Crypto's True Intended Users: AI Agents, Not Humans, According to Alchemy's CEO

The existing financial system was not designed 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 bottleneck, according to Nikil Viswanathan, co-founder of the crypto firm Alchemy. 'One could argue that crypto 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, and credit cards assume physical identity and presence. AI agents, on the other hand, operate differently. They do not sleep, they do not have a physical presence, and they do not use banks or credit cards. Moreover, they are increasingly capable of performing transactions on their own. 'All transactions for agents are online and inherently global,' Viswanathan told CoinDesk in an interview. This is where crypto starts to look like the native infrastructure for a new type of economic actor, rather than an alternative financial system. Alchemy is a crypto infrastructure company that provides developers with the necessary tools and services to build blockchain-based applications. It offers APIs, node infrastructure, and data services that power a wide range of products, from financial apps to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and games, allowing companies to build and scale on-chain products without having to manage the complexity of blockchain systems themselves. Traditional finance is built on the assumption of friction. For humans, paying someone in another country involves currency exchanges, intermediaries, delays, and fees. However, for AI agents, this is not feasible. Agents need to be able 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. Crypto offers exactly that: a global, always-on financial layer where value can move as easily as data, according to Viswanathan. 'Crypto is the global infrastructure for money that agents need,' he said. 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, Viswanathan said. Unlike humans, agents operate natively in code. 'Agents read in zeros and ones, which is their native language,' he said. 'That's also the language of crypto.' For years, crypto 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 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. 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 funds more easily. 'You can write code to manage a crypto 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 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.