How AI Agents Are Becoming the New Crypto Power Users

For the entire history of cryptocurrency, the primary participants have been humans: people buying, selling, holding, and trading. However, in 2025, a profound shift is occurring. We are witnessing the rise of the “Machine Economy,” where the dominant users of blockchain networks are not humans, but autonomous Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents.

These agents are software programs designed to perform complex tasks, make decisions, and transact value without human intervention. The marriage of AI’s decision-making capabilities with crypto’s permissionless payment rails is creating a new economic layer that operates at the speed of code.

Why AI Needs Crypto: The Payment Problem

To understand this trend, one must understand the limitations of traditional banking for AI. An autonomous AI agent cannot walk into a bank and open a checking account. It cannot pass a Know Your Customer (KYC) check or provide a driver’s license. This has historically limited AI agents to being passive tools. Cryptocurrency solves this instantly. A crypto wallet is permissionless: anyone, or anything, with the private keys can use it. This allows AI agents to hold their own funds, receive payments for services, and pay other agents for resources like computing power or data. Crypto is the native currency of the machine world.

Truth Terminal and the Rise of “Sentient” Wallets

We are already seeing early examples of this with phenomena like “Truth Terminal” and other semi-autonomous bots on social media platforms. These agents are beginning to manage their own portfolios, engaging with communities, and even launching their own tokens. While currently experimental, the implication is massive: in the future, an AI personal assistant might automatically negotiate the best price for your travel booking, pay the airline’s AI agent in a stablecoin, and settle the transaction in milliseconds, all on a blockchain backend. This creates a “machine-to-machine” (M2M) commerce layer that could dwarf human transaction volume.

Infrastructure for the Agentic Web

This shift is driving demand for specific types of blockchain infrastructure. AI agents require high throughput, low latency, and low fees. They are not influenced by marketing or tribalism; they optimize purely for efficiency. This is leading to a rise in execution-focused Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchains that cater specifically to high-frequency automated activity. For the human investor, recognizing which networks are building the “roads” for these AI vehicles is a key part of Fundamental Analysis.

The Investment Implication

The rise of the Machine Economy suggests that the future valuation of crypto networks may depend less on human adoption and more on agentic adoption. Networks that offer the best developer tooling for AI integration and the most efficient settlement layers will win. For traders, this opens up new markets centered around compute-tokenization and AI-focused protocols. Platforms like the YWO trading platform provide the necessary access to these emerging assets, allowing human traders to position themselves ahead of the coming wave of machine liquidity.