Chappy Asel, a former Apple engineer and founder of AI nonprofit The AI Collective, said the cryptocurrency industry’s embrace of AI is more about building financial infrastructure for autonomous machines than chatbots.
Speaking at the Consensus Conference in Miami, Asel, founder of The AI Collective, a global non-profit artificial intelligence community with more than 150 chapters and more than 200,000 members, said that as software agents increasingly make economic decisions on behalf of users and businesses, they will need payment systems that can process low-latency, programmable transactions at scale.
“When agents make most of their financial decisions, their economic decisions, how do they deal with each other?” Asser said during the panel discussion. “You want them to be highly systematic and mechanized. You want very small microtransactions. You want very low latency.”
Asel, who worked on Apple Vision Pro and early Apple Intelligence before launching The AI Collective, frames the convergence of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence through a practical lens.
“The first thing I heard throughout the conference…even my friends who only know about AI and know nothing about blockchain, they’ve heard about proxy payments,” he said.
Stablecoins already offer 24/7 settlement, and smart contracts allow for programmable execution. Bringing them together is the only logical way for agency payments (without middlemen) to become mainstream.
Still, the paper is in its early stages. AI agents are still in their infancy, and today many companies rely on centralized APIs and traditional payment systems. Attempts to build “agent payments” infrastructure have so far generated little meaningful commercial activity, suggesting the narrative may be growing faster than actual demand.
Even if machine-to-machine commerce takes longer to materialize, Asser believes the broader overlap between cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence may emerge first elsewhere.
“A lot of people will tell you, oh, the model isn’t good enough,” Axel said. “None of this. In fact, computing, data centers and energy are driving almost all decisions in artificial intelligence.”
The framework reflects a broader shift in the AI economy, in which access to chips, power and data center capacity is becoming a decisive competitive advantage.
Parts of the cryptocurrency industry are already taking action to seize this opportunity. Some Bitcoin miners have refocused on AI hosting and high-performance computing over the past year, betting that infrastructure originally built for mining can be repurposed for AI workloads.
For Axel, practical advice for founders dealing with uncertainty is simple: experiment.
“When the world is more uncertain than ever… things are only going to get crazier,” he said. “This guarantees that you’ll spend more and more time trying out new technologies.”
The issue with consumer adoption of cryptocurrencies has been partly a usability issue.
But an AI agent doesn’t need an introductory tutorial, won’t be intimidated by MetaMask, or needs help remembering a mnemonic phrase. If autonomous software becomes a meaningful economic player, cryptocurrencies may have found a user base that actually thinks in code.