needed to build blockchain-based applications. It offers APIs, node infrastructure, and data services that power everything from financial apps to non-fungible tokens and games, enabling companies to build and scale on-chain products without managing the complexity of blockchain systems themselves. Traditional finance assumes friction, with cross-border payments involving currency exchanges, intermediaries, delays, and fees. For humans, this is normal, but for AI agents, it is unusable. Agents need to transact seamlessly across borders, at any time, often in small increments, and require programmability, direct control over money via code, and systems that do not depend on physical infrastructure or identity. Cryptocurrency offers exactly that: a global, always-on financial layer where value moves as easily as data. The complexity that has long made cryptocurrency 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 for years, cryptocurrency has tried to abstract itself into something more human-friendly. However, its underlying architecture was never really built for humans in the first place. Viswanathan compared the shift from cryptocurrency tools being built primarily for humans to cryptocurrency tools being used by AI agents to the shift from the postal system to the internet. While people once had to physically write out a letter, buy a stamp, and mail it to share messages across the globe, communication in the modern era is much faster. Moving forward, AI agents will sit on top of cryptocurrency 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 will be a financial system that is more global, more programmable, and more autonomous. Viswanathan envisions a layered future: traditional finance and cryptocurrency as the base, an agent layer operating on top, and a human interface above that.