According to Alchemy's CEO, Cryptocurrency was Designed for AI Agents, Not Humans

The existing financial system was not designed with machines in mind. Instead, it was built around human limitations 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. "You can argue that crypto was built for AI agents, not humans," Viswanathan said. The discrepancy is evident everywhere. Banks have limited hours because humans do, payments are tied to countries because people live in them, and credit cards require physical identity and presence. AI agents, on the other hand, operate differently. They don't sleep, they don't have a physical location, and they 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 cryptocurrency starts to look less like an alternative financial system and more like the native infrastructure for a new kind of economic actor. Alchemy is a crypto infrastructure company that provides developers with the necessary tools and services to build blockchain-based applications. It offers APIs, node infrastructure, and data services that power various products, including financial apps, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and games, enabling companies to build and scale on-chain products without having to manage the complexity of blockchain systems themselves. Traditional finance assumes friction, with cross-border payments involving currency exchanges, intermediaries, delays, and fees. For humans, this is normal, but for AI agents, it's unusable. Agents require seamless transactions across borders, often in small increments, and need programmability, direct control over money via code, and systems that don't rely on physical infrastructure or identity. Cryptocurrency 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 cryptocurrency, 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. "Agents read in zeros and ones, that's their native language," he said. "That's also the language of crypto." For years, cryptocurrency has tried to become more human-friendly, but its underlying architecture was never really 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 a letter, buy a stamp, and mail it to share messages globally, communication in the modern era 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, making it easier for people to control their funds. "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, 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.