The crypto industry’s adoption of AI is less about chatbots and more about creating financial infrastructure for autonomous machines, says Chappy Asel, a former Apple engineer and founder of the nonprofit The AI Collective.
Speaking at Consensus Miami, Asel, founder of The AI Collective, a global nonprofit AI community with more than 200,000 members across more than 150 chapters, argued that as software agents increasingly make economic decisions on behalf of users and businesses, they will need payment systems that can handle low-latency, programmable transactions at scale.
“When agents make the majority of financial and economic decisions, how do they transact with each other? Asel said during the panel. “You want them to be highly systematic and mechanistic. You want very small transactions, micro-transactions. You want very low latency.”
Asel, who previously worked on Apple’s Vision Pro and early Apple Intelligence efforts before launching The AI Collective, presented the convergence of cryptography and AI from a practical perspective.
“The first thing I heard throughout this conference… even my friends who only know AI, they don’t know anything about blockchain, is that they heard about agent payments,” he said.
Stablecoins already offer 24/7 settlement and smart contracts enable programmable execution. Marrying them is the only logical way for agent payments – without a human in the middle – to become mainstream.
However, the thesis remains early. AI agents are still in their infancy and many companies today rely on centralized APIs and conventional payment systems. Attempts to create an “agent payments” infrastructure have so far generated little significant commercial activity, suggesting that the rhetoric may be growing faster than actual demand.
Even if machine-to-machine trading takes longer to materialize, Asel argued that the broader overlap between crypto and AI could first appear elsewhere.
“A lot of people will tell you, oh, that’s because the models aren’t good enough,” Asel said. “It’s none of those things. It’s literally the compute, the data centers, the energy that are driving virtually all AI decision-making right now.”
This framework reflects a broader shift in the AI economy, where access to chips, power and data center capacity is becoming the defining competitive advantage.
Parts of the crypto industry are already working to seize this opportunity. Several Bitcoin miners have spent the last year repositioning toward AI hosting and high-performance computing, betting that infrastructure originally designed for mining can be repurposed for AI workloads.
For Asel, the practical advice for founders facing uncertainty was simple: experiment.
“When the world is more uncertain than it has ever been, things are only going to get crazier,” he said. “This justifies you spending more and more time playing with new technology.”
The problem with consumer adoption of crypto has always been partly a usability problem.
But AI agents don’t need onboarding tutorials, aren’t intimidated by MetaMask, and don’t need help remembering seed phrases. If autonomous software becomes a significant economic player, cryptocurrencies may have found a user base who actually think in code.
