Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming a major player in the world of foundation models. These AI systems can not only produce outputs but also take actions in various environments, such as responding to emails, interacting with databases, calling APIs, or even performing physical tasks in robotic settings. This type of AI, known as agentic AI, has the potential to grant agents partial or full autonomy within their environments. In the near future, we may see millions of semi-autonomous agents becoming essential parts of business and personal ecosystems. These agents could interact with the world using crypto assets as a fundamental representation.
While the idea of crypto becoming the currency of AI is exciting and promising, there are significant challenges to overcome. The current state of the AI agent market is fragmented and lacks maturity. While many organizations see the potential of autonomous agents, the technology is still in its early stages of adoption. This has resulted in many agent demos but very few production-ready products.
The intersection of crypto and autonomous agents relies heavily on the development of the agent market. If millions of autonomous agents are to enhance our daily tasks, crypto could play a vital role in boosting their capabilities, particularly in the financial domain. Payments have always been crucial to the evolution of the internet, and if AI agents become integral to the intelligent internet, financial transactions will be a key component.
The programmability of crypto makes it an excellent fit for enabling payment capabilities in AI agents. For instance, agents could engage with each other to complete tasks like paying invoices and following up with clients via emails. Crypto could unlock payments as these tasks are successfully completed. However, the nascent state of the AI agent market poses a challenge to implementing these scenarios in practice.
One significant obstacle to the adoption of crypto in multi-agent architectures is the cultural mismatch between the AI and crypto communities. Many teams working on agentic platforms have little connection to the crypto market and may view crypto as a barrier to adoption. Overcoming this cultural friction will require unlocking use cases that are impossible without crypto payments.
While the promise of AI agents conducting financial transactions using crypto is appealing, the necessary infrastructure is currently lacking. Companies like Stripe have built their businesses on decades of e-commerce innovation, but similar infrastructure for AI agents is yet to be developed. As a result, early use cases for agents transacting may require significant evolution.
In today’s market, there are three options for enabling financial transactions in multi-agent systems: programmable fiat platforms like Stripe, stablecoins, and a native agent cryptocurrency and payment protocol. Each option has its advantages and limitations, highlighting the need for further development in this area.
Overall, agentic AI has the potential to bridge the gap between Web3 and AI, with crypto emerging as the currency of AI. While there are challenges to overcome, the rise of semi-autonomous agents could drive the creation of custom tokens, wallets, and protocols optimized for agentic workflows. Agents could serve as the gateway for crypto to establish itself as the primary currency in the world of AI.