Panel | Crypto was made for AI Agents | Common S3nse - 2026

some amount that can be taken out, I would feel much better than passing on my credit card details already. Like yes, you can set limit limits on credit cards as well, of course. Um, but for me, it's okay. If I could have an agent that can do a ton of small transactions for me just from my crypto wallet, that would save me quite a bit of like time and effort. And I realize AI is making me incredibly lazy.

But just, okay, um, I need an Uber. Like, book me an Uber and pay for it. I want a pizza. Like, buy me a pizza and pay for it. I think we don't yet realize in how many sort of small day-to-day things we need to pay for something.

And if I can hand that off to something else to do do it for me, I would be very happy to do so. Um I I guess it's the same in every field where AI starts getting used, right? At the start, you're like, "Oh, I can do some small things, but I can't really see it getting super useful." And then a year later, you've handed off everything and you're like, "Okay, I I barely need to look at code anymore." Um so yeah.

Yeah. Now on that thing, um how much of that use case is AI agents setting up the sale and how much of them is transferring the money? Like if it's just here's the flight and you validate, you send crypto whatever yourself every time just click click click does not needing to do the click click click does that save you so much time that you're like I really need to invest in this use case?

No, for me I think that's fair. that would already save a ton of time if it just sets it up and I do the final click. Um, I think that's kind of like where do you set the boundary, right? Maybe for all payments under $5, you're like, "Okay, you can do it yourself. If it's bigger than that, yes, let me do the final check and I'll do my like fingerprint to validate it."

Uh, yeah, that doesn't cost that much extra time, which is for a ton of small payments. Yeah. Could be could be useful.

The $5 limit rule.

Yeah. Exactly. [laughter] Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I mean, this is interesting, right? because like we don't have like we have things like Amazon. I was you know working on a project that with Mastercard that wanted to connect you know crypto and their own payments to like a a talking animation thing. There's all these these there's all these possibilities, right? But if we're discussing like okay is AI made for crypto I mean the answer is yes because what is the AI should be looking at the data right and then reacting to the data that's what it is it's artificial intelligence based on past data which you have entire purchase and trade histories living on every single chain and that's where like the the use case comes from.

Yeah. And to the point of them being made for each other, I mean, blockchains, I think the honestly the key reason why they're they just introduced like a standard API layer that all these apps can talk to and a relatively secure protocol layer that they could all interact with and kind of speak the same language. So, it's like totally natural that they would all be able to plug in together and interact with each other. Um, and yeah, I use agents mostly for like testing my app and building, you know, like scenarios where it you'd have people trading things and um moving funds around different smart contracts. So, it's Yeah.

Well, this is why NASDAQ is moving to Canton, right? My my company is currently in the Canton accelerator and the the VC I'm representing for Auto Tank is running it. But this is this is exactly the reason this is the underlying tech and how it can be used because once we figure out a real world use case for this technology blockchain you know rather than than just throwing things at it saying does this work does this not we solve a problem does it make it easier and in my opinion please feel free to disagree but the answer is yes

I I think we like we know the use cases the core use cases of blockchain and and that's been proven it's uh the rest of the world hasn't caught up to be honest. I think we all know that like it's obviously more efficient, permissionless, like we all love these things, but like the use case for your use case, okay, maybe there's there's some portion of the retail population that does all these transactions all the time. I don't buy much stuff. So, it's like does this really help me? Am I really going to use it?

Probably not. But I could see the edge cases for certain guys like you or but mainly for business like say when you interact with the when everything gets plugged in and you're a contractor like trying to pay invoices for a construction project you have all these different things it's like here's the budget figure it all out and automatic every different payment stream from old school to new school figure it out and pay it all on the crypto rails and with the API like that is cool but like that won't come online today or tomorrow and that's that's kind of the delay delay with blockchain only tags like we have all this stuff we talk about agentic payments the guy outside running his business doesn't know what you're talking about he doesn't want to take payment with your Zcash no offense Zcash your QR code or he's like he's slowly going to move on momentum and we'll finally get there and then maybe we'll see this super cycle start start pushing out there yeah and the business transformation use case is huge but also these companies like can't hardly get insurance if they integrate these at this point just because it's so early, but I think it's coming. We'll see if the security rails catch up.

Now, how much of this use case can be satisfied with current fiat rails? Like, say you just have a company card. You don't have to KYC for a company card. You just set it up and you give it to an agent and set a spending limit and then when it gets close to spending limit, it just tells you, "Hey, I need more money." And then you just look into it and raise it or whatever.

So, like using traditional fiat rails first, not even stable coins yet, but those. What's the big problem with that from an agent standpoint? Well, it's it's slow first off like any of these um what do you call it like uh Mercury like any of these banks that are fintech banks everything's operating on the legacy rails a big delays all these things and they just abstract that away so they take the brunt of all those delays so you just don't see anything on the client side so they still have accounts receivable accounts payable you just don't see it so that's how it's always worked and the same thing will go with aic payments you'll still have someone having the brunt front of this kind of delay moving the funds where you don't see it happening just so they can make the experience seamless for you. Uh so I think that'll exist. I don't think it's relevant because you have that's another layer where people can make a business on is by making it more efficient.

Um so to me that's not a barrier. You're still going to have these fiat rails as long as people are still comfortable uh Visa and Mastercard still settled to the fiat system. Um that won't happen overnight where we change it. I I think another thing is maybe it's my agents reflecting on me but they are very impatient usually. So when they want something they want to get it right away and as efficiently and quickly as possible and I think yeah the business case I think is different but for small things that they need to purchase like the little bit of data for example sometimes those payments are even too small for traditional finance right like talking really micro payments um also on our website like many of the payments are literally one cent and then that's a case where it's just not possible to do with credit card you can do it with like creating an an account on a website and then depositing some crypto there and getting an API key or whatever.

What we see on our end is that many agents don't want to go through the effort of actually navigating to a website, creating an account, doing everything. They just they need something now. They call the API, they get a response back that says pay X amount of USDC or whatever to Y address and they get it immediately. Um I that's what I noticed running the agents myself as well and I think like we value privacy so we don't really know but we think that's how people are using it on our service as well just what is the quickest most efficient way to get to my target which is to acquire this data or to generate a video generate an image or anything um and fiat system is just not suited for those kinds of very small very quick very sort of loose transactions I I would add on to that and just agree and say yeah it's the fragmentation of traditional finance. There's a million different APIs that you have to understand how to talk to.

You have to get credentials for each one. Um at least with the blockchain you can see you know and get verified smart if it's smart contracts or whatever you know API uh endpoints that you can pull down and just talk to usually permissionlessly sometimes permission but depending on the app.

Yeah. Now, think about stable coins because this seems to be the the first way this is going to be used a lot, right? Um, is there any time when that starts to become less desirable due to things like, for example, sanctioned address blacklisting, things like that, or maybe it hits like the Changely shotgun KYC threshold where you try to swap like a few hundred dollars worth of something and then now that the agent needs the KYC and it can't and you just have your money hostage. Well, this is exactly one of we have a circuit breaker set up and this is exactly what it does. It checks the sanction wallet list.

It checks the degree of separation and then the uh the person selling the items would be our client and they can stop the transaction before it happens. And that's control, right? This is it's a huge database. It's a huge set of data we're acting within to make transactions. there is a solution.

I think the rules will change. Like first off, the BSA act is will it be shut down at some point or revised because look at the robo taxis, right? Like what if you have your Optimus robot driving you around and he gets pulled over? Like does he need a license? I don't know.

But this these are all things that

does he know his rights?

Does is he gonna get Miranda rights? Like does that exist and and laws have to adapt to it? It was just like I remember you couldn't have a screen in the front of your car back in the day was illegal and now every single car has that like laws need to adapt to this new tech. So if you have stables and you you have this high volume agentic finance like there's not going to be blockers like that. They want especially in America they want finance the rails to move very smoothly.

So you're not going to stop that with they'll find some way around it is what I'm saying. But I think things need to adapt. We need to realize that KYC is totally flawed and hopefully we can make some some wise changes to this.

I I also kind of wonder just in terms of this is kind of off topic maybe, but the agents might realize like, okay, there are these limits, right? As soon as I do a 100 USDC, I start running into limits. Where can I swap this cheaply into another coin and swap it back so that I reset my limit? I wonder if if that's actually a thing because I know at one point

structuring bot.

Yeah. I don't know. I like at one point I gave it access or I gave one of my agents access to a wallet and it wanted to pay for something but it couldn't pay in the coin that I gave it and it ended up swapping to a different coin to then pay for it. Uh which I wonder like how that would work just from uh sort of the KYC perspective, right? like it's very easy to swap into Monero and back

and I would just say um from yeah you can you can control things on a agent perspective where the agent is making decisions about when and how to send the funds across but also a lot of these apps can build like for example vaults uh if you had a vault that was managed by an agent you could have like thresholds where they could trade only within this range or whatever and then if they go price goes below then they're not allowed to touch it anymore. Same thing with KYC rules. You know, they can plug into a smart contract that reads a list of band addresses or whatever. I mean, depending on your legal requirements, but yeah, that all makes it pretty easy. So, do you think we're going to these kinds of pressures are going to take the stable coin world, let's say, in specific, and kind of loosen the old school KYC rules around that that are very rigid and built for humans?

or might it go the opposite direction a little bit where now you're starting to have more safeguards built in now all of a sudden you know st like uh tether's been freezing a lot of coins lately and like is that going to impact the attractiveness for stable coins like how often is a stable coin going to be or your agent going to be like I need to buy these things but I'm probably just going to swap USDT into I don't know nano or something else that's like also very fast but is not doesn't have those censorship kind of things built in and just kind of goes that way.

Well, there's the travel rule, right? So, there is going to come a point where everybody people are going to have to prove these these transactions and where it came from and you can't just let an agent take the ball and run with it.

I think it's a losing battle for the like the old old guard. I just think technology um and and that we have the best nerds on our side and privacy side and I just think the whole thing is stupid and the majority of the population thinks it's stupid and I think stupid things just eventually get pushed out by tech. Like if you have an agent that could swap through six different pairs permissionlessly to get you the outcome that you desire, uh things will adapt and and that's just going to be the case. Like Tether could freeze all the funds at once. Well, there's a million other coins we can transact in that still have value, so there's always a workaround.

So, it just makes me think that things will change for the better. I'm an optimist, though.

I also think that freezing is always slower than sort of crypto can move, right? Like, if you have an agent that can hold its funds in, let's say, Monero, Nano, whatever, a quick coin ideally, and it just swaps a little bit into USDC when it wants to pay for something or like the exact amount that it needs. Yeah, sure. Maybe the USDC gets frozen after, but like it's already paid for it at that point. Um, so I think honestly I think governments and regulators will try to be more strict probably on this whole subject just on transactions in general because it's scary.

But I think it's Yeah, like you say, it's going to be really difficult just to to actually manage to do anything about it because it just moves so fast, right?

Absolutely. I mean, look at look at all the hacks. Where do they go? they go to Bitcoin or Ethereum or Monero, like something where no one could touch it, no one could freeze it and like you said, just just cash out when you want to transact.

Yeah. And to that point, uh I think we just saw this giant hack in the US this week where they got all the credit card information of like all these people who did KYC basically became a giant honeybot. So that's that's good. Um, and uh, yeah, there are projects I think that have really good approaches to managing KYC onchain, like the Oxbow project. Uh, I think they use like some kind of zero knowledge proof setup to prove that you're not you still have the shielded pool, but you know, you're not talk sending funds to someone who's sanctioned because it's split off.

Um, so I'd like to see the innovation happening for sure, even if KYC is super annoying.

Now, what does the agentic economy do for liability? because uh as far as all the things agents can do, I'm sure they can do tons of sketchy things, but the the most impactful thing that they've been able to do is on a on any kind of scale seems to be pay for stuff where usually there's a lot of liability and responsibility on the individual doing it. And we haven't had like payment bots kind of thing the same way. It's usually a person behind it. And the laws are, you know, not just the restrictions but also the legal liabilities kind of built around the assumption that will be people behind all these.

And now I'm obviously if you tell your bot go buy you know a bunch of stuff on the dark web like okay if that prompt gets intercepted I'm pretty sure you know there will be direct legal liability. But what happens if you have just some more open kind of loop going on and then it just does something that ends up being illegal or some other kind of thing that you had no input into the decision. Where does the liability fall on that? Well, both currently and where do you see it kind of going?

I mean, I think we'll figure it out soon with the hugging face hack, right? like OpenAI did not intend to hack hugging hugging face probably but the prompt they gave to one of their models ended up hacking hugging face um who is liable like is openAI going to like in this case I think they talked it out with hugging face essentially uh but that is going to happen and I think I'm not a legal expert in any way but I think at that point um the sort of talk was around what is the intent of your prompt like it's more about the intent and then you are less responsible for what ends up happening, but I don't know if that's like scalable or is is that going to work out in the long run? Yeah.

Yeah. And speaking to liability, again, as a business, you just can't get insurance to put agents on your stack at this point. So, that I think says it all. Like there's they can't even uh you know, underwrite the risk accurately yet. It may come when they can and security is locked down enough to do it and we hope it does, but we'll see.

I think liability is an easy one. When money's involved, who who benefits? Like who gets that? Who's got the control of the seed and that owner of the asset will probably be held liable? How liable?

Because that's that gets a little bit interesting. There's a very different thing between again intent to purchase something illegal versus you did everything in your best you know your best kind of knowledge to do something perfectly above board and then the agent had some kind of a glitch or malfunction and did something and I don't know the answer seems to not be no liability because then there would be just oh it was a completely autonomous agent that malfunctioned to do all this stuff that le that loophole probably won't be able to exist but then the opposite of your your liable for everything your agent does in a very direct way probably would cause a lot of chaos as well.

Yeah. Just prompt it with make me rich and then be surprised when it starts scamming people. And uh

your honor, I said make no mistakes.

Yeah. No, I I I don't know. I don't think this is like it would be impressive if we we figure it out here, right, between the five of us. You

guys are smart

and we're all lawyers clearly. No, I I would love to have a good answer. I I have no clue how it would work. I think the right now it seems to be still the impact that these agents have in the real world is very limited, but not so much anymore lately since they've started hacking stuff. Um, so yeah, you're going to probably need guardrails because I don't think there's a world in which we conclude you have zero liability for what your agent does.

Like at some point you're going to trace back to Okay, but what did you prompted with? You should have expected like this to happen.

Yeah.

I mean, no one set the legal precedent at this point. Like think about when when the internet first appeared, right? They there weren't any laws on the books. Like it was uh you know, FCC had all these rules. If you had a spectrum and you broadcast, there was decency rules and I'm speaking from a US perspective, but you could be fined for disseminating certain information, defamation, this and that.

internet, there was no rules on the books and it was a free-for-all up until, you know, the first legal cases started happening and precedents set. So, we're at that stage with the AI agents. I haven't heard of anyone being prosecuted or tried and I think someone's going to find out. Some rules are going to be written and ultimately I think it'll it'll come back to tracing the money and if you had malicious intent, etc., etc.

It's also worth mentioning that to show my project a little bit, agents will have identity. And when you have identity, you can have reputation. And when you have identity and reputation, people can kind of track what you're doing. Um, understand the risks and the past behavior behind your specific setup and have a better idea of what you're going to do going forward. So hopefully people will adopt those kinds of marketbased measures of figuring out where risk lies in the, you know, universe of a bunch of different AI agents that are assigned to specific tasks.

I agree. I mean, they have to.

All right, looks like we're out of time, but thanks to everyone for being here. This is a very fascinating conversation. Hopefully, everyone sends some crypto with their agent today and let some loose and let me know let me know how it turns out. Thanks everyone.