Haseeb Qureshi, managing companion at Dragonfly, argues that crypto’s persistent friction stems from a deeper mismatch: its structure seems higher aligned with synthetic intelligence (AI) brokers.
In his view, lots of crypto’s perceived failure modes aren’t design flaws however alerts that people had been by no means the best main customers.
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The Human-Crypto Disconnect
In an in depth submit on X, Qureshi argued {that a} elementary divide exists between human decision-making and blockchain’s deterministic structure. He mentioned the early imaginative and prescient of the trade imagined a world the place good contracts would substitute authorized agreements and courts, with property rights enforced instantly on-chain.
That shift, nonetheless, has not materialized. Even crypto-native companies akin to Dragonfly nonetheless depend on standard authorized contracts.
“When we sign a deal to invest into a startup, we don’t sign a smart contract. We sign a legal contract. The startup does the same. Neither of us are comfortable doing the deal without a legal agreement…In fact, even in the cases where we have an on-chain vesting contract, there’s usually also a legal contract in place,” he mentioned.
In line with Qureshi, the problem is just not technical failure however social misalignment. Blockchain methods operate as designed, but they aren’t structured round human conduct and error. He additionally contrasted this with conventional banking, which has developed over centuries to account for errors and misuse.
“The bank, terrible as it is, was designed for humans,” he added. “The banking system was specifically architected with human foibles and failure modes in mind, refined over hundreds of years. Banking is adapted to humans. Crypto is not.”
He added that lengthy cryptographic addresses, blind signing, immutable transactions, and automatic enforcement don’t align with human instinct about cash.
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“That’s why in 2026, it’s still terrifying to blind sign a transaction, to have stale approvals, or to accidentally open up a drainer. We know we should verify the contract, double-check the domain, and scan for address spoofing. We know we should do all of it, every time. But we don’t. We’re human. And that’s the tell. It’s why crypto always felt slightly misshapen for us,” the manager remarked.
AI Brokers: Crypto’s True Natives?
Qureshi urged that AI brokers could also be extra naturally suited to crypto’s design. He defined that AI brokers don’t fatigue or skip verification steps.
They will analyze contract logic, simulate edge circumstances, and execute transactions with out emotional hesitation. Whereas people could want the authorized methods, AI brokers could favor the determinism of code. In line with him,
“In that sense, crypto is self-contained, fully legible, and completely deterministic as system of property rights around money. It’s everything an AI agent could want from a financial system. What we as humans see as rigid footguns, AI agents see as a well-written spec…Even legally, our traditional monetary system was designed for human institutions, not AIs.”
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Qureshi forecasted that the crypto interface of the longer term will likely be a “self-driving wallet,” fully mediated by AI. On this mannequin, AI brokers handle monetary actions on behalf of customers.
He additionally urged that autonomous brokers might transact instantly with one another, positioning crypto’s always-on, permissionless infrastructure as a pure basis for a machine-to-machine economic system.
“I think it’s this: crypto’s failure modes, which always made it feel broken for humans, in retrospect were never bugs. They were simply signs that we humans were the wrong users. In 10 years, we will look back at amazement that we ever subjected humans to wrestle with crypto directly,” Qureshi pressured.
Nonetheless, he cautioned that such a shift wouldn’t happen in a single day. Technological methods usually require complementary breakthroughs earlier than reaching mainstream relevance.
“GPS had to wait for the smartphone. TCP/IP had to wait for the browser,” Qureshi famous. “For crypto, we might just have found it in AI agents.”
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Just lately, Bankless founder Ryan Adams additionally argued that crypto adoption has stalled on account of poor person expertise. Nevertheless, he urged that what seems to be “bad UX” for people may very well be optimum UX for AI brokers.
Adams predicted that billions of AI brokers might finally drive crypto markets past $10 trillion.
“In a year or two there’ll be billions of agents, many with wallets (then a year later they’ll be trillions). The “AiFi narrative” is underground like defi was in 2019. The dry tinder is quietly amassing however sooner or later it’s going to ignite. Nobody is being attentive to crypto now as a result of worth is down…however i imagine AI brokers will scale to trillions of crypto wallets. AiFi is the following frontier of DeFi,” the submit learn.
The machine-native crypto thesis is highly effective, however actual constraints stay. AI brokers could transact autonomously, but legal responsibility nonetheless in the end rests with people or establishments, protecting authorized methods related.
Deterministic good contracts cut back ambiguity however don’t get rid of exploits, governance failures, or systemic danger. Lastly, an argument is also made that if AI turns into the first interface, crypto could fade into backend infrastructure reasonably than operate as a parallel monetary order.
