Effectiveness of AI Agents in the Real World | Dhaiwat | ETHMumbai 2026

Hi everyone. Uh it's very good to be here in Mumbai. It's one of my favorite cities. My mom grew up in Mumbai. So uh it's very good to be back here talking about Ethereum.

Um I I don't work at layer zero. Um I work at ENS as a as a Devril. Uh I've been building on Ethereum for around six years now. Um, and because of the recent uh recent developments in everything AI, I think Ethereum is very uniquely positioned for whatever is coming next. And that's just what I want to talk about uh today.

Um, yeah. Can I have the next slide, please? Yes. Uh, thank you. Um so I mean I'm sure all of you have heard about claudebot uh openclaw and everything that's been happening in the AI space.

Uh uh all of this is very impressive. People are now assigning a lot of uh a very complex tasks to these AI agents like asking them to go out and do things for them. Um but there is there is a very specific problem. There's a very specific point where they stop. Um thank you.

There's a very uh specific point where they stop like they are not capable of going to these pages or apps and making payments like they will go and do very complex things. They will go and like like if you are very interested in sports, they will go out and fetch a lot of complex data for you. If you like a very specific player, they will give you like a 15 year entire data for that player. How which shots they like to play? where do they like to bowl and everything but they cannot buy things for you they are very limited and that's where they fall short in compared to humans like we can go and if um I'll just give you an anecdote from my personal life from a couple of weeks ago uh I actually have a screenshot in on my phone so I'm not sure how many of you like FIFA or like football here but I was trying to buy this game a couple of weeks ago it's FIFA 12 it's from 2011 so you literally literally cannot find this anywhere on the internet.

Uh it's not on any stores. Your only option is to go out and buy CD keys from people who have already bought it. And it's a tedious task. I had to spend like 6 hours trying to search for a key. Um and even if I I had access to OpenClaw, I have my own AI agent running and everything, but it cannot go and buy the thing for me.

Like it can just come back to me and be like, "Hey, this is where I found something useful." but it cannot complete the task. It can just give me links and I still have to go to the website, fill everything up and like go through all of that just just to buy a game. Um, and this is what this is why we are building AI, right? To automate manual labor, to automate things which we shouldn't be spending our time on.

Um but um they cannot open bank accounts. They don't have credit cards. Unless you are you feel safe enough to give them your credit card details, uh they can't really they can't really do that. Um so um this is where crypto is positioned very uniquely in terms of AI. uh you you'll see like companies like Stripe also um uh coming out with a lot of initiatives.

So this is serious like people are paying attention, people are building products around this um and well I just want to talk about what is interesting to me in this space right now and what you can possibly build in the hackathon just like bouncing some ideas. Um let's see okay so I don't think you can read the sub subtext but I have written that they cannot open bank accounts but they can hold stable coins uh which is very nice like it's just programmable money. This is something we have been talking about for years in crypto. Crypto is all about programmable money. Uh you know you can just write code and pay people for things.

Uh and now we finally have systems that can go out and do that. They can go out and do things for you, but they stop where they have to pay someone. Um and this is this is where crypto is positioned very uniquely through stable coins, through tokens, any any form of payment. But the problem is uh in my case when I was trying to buy that game, none of those sites actually supported uh crypto payments or even if they supported crypto payments, it required a human to actually go and make the payment. Uh which is which defeats the whole purpose of like having an AI do things for you.

My the what I'm trying to say here is that uh everything that's currently built all the checkouts like if you're trying to buy something UPI those UPI checkouts those credit card checkouts they are built with uh humans in mind they are not built with AI agents in mind and I don't think we are there just yet but I think in very soon maybe in the next 6 months maybe we'll have another blow up like Opus 4.6 6 or something like that coming in the next 6 months. These agents are becoming more and more powerful and they people are trying to get them to do things for them. Uh but none of the internet basically none of the internet actually works for them. Um so um that's where crypto can actually come in and do a lot of useful things.

Um can I just go back one slide? Yes. Um, I'm not sure how many of you have heard about X42, but uh it's something uh Coinbase came up with last year uh around October, September, and it's really just a simple way for uh an AI to go and buy things. uh and it doesn't even have to be an AI actually but let's just for for the simplicity and for in the interest of time um they came up came released this in u can I have the next slide yes they u they came out with this in October last year why is this important like you can go and check the details after the talk but the reason why this is important is that when I was trying to buy that game when my AI agent actually went and checked all of those websites and it gave me like 15 different results that hey look the your game is available on these 15 different websites but I can't pay for it so you'll just have to go and do it yourself. If those websites supported crypto payments if they were actually built with AI agents in mind the payment method would be crypto and stable coins and X42 just makes that standardized and easy.

Um and Ethereum is primarily where a lot of volume around X42 is happening. Um I will not go into a lot of technical details uh right now but um this is a a rough overview of how X42 works. It's just a simple HTTP request. It's nothing more complex. Uh I'm primarily talking about this just so if any of you are building something at the hackathon, this is something you can think of.

Um um it's all there on my Twitter. You can go and check. Um but if the website I was trying to buy the game from supported X42, my agent could have actually gone and completed the task and I would have been happy. I I would have just told Claude to hey go buy this game from me uh for me and I would have had the game in 2 hours or an hour or so. But I didn't uh because no one is actually building uh these solutions which are essentially bridges between the old internet and the new users of the internet.

Uh everyone is talking about um hey like this is what AI agents this is how AI agents will sell to each other. I think we are kind of too far for that. Um like like I said in my tweet I don't think the agents are quite ready for X2 yet. they are not really capable of generating so much useful work for each other. But what you can do as a builder at during this hackathon or just someone as a founder try to build uh solutions that bridge the existing internet which already has so much useful stuff and make it compatible with crypto payments.

Make it easy for AI agents to actually buy things uh on the internet. Um, Ethereum has the best tooling and the best ecosystem amongst all all of crypto. Uh, if you want to like go and experiment uh and there's some more things happenings as as well. Although I don't think now is really the prime time for these things but um in the next few years depending on how things play out if we have AGI or something like that um agents will be able to create information and useful alpha or whatever you want to call it for each other and that's when you'll need uh things like ERC 84 uh for agents. Uh I I don't think this is um I don't think this is like something we can see in action today.

Um but it is very useful infrastructure for the future. Um so if you want to build on that that's another interesting topic that I would want you guys to look at if you are participating in the hackathon. Uh but yeah and there's there's more things happening around all of these things as well. But you see you'll see that people are actually starting to notice the the Steve guy. He's not in crypto but they are finally waking up and realizing that oh crypto actually has a use case and it's it's just payments.

It's been payments all along. Um but we have a long way to go. So um that's basically uh what I wanted to talk about. Uh just make it easier for gamers like me to buy old games so my AI agents can go and purchase things easily on the internet. We don't have to go too far into the future.

Just make these useful bridges between the old internet and the new one. And we have a lot of exciting things ahead. Thank you.