Alchemy CEO Nikil Viswanathan argues the global financial system was designed for humans, but the next wave of commerce will be driven by AI agents that operate natively in crypto.
What to know:
- Crypto matches how agents operate, being borderless, continuous, and fully digital, said Nikil Viswanathan, co-founder and CEO of Alchemy.
- Complexity like keys and code is a feature for agents, not a barrier.
- AI agents will sit on top of crypto rails, handling transactions while humans interact through simpler interfaces, he argued.
The modern financial system was never designed for machines. It was built around the constraints of human life: geography, sleep cycles, paperwork, and physical presence. But as AI agents begin to act as economic participants, that human-centric design is starting to look less like a feature, and more like a bottleneck, said the co-founder of crypto firm Alchemy.
“You can argue that crypto was built for AI agents, not humans,” said Alchemy CEO and co-founder Nikil Viswanathan.
The mismatch is everywhere. Banks have operating hours because humans do. Payments are tied to countries because people live in them. Credit cards assume physical identity and presence, he said.
AI agents operate differently. They don’t sleep. They don’t live anywhere. They don’t walk into banks or carry cards. And increasingly, they don’t just assist with tasks, they transact.
“All transactions for agents are online. They’re inherently global,” Viswanathan, who will be speaking at Consensus Miami next month, told CoinDesk in an interview.
That’s where crypto starts to look less like an alternative financial system and more like the native infrastructure for a new kind of economic actor, he said.
Alchemy is a crypto infrastructure company that provides the underlying tools and services developers need to build blockchain-based applications. It offers APIs, node infrastructure, and data services that power everything from financial apps to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and games, enabling companies to build and scale onchain products without managing the complexity of blockchain systems themselves.
Built for the wrong user
Traditional finance assumes friction. Paying someone in another country involves currency exchanges, intermediaries, delays and fees. For humans, that’s normal. But for AI agents, it’s unusable.
Agents need to transact seamlessly across borders, at any time, often in tiny increments. They need programmability, direct control over money via code, and systems that don’t depend on physical infrastructure or identity.
Crypto offers exactly that: a global, always-on financial layer where value moves as easily as data, he said.
“Crypto is the global infrastructure for money that agents need,” Viswanathan said.
Complexity flips
What has long made crypto difficult for humans, including seed phrases, private keys and interacting directly with code, is exactly what makes it powerful for machines, Viswanathan said.
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, crypto has tried to abstract itself into something more human-friendly. But its underlying architecture was never really built for humans in the first place.
Viswanathan compared the shift from crypto tools being built primarily for humans to crypto tools being used by AI agents to an earlier epochal 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.
“Email is far more powerful than the postal system because it’s designed for computers,” Viswanathan said. “Crypto is similar.”
Agent-run financial system
Viswanathan said that moving forward, AI agents will sit on top of crypto infrastructure, handling complexity automatically, managing wallets, executing transactions and optimizing flows of capital in real time, letting people control their own 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 would be a financial system that is more global, more programmable, and more autonomous.
Viswanathan said he sees 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.
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