SAN FRANCISCO, CA – As artificial intelligence races ahead, some crypto executives believe it could become the force that finally pushes blockchain infrastructure into widespread use. Others aren’t convinced the leap is so straightforward.
In a recent panel discussion at NEARCON 2026, Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley described AI as “an unstoppable freight train,” arguing that its pace of development is unlike anything crypto has experienced. “AI is accomplishing a quarter’s worth of roadmap every two weeks right now,” he said, suggesting that projections based on previous crypto adoption cycles may already be outdated. “You have to dump the last six years of data and cut it fresh from the last six months.”
For Horsley, the implication is that public blockchains could benefit disproportionately from AI’s rise. “If there’s one space that will be an unmitigated benefactor of the adoption proliferation of AI, it will be public blockchains and crypto assets,” he said.
As autonomous agents begin to act on behalf of users, he suggested, crypto-native tools may offer practical advantages. “Agents, obviously, you’re not going to want to authorize OpenClaw with your credit card… You’re gonna want to fund them with stablecoins. They’re gonna want to transact confidentially,” Horsley said, pointing to stablecoins and onchain infrastructure as potential guardrails for machine-driven activity.
Diogo Monica, general partner at Haun Ventures and co-founder of Anchorage Digital, pushed back on the assumption that agentic commerce automatically requires new rails.
“There is a chance that the agent payments commerce looks exactly like the current payment commerce for the foreseeable future,” Monica said. “You are telling me that a superhuman intelligence cannot use the current payment rails, the current credit cards, the current instant settlement, to pay for things and to figure it out on their own.”
“You can’t tell me that AGI is coming and agents are going to be super smart… and tell me that they’re not going to be smart enough to figure out different systems,” he added.
Still, Monica acknowledged a deeper alignment between the technologies. “AI creates digital abundance and crypto versus digital scarcity. These are actually complementary technologies,” he said, adding that crypto’s privacy and verification tools could help mitigate some of the risks AI introduces.
Whether blockchains become the default rails for autonomous commerce remains unresolved. But as AI accelerates, the debate over crypto’s role in that future is clearly intensifying.
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