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 geography, sleep patterns, and physical presence. However, as AI agents become more involved in economic activities, this human-centric design is becoming a bottleneck, according to Nikil Viswanathan, co-founder of crypto firm Alchemy. Viswanathan argues that crypto was essentially built for AI agents, not humans. The traditional financial system is filled with limitations, such as operating hours, country-specific payments, and credit cards that require physical identity and presence. In contrast, AI agents operate around the clock, have no physical location, and do not use traditional banking systems or credit cards. They are increasingly involved in transactions, and all their transactions are online and global. This is where crypto starts to look like the native infrastructure for a new kind 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 is based on friction, with cross-border payments involving currency exchanges, intermediaries, delays, and fees. However, for AI agents, this is unusable, as they need to transact seamlessly across borders at any time, often in small increments, and require programmability and direct control over money via code. 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, and crypto's underlying architecture was never really built for humans in the first place. Viswanathan compares the shift from crypto tools being built primarily for humans to crypto tools being used by AI agents to the shift from the postal system to the internet. 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 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 crypto as the base, an agent layer operating on top, and a human interface above that.