Alchemy CEO Claims Crypto Was Designed for AI Agents, Not Humans

The conventional financial system was not created with machines in mind. Instead, it was built around human limitations such as geographical boundaries, sleep patterns, paperwork, and physical presence. However, as AI agents start to participate in economic activities, this human-centric design is becoming a bottleneck, according to Nikil Viswanathan, co-founder of the crypto firm Alchemy. Viswanathan argues that cryptocurrency was essentially built for AI agents, not humans. The disparity 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, have no physical location, do not walk into banks, and do not 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 cryptocurrency 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 developers with the underlying tools and services needed to build blockchain-based applications, including APIs, node infrastructure, and data services. Traditional finance is based on friction, with cross-border payments involving currency exchanges, intermediaries, delays, and fees. For humans, this is normal, but for AI agents, it is unusable. Agents need to transact seamlessly across borders at any time, often in small increments, and require programmability, direct control over money via code, and systems that do not depend on physical infrastructure or identity. Cryptocurrency offers exactly that: a global, always-on financial layer where value moves as easily as data. What has long made cryptocurrency difficult for humans, 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 their native language is 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 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. While people once had to physically write out a letter, buy a stamp, and mail it to share messages across the globe, communication in the modern era is much faster. Viswanathan envisions a future where AI agents will sit on top of crypto infrastructure, handling complexity automatically, managing wallets, executing transactions, and optimizing flows of capital in real time, allowing people to control their funds more easily. The result would be a financial system that is more global, more programmable, and more autonomous, with a layered structure consisting of traditional finance and crypto as the base, an agent layer operating on top, and a human interface above that.