AI is rapidly emerging as a major crypto investment narrative, built around the idea that autonomous agents could potentially drive transactions and demand for programmable financial infrastructure.
The infrastructure race is already underway. AI agents settled more than $73 million across roughly 176 million blockchain transactions in the year through April, according to a Keyrock report, while Coinbase, Stripe and Visa are developing competing systems for machine-to-machine payments.
Fidelity Digital Assets, the crypto arm of financial-services giant Fidelity Investments, however, sees a key risk.
More AI-driven activity may not translate into more value for crypto investors. The question is less about how much activity AI generates and more about who captures the economic value.
“As AI lowers barriers to development and participation, competitive advantages may increasingly reside in liquidity, distribution, security, trust, and regulatory integration rather than technology alone,” analyst Max Wadington wrote in the Wednesday report.
The convergence of crypto and artificial intelligence is increasingly centered on AI agents, autonomous software that can make decisions, buy data and computing power, and transact without human intervention.
Crypto proponents argue that stablecoins and blockchains are well-suited to this emerging machine economy because they enable programmable, around-the-clock micropayments that can be difficult or uneconomical on traditional card rails. Crypto infrastructure firm Alchemy’s CEO Nikil Viswanathan even went as far as saying that “crypto was built for AI agents, not humans.”
While AI can make blockchain applications cheaper and faster to build, potentially flooding crypto with new products, more development doesn't guarantee demand or product-market fit. As software becomes easier to replicate, Wadington said the competitive advantages could shift toward harder-to-copy assets such as liquidity, distribution, security and trust, potentially benefiting established networks.
Autonomous agents may also choose alternatives to public blockchains.
Banks, fintechs and technology companies could offer lower costs, better performance, regulatory clarity and established distribution.
That means a boom in AI-driven economic activity doesn't necessarily mean a boom in blockchain activity, Fidelity said.
The token-capture problem
Even if AI agents increasingly use blockchains, more transactions may not mean more value for token holders, the report argued.
Micropayments are one of the examples. AI could drive huge volumes of these types of transactions, but payments tend to generate relatively low fees and can be routed to Layer 2 networks or settled off-chain.