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 actors, this human-centered design begins to look less like a feature and more like a bottleneck, said the co-founder of crypto company Alchemy.
“You can argue that cryptography was designed for AI agents, not humans,” said Nikil Viswanathan, CEO and co-founder of Alchemy.
The gap is everywhere. Banks have opening hours because humans do. Payments are tied to countries because people live there. Credit cards assume physical identity and presence, he said.
AI agents work differently. They don’t sleep. They don’t live anywhere. They don’t go into banks and don’t carry cards. And increasingly, they don’t just help complete tasks, they complete transactions.
“All transactions for agents are done online. They are inherently global,” Viswanathan, who will speak at Consensus Miami next month, said in an interview with CoinDesk.
This is where crypto starts to look less like an alternative financial system and more like a native infrastructure for a new type 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 applications to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and gaming, allowing businesses to create and scale on-chain products without managing the complexity of blockchain systems themselves.
Designed for the wrong user
Traditional finance involves friction. Paying someone in another country involves currency exchanges, middlemen, delays and fees. For humans, this is normal. But for AI agents, it’s unusable.
Agents must transact across borders seamlessly, at any time, often in small increments. They need programmability, direct control of money through code, and systems that don’t rely on physical infrastructure or identity.
That’s exactly what crypto offers: 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 reverses
What has long made cryptography difficult for humans, including seed phrases, private keys and direct interaction with code, is exactly what makes it powerful for machines, Viswanathan said.
Unlike humans, agents operate natively in code.
“Agents read with zeros and ones. It’s their native language,” he said. “It’s also the language of cryptography.”
For years, crypto has tried to abstract itself into something more user-friendly. But its underlying architecture was never really designed for humans.
Viswanathan compared the shift from cryptographic tools designed primarily for humans to cryptographic tools used by AI agents to an earlier historical shift from the postal system to the Internet. While once people had to physically write a letter, buy a stamp, and mail it to share messages across the world, communication in the modern age is much faster.
“Email is much more powerful than the postal system because it is designed for computers,” Viswanathan said. “Crypto is similar.”
Agent-managed financial system
Viswanathan said that in the future, AI agents will sit atop crypto infrastructure, automatically handling complexity, managing wallets, executing trades and optimizing capital flows in real time, making it easier for people to control their own 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 would be a more global, more programmable and more autonomous financial system.
Viswanathan said he sees a multi-layered future: traditional finance and crypto as the foundation, an agent layer operating on top, and a human interface on top.
“Just as computers operate the Internet and humans use it, agents will manage finance,” he said.
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