SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – As artificial intelligence advances rapidly, some cryptocurrency executives believe it could be the force that ultimately drives widespread use of blockchain infrastructure. Others are not convinced the leap is so simple.
During a recent panel discussion at NEARCON 2026, Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley described artificial intelligence as “an unstoppable freight train,” arguing that it is developing at a pace unlike anything cryptocurrencies have experienced. “Artificial intelligence now completes a quarter of the roadmap every two weeks,” he said, suggesting that predictions based on previous cryptocurrency adoption cycles may be outdated. “You have to dump the last six years of data and delete the new data from the last six months.”
For Horsley, this means public blockchains may benefit disproportionately from the rise of artificial intelligence. “If there’s one area that stands to be an unmitigated beneficiary of the proliferation of artificial intelligence, it’s public blockchains and cryptoassets,” he said.
He suggested that crypto-native tools may offer practical advantages as autonomous agents begin to act on behalf of users. “Obviously, agents are not going to want to authorize OpenClaw with a credit card… You’re going to want to fund them with stablecoins. They’re going to want transactions to be kept private,” Horsley said, pointing to stablecoins and on-chain infrastructure as potential guardrails for machine-driven activity.
Diogo Monica, general partner at Haun Ventures and co-founder of Anchorage Digital, disputes the assumption that agency commerce automatically requires a new track.
“For the foreseeable future, the agency payments business is likely to look exactly like the current payments business,” Monica said. “You’re telling me that superhuman intelligence can’t use current payment methods, current credit cards, current instant settlement to pay for it and fix the problem on its own.”
“You can’t tell me that general artificial intelligence is coming and agents are going to be super smart… and you can’t tell me that they won’t be smart enough to figure out different systems,” he added.
Still, Monica acknowledges that there are deeper consistencies between these technologies. “AI creates digital abundance and cryptocurrencies combat digital scarcity. These are actually complementary technologies,” he said, adding that cryptocurrency’s privacy and verification tools can help mitigate some of the risks posed by AI.
Whether blockchain becomes the default trajectory for autonomous commerce remains up in the air. But as the development of artificial intelligence accelerates, the debate over the role of cryptocurrencies in the future is clearly intensifying.
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