Crypto's True Intended Users: AI Agents, According to Alchemy CEO

The conventional financial system was not designed with machines in mind, but rather around human constraints such as geographical location, sleep patterns, 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. "One could argue that crypto was built for AI agents, not humans," Viswanathan stated. The disparity is evident everywhere: banks have limited operating hours because humans do, payments are tied to countries because people live in them, and credit cards assume a physical identity and presence. In contrast, AI agents operate differently; they do not sleep, have no physical location, do not visit banks, and do not carry cards. Moreover, they are increasingly involved in transactions, not just assisting with tasks. All transactions for agents are online and inherently global, Viswanathan explained in an interview with CoinDesk. This is where crypto begins to resemble the native infrastructure for a new type of economic actor, rather than an alternative financial system. Alchemy, as a crypto infrastructure company, provides developers with the necessary tools and services to build blockchain-based applications, including APIs, node infrastructure, and data services. These tools enable companies to create and scale on-chain products without having to manage the complexity of blockchain systems themselves. Traditional finance is based on the assumption of friction, where cross-border payments involve currency exchanges, intermediaries, delays, and fees - a normal experience for humans but unusable for AI agents. Agents require seamless, borderless transactions at any time, often in small increments, and need programmability and direct control over money via code, without relying on physical infrastructure or identity. Crypto offers exactly that: a global, always-on financial layer where value can move as easily as data, Viswanathan noted. The complexity that has long made crypto challenging for humans, such as seed phrases, private keys, and interacting directly with code, is precisely what makes it powerful for machines. Unlike humans, agents operate natively in code, reading in zeros and ones, which is also the language of crypto. For years, crypto has attempted to become more human-friendly, but its underlying architecture was never truly built for humans. Viswanathan compared the shift from crypto tools being designed primarily for humans to 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. Looking ahead, Viswanathan envisions AI agents sitting 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, programmable, and 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. "Just like computers operate the internet and humans use it, agents will operate finance," Viswanathan said.