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

The current financial landscape was not designed with machines in mind, but rather around human constraints such as geographical location, sleep patterns, and physical presence. However, as AI agents start to participate in economic activities, this human-centric design is becoming a hindrance, according to Alchemy co-founder Nikil Viswanathan. 'One could argue that cryptocurrency was built for AI agents, not humans,' Viswanathan stated. The discrepancies are evident everywhere: banks operate on human schedules, payments are tied to countries, and credit cards require physical identity and presence. In contrast, AI agents do not sleep, have no physical location, and do not use traditional banking systems or credit cards. Moreover, they are increasingly involved in transactions, not just assisting with tasks. All transactions conducted by agents occur online and are inherently global, Viswanathan explained in an interview with CoinDesk. This is where cryptocurrency starts to emerge as the native infrastructure for a new type of economic actor, rather than an alternative financial system. Alchemy, a cryptocurrency 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, with cross-border payments involving currency exchanges, intermediaries, and fees. While this may be normal for humans, it is impractical for AI agents, which require seamless and rapid transactions across borders, often in small increments, as well as programmability and direct control over funds via code. Cryptocurrency offers exactly that: a global, always-on financial layer where value can be transferred as easily as data. The complexity that has long made cryptocurrency challenging for humans, including seed phrases, private keys, and interacting directly with code, is precisely what makes it powerful for machines, as agents operate natively in code. 'Agents are designed to read in zeros and ones, which is also the language of cryptocurrency,' Viswanathan said. For years, cryptocurrency has attempted to become more human-friendly, but its underlying architecture was never truly built for humans. Viswanathan compared the shift from cryptocurrency tools being designed primarily for humans to being used by AI agents to the transition 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. Moving forward, AI agents will utilize cryptocurrency 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 cryptocurrency wallet, but you cannot do the same with a traditional bank account,' Viswanathan said. The result will be a more global, programmable, and autonomous financial system. Viswanathan envisions a layered future, with traditional finance and cryptocurrency at 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.