Agents + Crypto: What's Real & What's Cope

Transcript

I'm going to be talking today about the intersection of agents and crypto. We're going to be talking about what's real and what's cope. So, first thing I think you should always start with an admission or a confession. My confession is this. So, I've been talking about agents in crypto for a while and I was wrong. And I was wrong because I said that agents are all going to be using crypto. And I said that there's no way that the traditional financial rails are going to be able to be ready in time for what agents are going to start to do once they come online and start being used in our daily lives. And it turns out that is not true. So the reality is that your agent doesn't need crypto. You do. And

I'm going to develop this thesis through this talk. So, first thing you guys remember earlier this year, everybody was talking about how agentic payments were going to explode. You had CZ, you had Brian Armstrong, you had X42 moving up and to the right, and everybody was like, "Oh my god, it's so obvious the real users of crypto are not going to be humans. They're going to be AIS." Okay. Well, this chart goes up to November last year. Um, if you know what's happened since then, uh, the chart went way down. Okay. It turns out agents are not using X42. It turns out 90% of the payments volume at X42 was farming.

Surprise, surprise, it's crypto. And the reality is that agents are kind of here. Agents are here. We have them with Hermes agent. We have them with Meta's Muse. We, you know, Open AAI just rolled out DOTs. There's Instinct. These things are mass market products. They're growing like crazy. And what are they using? They're using cards. They're using credit cards. They're using credit cards just like we all do. Now, we we've seen companies like Rain, like Visa, like Ramp, like Stripe all launch these agentic card products that basically create these kind of subcards underneath your card that have rate limits. They have restrictions on how much can be spent, on where they can be spent. All of these companies realize just as much

as we did that agentic commerce is going to be a big thing and they're ready for it. And the reality, you know, how many of you out there right now are using one of these AI agent products? So, give me a show of hands. How many people have a Muse, a Hermes agent, something like that. Okay, it looks like maybe 15 20% of people have uh have used a product like this. Um, I have a product like this. Uh, I gave it a crypto wallet, but it turns out most stuff you cannot buy with crypto today. Uh, I also gave it a card and turns out most of the stuff that it buys for me is using a card. So the reality is that today with consumer payments, cards are mostly the answer.

Now they're not going to work everywhere and obviously in the US and in a lot of developed markets, cards are ubiquitous. They're not ubiquitous everywhere in the world and agents are going to be everywhere in the world. So it's not that cards are the only answer, but it is clear that this story that we were telling and I was one of the people telling the story at the beginning of the beginning of this year before agents really became mainstream is that these things are going to use crypto. They're going to trust crypto more than traditional Rails and traditional Rails are not going to be ready. Well, that's wrong. The Rails are ready. Okay, so that's the coat part. That part is not where agents and crypto are going to be interacting outside of the usual stuff.

So, international macro payments, the kinds of things that you use crypto for, your AI agents are going to use crypto for. But there's other things about crypto that do fundamentally change with agents. And that's what I want to focus on more in this talk. So the highle thing to understand about agents is that agents make hard things easy. That's the core of how agents change our interactions with the world. And now governments all around the world are feeling this and they're terrified. Why are they terrified? They're terrified because governments provide all sorts of services. And a lot of those services were kind of dependent on this huge bureaucratic morass that they

assumed people would not be able to easily navigate. So if you want to file a court claim, if you want to file a complaint as a consumer with a CFPB, if you want to file for um you know some kind of uh welfare, if you want to have a housing complaint, all of these things were gated behind these bureaucratic hoops that you had to jump through. And what people are seeing now is that there's an explosion in every single thing like this at almost every government around the world. They're getting dodoed by AI agents that are just coming in and dutifully consuming services on behalf of their uh owners.

Now, the problem with this is that it turns out we really don't have governments that can do this for everyone. Uh we we don't have systems that are designed for everybody in the world to be able to have CFPB complaints uh filed with some business that they don't like. And so the reality is that these things were actually secretly rationing systems and they're not ready for the world of AI agents. Okay. Now, so the theme agents make hard things easy. Well, what are other hard things besides navigating bureaucracy? Classically, one of the hard things that has made crypto adoption difficult is that crypto is hard. Crypto is hard.

It's hard to understand. Most people find it extremely opaque and very difficult to use. And that's one of the reasons why agents are going to fundamentally change your relationship with crypto. And if not yours personally, you might be very crypto native. Uh but a lot of people in your life who've always said like look, crypto seems cool in the abstract, but I don't know how to use it. I don't know how to navigate a wallet. I don't know how to deal with gas fees. I don't know how to move assets around. I don't understand bridging. All this stuff is way too complicated for me. And as a result, I don't trust it. I'm afraid of it. Um and of course, it's not just that people are afraid. They reliably mess up. They get hacked. They get fished.

They go into honeypotss. They lose their crypto assets. 20% of all Bitcoin is most likely lost just from looking at onchain records. Which tells you that agents, one of the biggest things about how they're going to change crypto is they are going to make crypto more reliable by protecting you from your own stupidity. And as humans, we're pretty stupid. Now, why do we trust banks? Most people who say, "Ah, crypto is kind of scary. I don't really trust it." But they do trust their bank. And you know, candidly, I am the same way. When I send a large amount of money using my crypto wallet, I'm always a little bit scared.

And I've been interacting with crypto for 10 plus years. I'm, you know, if anyone shouldn't be scared, it's me. But I'm always a little bit scared when I'm sending a large amount of money in my wallet. And why am I a little bit scared? I'm a little bit scared because maybe, just maybe, I'm accidentally sending money to North Korea right now. And it's always in the back of my head and it should always be in the back of your head. Now, I'm never worried when I go into my bank account that I'm accidentally wiring money to North Korea. Why am I not worried? I'm not worried because my bank protects me from my own stupidity. If I do try to wire money to North Korea, my bank is going to stop me and say, "Hey, yo, what are you doing?

Don't do that." The reason why that works is that there's an intelligence layer sitting in between me and my money and that intelligence layer is the bank. The bank in it sits as this intelligent agent on my behalf managing my own mistakes. Well, once we start making AIS the API to crypto, once you're going to be interacting with your agent to interact with crypto, then now all of a sudden the same thing will be true for you in crypto is that you're never going to get fished again. You're never going to get hacked again. You're never going to get scammed again. You're never going to use something when uh there's a DNS poisoning attack and turns out you're at the wrong interface. Uh when there's an active exploitation of a smart contract,

your agent will always go check the contract first and see that there's anything weird going on. all of these little mistakes or of course, hey, I thought I was copy and pasting this address, but actually it's North Korea. Your agent will always check. Your agent will never be lazy. Your agent will never skip a step. Your agent will never be tired. It will never make the same mistake that you will. And so, every single one of these companies realizes that the way that we use crypto in 5 years is not going to be the way that we use crypto today. It is going to change almost everything about our interaction with this technology and the way in which people's trust relationship with crypto is going to be refashioned. Okay.

Now the second thing that I want to point out about this is that um when I said you know agents make things easy that were hard one of the things that this interacts very deeply with is actually privacy. Now what do I mean by that? So my claim is that privacy has never really been a right. We've never really had effective privacy in most societies. Privacy has been effectively a rate limit. Similar to what I was describing with government services is that you know it's not that the government doesn't allow everybody in the world to send a complaint to the CFPB. Just in practice we didn't because it was just too annoying. It's too difficult.

There's too much bureaucracy. Most people won't do it unless they really really care. Well privacy is kind of the same way. In fact, um, just recently in the Supreme Court, Justice Alto said this. In the precomputer age, the greatest protections of privacy were neither constitutional nor statuto, but practical. This was a case where they were looking at warrantless surveillance by police installing GPS trackers on cars. And the question was, was this a constitutional violation of the right to privacy? And their claim was that, well, look, there's nothing stopping you from just like getting in a car and following someone's car. What's the difference between that and a GPS tracker? Right?

Isn't that basically the same thing? It's not like the police now have a a new tool with a GPS tracker. They couldn't have done manually if they wanted to. And nothing about that is illegal. We all know that as a policeman, you can go follow someone's car as long as you want. And what he points out, which I think is correct, and we're now starting to realize this, is that the right to privacy was always a matter of friction. It was not a matter that the constitution says you have privacy or that legally you have privacy. It's that it was just too impractical for the police to literally follow every single criminal around all the time. But technology changes that.

It makes it's now trivial to follow a car around all the time, everywhere it's going. The same thing Dario Amode, the founder of anthropic in his face off with the Department of Justice, sorry, with the Department of War, uh, points out the same thing is that powerful AI makes it possible to assemble a comprehensive picture of any person's life automatically and at massive scale. And what he's referring to, of course, is that every single person out there, myself included, has all sorts of data about themselves that's been leaked everywhere. All these uh all these hacks, all of these data breaches. That just means that on the dark web on every single one of us is just floating around the sewage of information. And the only thing preventing somebody from using

that information to figure out who you are, to figure out what you're doing, to piece together a picture of your life, is just time. It's just work. It's just nobody bothers. Nobody cares. Nobody cares about you. Nobody cares about me. Well, maybe a few people care about me, but uh most people it's just kind of why would anyone bother? Well, we're now in a very different world. We're in a very different equilibrium about the cost of achieving privacy and of taking away that privacy from somebody else. There's been a lot of drama lately about this company called Flock, which has these cameras that are installed in many different cities around the world. And people are getting really upset about Flock. It's taking off in the US. And a

big part of the reason why is that you can search through the Flock central database 80,000 cameras in a single query. And basically, it allows you, and again, you know, having cameras on street corners, that's been around for a very long time. Nothing illegal about it. The difference is just scale. Quantity is a quality of its own. When you have one of these cameras sitting everywhere in every single street corner and you can use AI to instantaneously search every single camera on every single street corner everywhere. Then now all of a sudden you have a panopticon.

Now all of a sudden the government knows everything all the time of where everybody is. The only difference was technology. And so the same thing we're seeing in crypto is um physical attacks against crypto holders are increasing dramatically. 2025 and 2026 we've seen all-time highs physical attacks reported against crypto holders. Now why is this happening? Part of the reason why this is happening of course is that many people have some public information about their out there about themselves and about their crypto holdings. Now you know this uh the defense for most people was that like well why would anyone bother? I'm just a small time guy. You know, I I'm not super loud. Maybe I'm not a big public figure on Twitter. You

know, why would I need private security? Why would I need to hide where I live? Why would I need to do any of these things? Well, the only real constraint was some bad actor being sufficiently motivated to put a query into an LLM, go download some data on the dark web for a couple dollars, and figure out where you live, figure out how much crypto you hold, figure out all these different data leaks about you and what your net worth is, and then come to your house. That's all it took. There was no big change in the information out there. There was no big change in the capabilities. It's just that before 2025, if you wanted to do this, you had to really want to do this. You had to spend significant time on every single target that you decided to go after.

Today, you don't. Today, you don't. Now, this panopticon is a big part of why crypto exists. It's always been a big part of why crypto exists. And the difference between AI and crypto on this dimension is that AI is a technology that fundamentally empowers the state. It makes the state more powerful because it scales up what the state can do at any given time. The constraint on almost every government was that it's too slow. It's too stupid. It doesn't understand enough about all the data that it has at its fingertips.

Well, now it does understand it. Crypto is the opposite. Crypto pushes that power away from governments into the hands of individuals. And this ultimately is the only counterveailing force you're going to have in a world where the government is becoming more and more powerful, more and more centralized, more and more um able to see everything that we are doing. Now, the problem with privacy historically is that, you know, the thing that people often say is that, you know, well, yeah, you can talk about privacy, but people don't really care.

People are lazy. They don't really think about it that much. You know, okay, they're going to use Muse Meta's AI product and they're going to give Meta all their chat logs. They're going to give their chat logs to Chatbt. They're going to give it to OpenAI. They're going to give it to Google. People don't care. They'll only really talk about privacy, but they don't care when push comes to shove. And the story I think is largely correct, which is that privacy mostly only wins when it's easy, when it's a very small leap to go from non-private to private. Right? So you saw this with the web is that it wasn't until Let's Encrypt started offering very cheap and and effectively free HTTPS certificates that people started going to HTTPS on mass. This started after the Snowden revelations, but basically the entire internet now is on

HTTPS. And why are people willing to do it? Well, back in the day, if you were using an SSL connection, it was extremely slow. People only use SSL when you're going through like a checkout page and putting a credit card through the internet. Now, everything you do uses HTTPS. And the reason why is because it's costless. It's easy. It doesn't you don't nothing is required of you in order to get privacy in every single web request that you make. The same thing is true with encrypted chats. you know there there have always been N10 encrypted uh uh chat uh applications but only until you saw signal which was very usable and then eventually WhatsApp which moved entirely to be end encrypted using the signal uh signal inspired protocols that we now have billions of

people using N10 encrypted chats because it's easy because they don't have to do anything you don't have to lift a finger you just use WhatsApp and now all of your chats are encrypted the same thing has now happened increasingly with Zcash is that so much of the UX improvements in Zcash, you can draw a direct line to why you see more and more usage and more and more shielded activity within Zcash is because it's easy. So I claim that AI is going to fundamentally make the same thing true of privacy and it's the way in which people are going to start pushing back against the natural encroachment of this technology on their freedom and their privacy. And so in that sense, your AI agent is going to be your bull work against the encroachment

of privacy in your life. Privacy is now a prompt. You can tell your agent when your agent is capable enough and powerful enough, make me private. Erase my public footprint. Give me top-notch obset. Go onto the dark web and remove any evidence you can of me. Go buy me a PO box. Go find whatever ways you can to red team me. Imagine you're a bad actor and try to figure out where I live. Try to figure out how to attack me. what would you do to try to get into my life? your agent can figure this out for you and it can basically be your private security especially in the digital realm and so you know the ways in which you know Zcash might be hard to use or privacy preserving protocols might be hard to use you know all these things the answer is you know look still today

it's harder to use Zcash than to use something very simple but if your AI agent is going to be sitting in front of you if they're going to be the API to crypto then it costs you nothing just say hey in instead of doing this thing with Bitcoin do it with Zcash Instead of doing this thing in plain text, do it in uh in crypto text. All of that is going to fundamentally change your ability to protect yourself from what's coming in society. Now, the last element that is a part of this complete picture of how we are going to protect ourselves in the age of this panopticon is with private AI. And of course, this is a reference to Venice in which we're investors. Venice is a privacy preserving AI inference platform. You

can think of them as a private chatbt. They've been growing like crazy. and uh they use crypto rails underneath the hood. And in fact, with Venice, if you want to be entirely anonymous, you don't have to be. You can use Venice with a Google login and you can pay with a credit card, but if you want to, you can use Venice entirely with an Ethereum address and pay with stable coins, allowing you complete anonymity. And you can pay with other currencies as well. And so this allows you again that last step. If you want to have fully encrypted interactions with your AI, you can do so using privacy preserving technology. I think this is going to be the most important battle from the perspective of civil liberties over the next decade is one how you are going to protect yourself from the increasing

power of the state and second how you are going to maintain your control over AI because AI is going to become the most politicized technology of the next decade and so that's why I say that look the stories we told that agents are going to be using crypto I don't know that agents are going to be using crypto to do everything that they do I don't think that's true I think for most consumers AIS are going to use the same things that you're going to use. But my claim at the end of the day is that it's not your agent that needs crypto. It's you who needs crypto. Thank you.