Alchemy CEO: Cryptocurrency is Better Suited for AI Agents Than Humans

The existing financial system was not created with machines in mind, but rather with the constraints of human life, such as geographical location, sleep patterns, and physical presence. However, as AI agents begin to participate in the economy, this human-centric design is becoming a hindrance, says Alchemy co-founder Nikil Viswanathan. "You can argue that cryptocurrency was built for AI agents, not humans," he stated. The mismatch between traditional finance and AI agents is evident everywhere, from banks' operating hours to credit cards' assumption of physical identity. AI agents, on the other hand, operate around the clock, are location-independent, and don't require physical presence. They are increasingly capable of performing transactions on their own. "All transactions for agents are online and inherently global," Viswanathan explained. This is where cryptocurrency starts to look like the native infrastructure for a new type of economic actor. Alchemy, a crypto infrastructure company, provides the necessary tools and services for developers to build blockchain-based applications, enabling companies to create and scale on-chain products without managing the complexity of blockchain systems themselves. Traditional finance is built on the assumption of friction, with cross-border payments involving currency exchanges, intermediaries, delays, and fees. However, for AI agents, this is not only unnecessary but also unusable. Agents require seamless, programmable, and direct control over money via code, without relying on physical infrastructure or identity. Cryptocurrency offers exactly that: a global, always-on financial layer where value can move 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 actually a strength when it comes to machines. Unlike humans, 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 really built for humans. Viswanathan compared 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. Just as email is more powerful than the postal system because it's 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 flows of capital in real time, making it easier for people to control their own funds. "You can write code to manage a crypto wallet, but you can't write code to manage a bank account in the same way," Viswanathan said. The result will 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.