The digital asset industry has longed for mainstream adoption but has mostly come up short. Now it’s betting on the emerging agentic economy, arguing blockchain infrastructure was built for machines all along. Crypto has spent the better part of the last 15 years asking ordinary people to put up with an absurd amount of hassle just to move money around. Memorize this 12-word phrase. Understand gas fees. Accept that your money is gone forever because you pasted the wrong address into a box.  But it has finally found an explanation for why it was built this way. Crypto was never really designed for people, the argument goes. It was meant for machines—the tireless bots that don’t care about ugly interfaces, lose seed phrases or need an 18-year-old Polymarket trader to explain the difference between Base, Polygon and Optimism. Coinbase’s chief executive, Brian Armstrong, has become one of the loudest evangelists of this idea. “Very soon there are going to be more AI agents than humans making transactions,” he wrote on X earlier this month. “They can’t open a bank account, but they can own a crypto wallet.” “We started to move to an AI-first mentality throughout the company," added Armstrong on a recent podcast. What a convenient new pitch for the industry that has spent years promising to rewire finance but mostly succeeded at reinventing speculation. But it may also be the first one in years that feels intuitively plausible. For all its chaos, crypto offers something traditional finance still does not: the ability to move funds permissionlessly, near-instantly, globally, at any hour. McKinsey projects that AI agents could mediate between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in consumer commerce by 2030—more than the current value of the entire crypto market, which sits at about $2.4 trillion. “This changes a lot about how we think about the investment landscape and about building products,” says Matt Huang, managing partner at Paradigm, crypto’s largest venture capital firm. “You really have to think agent-first now and assume that most of your customers are going to be agents rather than people.” Countless crypto firms, including Huang’s new payments-focused startup Tempo, are now racing to invent, or reinvent, themselves for this emerging class of users. Justin Sun, the billionaire founder of the Tron blockchain and a major investor in Trump’s crypto projects, is already calling it Web 4.0 (as if Web 3.0 was ever really built!). MoonPay, which helps people—and now, increasingly, software—buy and sell crypto using ordinary payment methods, completely revamped its AI strategy after OpenClaw, the open-source AI assistant that can interact directly with a user’s files and applications, took off a few months ago.  “The bet that MoonPay is making is that we don’t need to double down on reinvesting in a beautiful UX (user experience) because agents become the interface,” says Kevin Arifin, the firm’s product lead. That might be excellent news for anyone who still cannot, or simply will not, make themselves care about the finer points of crypto plumbing. You’ll just tell your AI what you want done—buy some bitcoin, find a lending service with decent rates, put the assets to work—and it will handle all. Except none of this is happening at a meaningful scale yet. Read the full story on Forbes: ByNina Bambysheva https://www.forbes.com/sites/ninabambysheva/2026/03/25/why-crypto-is-obsessed-with-ai-agents/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices