Crypto's True Purpose: Empowering AI Agents Over Humans, According to Alchemy's CEO

The existing financial landscape was never designed with machines in mind. Instead, it was built around human limitations such as 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 significant obstacle, according to Nikil Viswanathan, co-founder of the crypto firm Alchemy. "One could argue that crypto was built for AI agents, not humans," Viswanathan stated. The discrepancy is evident everywhere: banks have limited operating hours because humans do, payments are tied to specific countries because people reside in them, and credit cards assume a physical identity and presence. AI agents, on the other hand, operate differently. They don't require sleep, don't have a physical location, and don't use banks or credit cards. Moreover, they are increasingly involved in transactions, not just assisting with tasks. All transactions for agents are online and inherently global, Viswanathan explained in an interview with CoinDesk. This is where crypto starts to resemble the native infrastructure for a new type of economic actor, rather than an alternative financial system. Alchemy, a crypto infrastructure company, provides the necessary tools and services for developers to build blockchain-based applications, including APIs, node infrastructure, and data services that power various products such as financial apps, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and games. Traditional finance is based on friction, with cross-border payments involving currency exchanges, intermediaries, delays, and fees. While this is normal for humans, it's impractical for AI agents. Agents require seamless transactions across borders, often in small increments, and need programmability, direct control over money via code, and systems that don't rely on physical infrastructure or identity. Crypto offers exactly that: a global, always-on financial layer where value can move as easily as data, Viswanathan said. What has long made crypto challenging for humans, including seed phrases, private keys, and interacting directly with code, is precisely what makes it powerful for machines. Unlike humans, agents operate natively in code, with zeros and ones being their native language, which is also the language of crypto. For years, crypto has attempted to become more human-friendly, but its underlying architecture was never truly 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 transition from the postal system to the internet. While people once had to physically write and mail letters to share messages globally, modern communication 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 capital flows 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 will 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.