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

The modern financial system was not designed to accommodate machines, but rather was built around human constraints such as geographical location, 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 cryptocurrency was built for AI agents, not humans,' Viswanathan said. The discrepancy is evident everywhere: banks have limited operating hours because humans do, payments are tied to countries because people live in them, and credit cards require physical identity and presence. In contrast, AI agents do not sleep, do not have a physical location, do not walk into banks, and do not carry cards. Moreover, they are increasingly capable of transacting on their own. 'All transactions for agents are online and inherently global,' Viswanathan told CoinDesk in an interview. This is where cryptocurrency 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 developers with the necessary tools and services to build blockchain-based applications, including APIs, node infrastructure, and data services. Traditional finance is built on the assumption of friction, where cross-border payments involve currency exchanges, intermediaries, delays, and fees. However, for AI agents, this is not only inconvenient but also unusable. Agents require seamless, borderless transactions at any time, often in small increments, and need programmability, direct control over funds via code, and systems that do not rely on physical infrastructure or identity. Cryptocurrency offers exactly that: a global, always-on financial layer where value can be transferred 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 precisely what makes it powerful for machines. Unlike humans, agents operate natively in code and 'speak' in zeros and ones, which is also the language of cryptocurrency. For years, cryptocurrency has tried to become more human-friendly, but its underlying architecture was never designed 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. Just as email is more powerful than the postal system because it is designed for computers, cryptocurrency is similar. Looking ahead, Viswanathan envisions a future where AI agents sit on top of crypto infrastructure, handling complexity automatically, managing wallets, executing transactions, and optimizing capital flows in real-time, making it easier for people to control their funds. 'You can write code to manage a crypto wallet, but you can't do the same with a bank account,' Viswanathan said. The result would be a financial system that is more global, more programmable, and more autonomous. Viswanathan sees a layered future: traditional finance and cryptocurrency as the base, an agent layer operating on top, and a human interface above that. 'Just as computers operate the internet and humans use it, agents will operate finance,' he said.