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

The conventional financial system was never designed to accommodate machines. Instead, it was built 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 bottleneck, according to Alchemy co-founder Nikil Viswanathan. 'One could argue that crypto was built for AI agents, not humans,' Viswanathan said. The disparity is evident everywhere: banks operate during specific 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 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 told CoinDesk in an interview. 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 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, delays, and fees. However, for AI agents, this is impractical. Agents require seamless, instantaneous transactions across borders, often in small increments, and need programmability and direct control over money via code. Crypto offers exactly that: a global, always-on financial layer where value can move as easily as data. 'Crypto is the global infrastructure for money that agents need,' Viswanathan said. 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 zeros and ones as 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 designed 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 communicate 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, programmable, and 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.