Crypto is built for AI agents, not humans, says Alchemy's CEO

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.”