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

The current financial system was not designed with machines in mind, but rather 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 hindrance, according to Alchemy co-founder Nikil Viswanathan. Viswanathan argues that cryptocurrency was actually built for AI agents, not humans. The traditional financial system is filled with mismatches, such as banks having operating hours because humans do, payments being tied to countries because people live in them, and credit cards assuming physical identity and presence. In contrast, AI agents operate around the clock, have no physical location, and do not use banks or credit cards. They are increasingly capable of not just assisting with tasks, but also conducting transactions. All transactions for AI agents are online and inherently global, making cryptocurrency the native infrastructure for this new type of economic actor. Alchemy, a crypto infrastructure company, provides the underlying tools and services needed to build blockchain-based applications, 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. However, for AI agents, this is unusable. They 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. 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, AI agents operate natively in code, reading in zeros and ones, which is also the language of cryptocurrency. For years, cryptocurrency has tried to abstract itself into something more human-friendly, but its underlying architecture was never really built for humans in the first place. Viswanathan compares 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. 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 cryptocurrency infrastructure, handling complexity automatically, managing wallets, executing transactions, and optimizing flows of capital in real time, allowing people to control their own 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 cryptocurrency as the base, an agent layer operating on top, and a human interface above that.