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

The existing financial system was not created with machines in mind, but rather around the limitations of human existence, including geographical constraints, 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 Nikil Viswanathan, co-founder of the crypto firm Alchemy. Viswanathan stated, "You can argue that crypto was built for AI agents, not humans." The discrepancy 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 don't sleep, they don't have a physical presence, and they don't use banks or credit cards. Increasingly, they don't just assist with tasks, but also carry out transactions. All transactions for agents are online and inherently global, Viswanathan told CoinDesk in an interview. This is where crypto starts to look less like an alternative financial system and more like the native infrastructure for a new type of economic actor. Alchemy, a crypto infrastructure company, provides developers with the underlying tools and services needed 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's unusable. Agents need to transact seamlessly across borders, at any time, often in tiny increments, and they require programmability, direct control over money via code, and systems that don't depend on physical infrastructure or identity. Crypto offers exactly that: a global, always-on financial layer where value moves as easily as data. What has long made crypto 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. That's their native language," Viswanathan said. "That's also the language of crypto." For years, crypto 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 compared the shift from crypto tools being built primarily for humans to crypto tools being used by AI agents to an earlier 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 across the globe, communication in the modern era is much faster. "Email is far more powerful than the postal system because it's designed for computers," Viswanathan said. "Crypto is similar." Moving forward, AI agents will sit on top of crypto 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. Viswanathan envisions a layered future: 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," he said.