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

The modern financial system was not designed with machines in mind, but rather around the constraints of human life, including geographical location, sleep patterns, paperwork, and physical presence. However, as AI agents become economic participants, 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 have limited hours due to human limitations, 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 sleep, don't have a physical location, and don't use banks or credit cards. Moreover, they don't just assist with tasks, but also transact. 'All transactions for agents are online and inherently global,' Viswanathan told CoinDesk in an interview. This is where crypto starts to look like the native infrastructure for a new type of economic actor, rather than an alternative financial system. Alchemy, a crypto infrastructure company, provides the underlying tools and services developers need to build blockchain-based applications, including APIs, node infrastructure, and data services. Traditional finance assumes friction, with cross-border payments involving currency exchanges, intermediaries, delays, and fees, which is normal for humans but unusable for AI agents. Agents require seamless, borderless transactions at any time, 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 moves as easily as data. 'Crypto is the global infrastructure for money that agents need,' 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. 'Agents read in zeros and ones, which is their native language, and that's also the language of crypto,' he said. For years, crypto has attempted to abstract itself into something more human-friendly, but its underlying architecture was never 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 shift from the postal system to the internet. '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, but you can't write code to manage a bank account in the same way,' Viswanathan said. The result would 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.