The modern financial system was never designed for machines. It was built around the constraints of human life, such as geography, sleep cycles, paperwork, and physical presence. But as AI agents begin to act as economic participants, their human-centered design is starting to look more like a bottleneck than a feature, said the co-founder of cryptocurrency company Alchemy.
“You could argue that cryptocurrencies were created for AI agents, not humans,” said Nikhil Viswanathan, CEO and co-founder of Alchemy.
Mismatches are everywhere. Banks also have business hours because humans do. Payments are tied to the state because people live there. He said credit cards rely on physical identity and presence.
AI agents behave differently. they don’t sleep They don’t live anywhere. They don’t go to banks or carry cards. And increasingly, they are not only assisting with tasks, but also conducting transactions.
“All agency transactions are done online. They are global in nature,” Viswanathan, who will be speaking at Consensus Miami next month, told CoinDesk in an interview.
From there, he said, cryptocurrencies begin to look less like an alternative financial system and more like a native infrastructure for a new kind of economic entity.
Alchemy is a crypto infrastructure company that provides the underlying tools and services that developers need to build blockchain-based applications. It provides APIs, node infrastructure, and data services that power everything from financial apps to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and games, allowing enterprises to build and scale on-chain products without managing the complexity of the blockchain system itself.
Built for the wrong user
Traditional finance is premised on friction. Payments to someone in another country are subject to exchange, brokerage, delays, and fees. For humans, that’s normal. However, it cannot be used for AI agents.
Agents need to seamlessly transact across borders at all times, often in small increments. We need programmability, direct control of money through code, and systems that don’t rely on physical infrastructure or identity.
Cryptocurrencies provide just that, a global, always-on financial layer where value moves as easily as data, he said.
“Cryptocurrency is the global money infrastructure that agents need,” Viswanathan said.
inversion of complexity
Viswanathan said the very things that have long made cryptography difficult for humans, such as seed phrases, private keys, and direct interaction with code, are what make it powerful for machines.
Unlike humans, agents work natively in code.
“Agents read in zeros and ones. That’s their native language,” he said. “It’s also the language of cryptocurrencies.”
For years, cryptocurrencies have attempted to abstract themselves into something more human-friendly. However, the underlying architecture was not created for humans in the first place.
Viswanathan likened the transition from cryptographic tools built primarily for humans to cryptographic tools used by AI agents to the early, groundbreaking transition from the postal system to the Internet. Sharing messages around the world once required physically writing letters, buying stamps, and mailing them, but modern communication is much faster.
“Email is much more powerful than the postal system because it was designed for computers,” Viswanathan said. “Virtual currencies are similar.”
Agency-operated financial system
Viswanathan said that going forward, AI agents will sit on top of crypto infrastructure, automatically handling complexities, managing wallets, executing transactions, and optimizing capital flows in real-time, allowing people to more easily manage their funds.
“You can write code to manage your cryptocurrency wallet,” Viswanathan said. “You can’t write code to manage bank accounts in the same way.”
The result is a financial system that is more global, more programmable, and more autonomous.
Viswanathan said he sees a layered future based on traditional finance and cryptocurrencies, with an agent layer running on top of that and a human interface on top.
“Agents will run finance in the same way that computers run the Internet and humans use the Internet,” he said.
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