By Michael Scott
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents are flooding the blockchain network space in a transformative shift to replace humans in driving crypto’s future.
Machines are set to play a more dominant role in the crypto space following the Tuesday, Jan. 7 groundbreaking disclosure by NVIDIA at the CES 2025 event. The announcement triggered an ongoing debate about a looming radical shift within the crypto industry where humans might not dominate the next wave of users.
Fresh off the revelation by NVIDIA, leading crypto developers and investors anticipate blockchain networks will witness an influx of AI agents. Nonetheless, they split their views on how to get there and its implications for everyone else.
Former McKinsey analyst Evan revealed in a Jan. 6 X post that AI is perceived by many as a mainstay category. The Monad’s ecosystem lead projects that the world should expect to witness a billion AI agents onchain, thus outnumbering humans.
Evan adds that the inherently unfriendly UX in crypto disadvantages human users. However, the AI agents hardly care about such friction.
The ambitious forecasts emerge following the surge in the development of crypto-focused AI agents. For context, development platforms such as Virtuals have witnessed exponential revenue growth, currently surpassing $60M.
Is Nvidia Eyeing Advanced Role in AI?
The AI agent tokens have witnessed elevated demand, including AI16z, coincidentally, as Nvidia is confident of replicating the record-breaking performance in 2024. The computing giant seeks to replicate the past year with several products unveiled to solidify AI development and gaming dominance.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang announced new software and hardware offerings when addressing the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) 2025. He announced expansive product additions spanning personal AI supercomputers and gaming cards.
The striking product during Nvidia’s announcement was the DIGITS product, which was profiled as a personal AI supercomputer. The product costs $3,000 and can pack the computing power into a desktop-sized box.
DIGITS leverages a new superchip, GB10 Grace Blackwell. Huang indicated that the machine can accommodate the AI models to a maximum of 200 billion parameters, although still powered from the standard outlet.
Ease of Launching AI Applications
Dragonfly Capital head partner Haseeb Qureshi acknowledges the changes in applications are evident. Instead, he indicates that developers do not need to raise million-dollar funds as a $10,000 fee is enough to unveil an AI cloud computing application.
Qureshi illustrates that the bolstered accessibility democratizes the process of building and deploying blockchain applications to transform on-chain renaissance. He admits that the implications extend typical cost efficiency.
Qureshi considers the increased accessibility to raise ethical concerns regarding authenticating and trusting digital interactions. He anticipates that chatbots could conceal their AI identity and pass authentication as humans.
Qureshi illustrates that the current AI agents in crypto are hardly what they should be in their ultimate version. He considers them unqualified to earn the real agents’ title. Instead, they are chatbots interlinked with memecoins.
Crypto-AI Integration
Cryptocurrency and AI have witnessed strengthening bonds, as revealed in September 2024 by Delphi Labs in its published thesis. The project specializing in Web3 protocol R&D examined how AI could influence crypto in the future.
Delphi Labs indicated in the publication that though AI is a powerful resource that could impact society profoundly, it could pose huge risks when solely controlled by large tech and state players.
Delphi Labs hypothesized that crypto could thwart such a monopoly by delivering genuine superior solutions for the developers and users.
The projected transformation begins as some initiatives, such as Wayfinder, establish functions for the AI agents. This development enables the agents to interact autonomously with blockchain networks.
Yuk Hui, who is both a philosopher and software engineer, calms the fears that machines would replace humans. He considers the AI agents unlikely to replace human beings entirely.
Hui indicated that replacing humans is time intensive as such would involve making the humans extinct. The software expert considers machine intelligence a resource to transform humans to unimaginable levels.