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

The current financial system was not created with machines in mind. Instead, it was built around the limitations of human life, 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. 'One could argue that cryptocurrency was designed for AI agents, not humans,' Viswanathan said. The discrepancy is evident everywhere. Banks have limited hours of operation 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, do not have a physical location, do not visit banks, and do not carry cards. Moreover, they are increasingly involved in transactions, not just assisting with tasks. 'All transactions for agents are online and inherently global,' Viswanathan said in an interview with CoinDesk. 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 applications to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and games, allowing companies to build and scale on-chain products without managing the complexity of blockchain systems themselves. Traditional finance is designed with friction in mind. For humans, paying someone in another country involves currency exchanges, intermediaries, delays, and fees, which is normal. However, for AI agents, this is unusable. Agents require seamless transactions across borders, often in tiny increments, and need 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. The complexity of cryptocurrency, including seed phrases, private keys, and interacting directly with code, is what makes it powerful for machines. Unlike humans, agents operate natively in code. 'Agents read in zeros and ones, which is their native language,' Viswanathan said. 'That's also the language of cryptocurrency.' For years, cryptocurrency has tried to become more human-friendly, but its underlying architecture was never really 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 shift from the postal system to the internet. While people once had to physically write a letter, buy a stamp, and mail it to share messages globally, 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 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.