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

The current financial system was not designed with machines in mind. Instead, it was built 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 Nikil Viswanathan, co-founder of the cryptocurrency firm Alchemy. "You can argue that cryptocurrency was built for AI agents, not humans," Viswanathan said. The disparity is evident everywhere. Banks have limited operating hours because humans do. Payments are tied to countries because people live in them. Credit cards assume physical identity and presence. AI agents, on the other hand, operate differently. They do not sleep, do not live in a specific location, do not visit banks, and do not carry cards. Moreover, they are increasingly capable of performing transactions. "All transactions for agents are online and inherently global," Viswanathan told CoinDesk in an interview. This is where cryptocurrency starts to look less like an alternative financial system and more like the native infrastructure for a new type of economic actor. Alchemy is a cryptocurrency infrastructure company that 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. For humans, paying someone in another country involves currency exchanges, intermediaries, delays, and fees. However, for AI agents, this is impractical. Agents need to transact seamlessly across borders, at any time, often in small increments. They 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. "Cryptocurrency is the global infrastructure for money that agents need," Viswanathan said. 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, agents operate natively in code. "Agents read in zeros and ones. That's their native language," he said. "That's also the language of cryptocurrency." For years, cryptocurrency has tried to abstract itself into something more human-friendly. However, its underlying architecture was never really built for humans in the first place. Viswanathan compared the shift from cryptocurrency tools being built primarily for humans to cryptocurrency 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. "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. "You can write code to manage a cryptocurrency wallet," Viswanathan said. "You can't write code to manage a bank account in the same way." The result would be a financial system that is more global, more programmable, and more autonomous. Viswanathan envisions a layered future: traditional finance and cryptocurrency 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.