Crypto Designed for AI Agents, Not Humans, According to Alchemy CEO

The traditional financial system was not designed with machines in mind. Instead, it was built around human limitations such as geographical constraints, sleep patterns, and physical presence. However, as AI agents start to participate in economic activities, this human-centric design is becoming a bottleneck, according to Nikil Viswanathan, co-founder of the crypto firm Alchemy. Viswanathan suggests that cryptocurrency was actually built for AI agents, not humans. The existing financial system is filled with human-centric limitations, such as banking hours, country-specific payments, and credit cards that require physical identity and presence. In contrast, AI agents operate without sleep, geographical constraints, or physical presence, and they are increasingly capable of performing transactions on their own. All transactions involving AI agents are online and global, Viswanathan noted in an interview. This is where cryptocurrency starts to emerge as the native infrastructure for a new type of economic actor, rather than an alternative financial system. Alchemy, a crypto infrastructure company, provides developers with the necessary tools and services to build blockchain-based applications, including APIs, node infrastructure, and data services. Traditional finance is based on the assumption of friction, which is normal for humans but unusable for AI agents. These agents require seamless, borderless transactions at any time, often in small increments, and they need programmability and direct control over money via code. Cryptocurrency offers exactly that - a global, always-on financial layer where value can move as easily as data. The complexity of cryptocurrency, including seed phrases, private keys, and interacting directly with code, is actually a strength when it comes to machines. Unlike humans, AI agents operate natively in code and can read zeros and ones as their native language, which is also the language of cryptocurrency. For years, cryptocurrency has tried to become more human-friendly, but its underlying architecture was never designed for humans in the first place. Viswanathan compared the shift from crypto tools being built primarily for humans to crypto tools being used by AI agents to the transition 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 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 will be a financial system that is more global, programmable, and autonomous, with a layered structure consisting of traditional finance and crypto as the base, an agent layer operating on top, and a human interface above that.