According to Alchemy's CEO, Cryptocurrency is Designed for AI Agents Rather Than Humans

The existing financial system was not created with machines in mind, but rather around the limitations of human existence, such as geographical location, sleep patterns, paperwork, and physical presence. However, as AI agents start to participate in economic activities, this human-centered design is becoming a hindrance, according to Alchemy co-founder Nikil Viswanathan. "You can argue that cryptocurrency was built for AI agents, not humans," Viswanathan stated. The disparity is evident everywhere: banks have operating hours because humans do, payments are tied to countries because people live in them, and credit cards assume physical identity and presence. AI agents, on the other hand, operate differently. They do not sleep, they do not have a physical location, and they do not carry cards or walk into banks. Moreover, they are increasingly involved in transactions, not just assisting with tasks. All transactions for agents are online and inherently global, Viswanathan noted in an interview with CoinDesk. This is where cryptocurrency starts to appear less like an alternative financial system and more like the native infrastructure for a new type of economic actor. Alchemy, a cryptocurrency infrastructure company, provides developers with the necessary tools and services to build blockchain-based applications, including APIs, node infrastructure, and data services that power everything from financial apps to non-fungible tokens and games. Traditional finance is based on the assumption of friction, where paying someone in another country involves currency exchanges, intermediaries, delays, and fees. For humans, this is normal, but for AI agents, it is impractical. Agents require seamless transactions across borders, at any time, often in small increments, and they need programmability, direct control over money via code, and systems that do not rely 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 challenging for humans, including seed phrases, private keys, and interacting directly with code, is precisely what makes it powerful for machines. Unlike humans, agents operate natively in code, and their native language is zeros and ones, which is also the language of cryptocurrency. For years, cryptocurrency has attempted to become more human-friendly, but its underlying architecture was never truly designed for humans. Viswanathan compared the shift from cryptocurrency tools being built primarily for humans to cryptocurrency tools being used by AI agents to the earlier shift from the postal system to the internet. In the future, AI agents will sit on top of cryptocurrency 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 will be a financial system that is more global, more programmable, and more autonomous, with a layered structure consisting of traditional finance and cryptocurrency as the base, an agent layer operating on top, and a human interface above that.