Since starting ChatGPT, I’ve been a little obsessed with artificial intelligence and its potential uses. Less than a year after this release, we have already seen several use cases and many more are planned.
What interests me is how AI will impact finance. As training and computing costs fall, it is expected that AI agents will outnumber humans online (if they do not already). These agents will consume, generate and exchange an unimaginable amount of information. This brings with it many opportunities and fears in areas such as finance where identity management is of utmost importance.
So let’s go one step further. How will AI (especially topics like human-like AI agents) impact blockchain networks? Do blockchains offer a new opportunity for AI-driven agents in the fintech space?
The current state of AI-driven agents in finance
AI supporters in finance and fintech believe that there must be a way to enable AI agents to freely handle and complete tasks without direct human interaction. And of course we want to identify, control and examine their actions.
For this reason, we cannot allow AI agents to use traditional financial systems as they do not fit the identity model used in these systems. We can’t do that
- Audit them,
- trust them,
- Secure them
At least not yet.
This current reality drastically limits AI’s ability to interact with financial systems… and that’s before we even get to the questions of resources and costs. Although costs have fallen, they are still significant. The current state of affairs is for companies like OpenAI to cover their huge operating costs by requiring API access to the AI models they create.
So the problem is AI adaptation, or finding a method that supports training and organizing AI agents in a way that is scalable and trustworthy.
Every solution requires three things:
- A new software model where trusted code execution is guaranteed and verifiable;
- A new digital financial system that can serve not only humans but also AI agents;
- A cryptographic identity model that includes decentralized communication and reputation protocols.
Currently, the best way to achieve these three things is through blockchain protocols and smart contracts.
The potential of combining blockchain and AI technology
Major blockchain platforms such as Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche and others enable secure, reliable, decentralized applications with an auditable transaction trail. Other networks like Filecoin and Arweave can provide cost-effective and secure data storage, which will be crucial for AI models. Tens of billions of dollars in assets and hundreds of thousands of daily transactions are already locked on these networks.
Since these platforms are based on smart contracts, which are self-executing code, it seems like a small step to use these networks to train, deploy and operate decentralized AI agents that can interact with each other via smart contracts.
So it seems like blockchain could be a perfect marriage of fintech and AI… right? Future AI agents could instead operate through smart contracts and pay small fees – digital tokens – when carrying out their tasks. This not only improves the efficiency of the AI agents, but also increases the use of the blockchain on which the smart contracts reside: a win-win situation.
Creating AI agents that can control their digital wallets would mean they could easily use any smart contract-based platform or service, including DeFi protocols and infrastructure services.
Such an agent could even invest its tokens through staking or yield farming protocols or trading on decentralized exchanges. This would allow optimization of the agent’s financial operations while increasing liquidity in the markets. Depending on the role of the agent themselves, they could charge other agents for their services.
The result would be a vast network of economically motivated AI agents, all collaborating across decentralized protocols, trading data and services while covering their costs. This is unimaginable with the traditional financial system.
The blockchain as a new vehicle for AI agents
Even when AI agents deliver their benefits off-chain, they operate on a network… that means an immutable log of their activities that is public and transparent. This transparency offers many benefits, including:
- Distinguishing AI activities and content from human activities,
- Build identity systems for AI agents,
- Check agent actions in real time and
- Creating reputation systems for AI agents.
With such a control system, we could reward the good actors within that system, punish or remove bad actors, and know with certainty which agents perform best at a given task. Not only do people know which agents they can trust, but other agents can also quickly decide which agents they can trust and rely on based on a given agent’s publicly available on-chain history.
Of course, there is still a lot of work to be done to get to this point. As blockchain infrastructure becomes faster and cheaper, we need to scale smart contract blockchains to handle all the transactions that AI agents would create.
Programmable smart contract wallets are being developed to help agents process transactions using smart contracts and other agents. One of the key features of these newer wallet types is the ability to integrate account abstraction, which would allow human actors to authorize AI agents to spend through a specific wallet.
We would also need to build the registries and reputation systems needed to track AI agents, most likely using their public keys as identifiers for each individual agent. Once this is underway, I expect several new business applications and models to emerge.
Takeaway for investors
There is still a lot of work to be done in the field of AI, but all of these developments are probably just around the corner, even if they may seem unattainable now. Once the floodgates open, we will likely see many more blockchain/AI use cases, ushering in a new financial system that is more open, transparent, efficient, and ultimately better aligned with humanity’s needs.
If you are like me and believe that a combination of blockchain and AI is inevitable, then you can probably also see how this would impact the value of various blockchain platforms and protocols. We always hoped for the mass adoption of blockchain, but none of us expected that this mass adoption could be based on AI rather than humans. In any case, it will increase the value of the underlying blockchains and create opportunities for those with imagination to see them.
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