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

The conventional financial system was not designed with machines in mind. Instead, it was built around human limitations such as geography, 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. Viswanathan stated, 'You can argue that crypto was built for AI agents, not humans.' The mismatch between the current financial system and AI agents 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, live in a specific location, walk into banks, or carry 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 look less like an alternative financial system and more like the native infrastructure for a new kind of economic actor. Alchemy, a crypto infrastructure company, provides the underlying tools and services developers need 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. Viswanathan believes that traditional finance assumes friction, which is normal for humans but unusable for AI agents. Agents need to transact seamlessly across borders, at any time, often in tiny increments, and 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 moves as easily as data. The complexity of crypto, 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 and can read in zeros and ones. 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. He believes that 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. This would result in 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.