SAN FRANCISCO, CA – Cryptocurrencies are about more than just building faster payment rails. It may be building a financial system for non-humans.
As AI agents become more autonomous, developers have provided them with crypto wallets that allow the software to hold assets, pay for services, trade tokens, and even hire other agents. The technical pieces are falling into place. Legal ones don’t.
At the recent NEARCON 2026 conference, Electric Capital’s Avichal Garg considered the moment historic.
“What would happen if there were no humans behind it?” Garg asked. “This is a piece of code that owns a wallet, executes the code to make more money… How does liability work in this situation? I actually don’t know.”
Cryptocurrency makes this possible in ways that traditional finance cannot. Blockchain allows for programmable currency, instant settlement, and global access. Pair that with an AI agent capable of making decisions, and you get something new: software that can both think and trade.
Garg compares this shift to the creation of the limited liability company in the 19th century—a legal breakthrough that unleashed pooled capital and industrial-scale growth.
“So far, the cost of participating in the economy has come down,” he said. “You’re talking about anyone in the world, with relatively little money, being able to create value.”
But implementation issues remain unresolved.
“You can’t punish AI,” Garg points out. “You can turn them off, but they don’t care.”
If autonomous agents start trading, lending, recruiting, and scaling operations on-chain, lawmakers may face a fundamental question: Who is responsible when software with its own wallet operates independently?
Read more: Kraken’s co-CEO can trust 100% of his cryptocurrency to AI — Dragonfly’s Haseeb Qureshi isn’t convinced
