Fresh off of NVIDIA's groundbreaking announcements on AI at CES 2025 on Tuesday, the crypto industry is abuzz with ideas. Observers see a radical shift emerging in crypto: the next wave of users might not be human at all.
Leading crypto builders and investors are predicting a future where AI agents, not people, dominate blockchain networks—but they're split on how we'll get there and what it means for everyone else.
"We will see a billion agents onchain before we see a billion humans onchain," predicts Twitter user Evan, an ecosystem lead at Monad and former McKinsey analyst. "Crypto has inherently unfriendly UX for human users. Agents do not care about this friction."
The predictions come amid a surge in AI agent development for crypto, with platforms like Virtuals already generating $60 million in revenue.
Crypto's latest meta has also seen certain assets from projects such as AI16z skyrocket, following demand for AI agent tokens.
What You Need to Know About Nvidia's AI Announcements at CES 2025
After a record-breaking 2024, Nvidia is kicking off 2025 with a bang, unveiling a slate of products that could solidify its dominance in the fields of AI development and gaming. CEO Jensen Huang took the stage at CES in Las Vegas to showcase new hardware and software offerings that span everything from personal AI supercomputers to next-generation gaming cards. Nvidia's biggest announcement: Project DIGITS, a $3,000 personal AI supercomputer that packs a petaflop of computing power into a deskt...
Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly Capital, points to changes in accessibility, where "instead of having to raise millions of dollars," developers could "launch an application with $10,000 of AI cloud compute."
This democratizes who can build and deploy blockchain apps and could "lead to an on-chain renaissance," Qureshi claims.
But the implications extend beyond just cost efficiency.
Raising ethical concerns about authentication and trust in digital interactions, Qureshi predicts that "chatbots will start hiding that they are AIs" and "pass as humans."
Qureshi claims that most current "AI agents" in crypto aren't what they're supposed to be, at least in their current versions. "These things are not really agents. These are chatbots with meme coins attached," notes Qureshi.
Crypto and AI go hand in hand
In September last year, Delphi Labs, a project focusing on Web3 protocol R&D, published a thesis on how AI could impact crypto in the coming years.
While AI could be a powerful resource "impacting society deeply," it also risks being "solely controlled by big tech and the state," Delphi Labs' paper states.
Delphi Labs claims crypto "can prevent this monopoly" by "delivering genuinely better solutions for developers and users.”
The transformation is already beginning, with some projects like Wayfinder developing functions for AI agents to interact autonomously with blockchain networks.
Ethereum Game 'Illuvium' Reveals AI Agent Plans via Surging Virtuals Protocol
Ethereum game franchise Illuvium is set to leverage the viral AI agent Virtuals Protocol to enhance its non-playable characters, or NPCs. This comes after Virtuals has surged in popularity in recent weeks after it lowered the barrier for AI agent creation, leading to the creation of some of Crypto Twitter’s favorite new characters. The Virtuals Protocol straps AI agents with its proprietary G.A.M.E large language model framework to power AI agents. AiXBT (AIXBT) is the most popular of all its cr...
Should the average Joe be concerned?
Yuk Hui, a contemporary philosopher trained as a software engineer, thinks not.
Machines such as AI agents won't "completely replace human beings" because doing so "may take longer than the extinction of the human species," Hui wrote more than three years ago.
Instead, "machine intelligence will transform humans [...] beyond their own imagination."
Edited by Sebastian Sinclair
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