Alchemy's Nikil Viswanathan: Crypto Was Built for AI Agents, Not Humans
Alchemy CEO Nikil Viswanathan argues crypto's always-on, programmable, identity-light design fits AI agents far better than legacy finance, with humans guiding the strategy and agents running the engine.
Nikil Viswanathan, CEO and co-founder of Alchemy, argues that crypto's design quietly anticipated AI agents long before the agent era arrived. "You can argue that crypto was built for AI agents, not humans," he told CoinDesk.
The mismatch with TradFi
His core point is structural. Traditional finance assumes friction — currency conversion, intermediaries, settlement delays, identity checks — that humans tolerate but AI agents cannot. Agents need to transact globally, around the clock, in tiny increments, with direct programmatic control and without depending on physical infrastructure. Crypto, he argues, already provides exactly that as an always-on, code-native financial layer.
A layered future
Viswanathan sketched a stack with conventional finance and crypto at the base, an agent layer running on top, and human-facing interfaces above that. In his model, agents operate the financial engines while humans set strategy — a division of labor that lines up neatly with Alchemy's own pivot toward AI-payment infrastructure earlier this month.
The Bottom Line
It's a self-serving argument from an infrastructure CEO — and also a pretty hard one to refute on the merits. Every property humans complain about in crypto (24/7 settlement, raw key control, machine-readable assets, micropayments) is precisely what an agent needs. The companies that win the next cycle will be the ones that hide that surface from humans while exposing it cleanly to agents.
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