Machines, Not Humans to Drive Crypto’s Mass Adoption?

Fresh from the groundbreaking NVIDIA announcements about AI at CES 2025 on Tuesday, the crypto industry is buzzing with ideas. Observers see a radical shift emerging in crypto: the next wave of users might not be human at all.

Leading crypto builders and investors predict a future where AI agents, not humans, dominate blockchain networks, but they are divided on how we will get there and what it means for everyone else.

“We will see a billion agents on the chain before we see a billion people on the chain,” predicts Twitter user Evan, ecosystem leader at Monad and former McKinsey analyst. “Crypto has inherently unfriendly UX for human users. Agents don’t care about this friction.”

The predictions come amid a surge in the development of AI agents for crypto, with platforms like Virtuals already generating $60 million in revenue.

Cryptos latest meta has also seen certain assets of projects such as AI16z skyrocketing, due to the demand for AI agent tokens.

Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly Capital, points to changes in accessibility, where “instead of having to raise millions of dollars,” developers could “launch an application with $10,000 of AI cloud compute.”

This democratizes who can build and deploy blockchain apps and could “lead to a renaissance in the chain,” Qureshi claims.

But the implications extend beyond just cost efficiency.

Qureshi raises ethical concerns about authentication and trust in digital interactions, predicting that “chatbots will start to hide that they are AIs” and “pass as humans.”

Qureshi claims that most current “AI agents” in crypto are not what they should be, at least in their current versions. “These things aren’t really agents. These are chatbots with meme coins attached to them,” Qureshi notes.

Crypto and AI go hand in hand

In September last year, Delphi Labs, a project focused on R&D on the Web3 protocol, published a statement on how AI could impact cryptocurrencies in the coming years.

While AI could be a powerful resource that has “deep implications for society,” it also runs the risk of being “controlled solely by big tech companies and the state,” the Delphi Labs article states.

Delphi Labs claims that crypto can “prevent this monopoly” by “truly delivering better solutions for developers and users.”

The transformation is already beginning, with some projects like Wayfinder developing features for AI agents interact with each other autonomously with blockchain networks.

Should the Average Joe Be Worried?

Yuk Hui, a contemporary philosopher trained as a software engineer, doesn’t think so.

Machines like AI agents will not “completely replace” humans as this could “take longer than the extinction of the human species,” Hui says. wrote over three years ago.

Instead, ‘machine intelligence will transform people […] beyond their own imagination.”

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair