Crypto Designed for AI Agents, Not Humans, Claims Alchemy CEO

The current financial system was not designed with machines in mind. Instead, it was built around the limitations of human life, 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 hindrance, according to Alchemy co-founder Nikil Viswanathan. "One could argue that cryptocurrency was built for AI agents, not humans," Viswanathan said. The discrepancy is evident everywhere. Banks have limited operating 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, operate differently. They do not sleep, do not have a 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 told CoinDesk in an interview. This is where cryptocurrency starts to look like the native infrastructure for a new type of economic actor, rather than an alternative financial system. Alchemy, a cryptocurrency infrastructure company, provides the underlying tools and services that developers need to build blockchain-based applications. It offers APIs, node infrastructure, and data services that power everything from financial apps to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and games, enabling companies to build and scale on-chain products without managing the complexity of blockchain systems themselves. Traditional finance is based on 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 require seamless transactions across borders, at any time, often in small increments. They need programmability, direct control over money through code, and systems that do not depend on physical infrastructure or identity. Cryptocurrency provides exactly that: a global, always-on financial layer where value moves as easily as data. "Cryptocurrency is the global infrastructure for money that agents need," Viswanathan said. What 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. "Agents read in zeros and ones, which is their native language," he said. "That's also the language of cryptocurrency." For years, cryptocurrency has tried to become more human-friendly, but its underlying architecture was never really built for humans. 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 globally, modern communication is much faster. "Email is far more powerful than the postal system because it's designed for computers," Viswanathan said. "Cryptocurrency is similar." 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, making it easier for people to control their funds. "You can write code to manage a cryptocurrency wallet," Viswanathan said. "You can't write code to manage a bank account in the same way." The result would 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. "Just like computers operate the internet and humans use it, agents will operate finance," he said.