If Consensus Hong Kong 2026 had an unofficial theme, it wasn’t Bitcoin or regulation. It was synthetic intelligence — and the scramble to determine what it really means for crypto.
AI surfaced in nearly each context: main-stage keynotes, side-event panels, enterprise capital conferences, and even the post-conference temper. However the conversations weren’t uniform. They ranged from Hong Kong authorities officers endorsing the machine economic system to enterprise capitalists declaring the AI hype cycle in crypto already over.
Enterprise AI Brokers Are Already Deployed
On the Gate’s facet occasion, Sophia Jin, Hong Kong Tech Director at Byteplus — ByteDance’s enterprise know-how arm — revealed that a number of main crypto exchanges are already utilizing the corporate’s AI agent merchandise. She outlined three use circumstances in manufacturing: clever customer support that includes deep analysis and buying and selling state of affairs matching; multi-agent analysis programs with parallel information assortment; and AML workflow automation with human oversight at resolution factors.
Essentially the most notable element was the protection structure. Byteplus locations guardrails outdoors the agent orchestration layer — a kill change that may halt brokers instantly in the event that they breach outlined boundaries. Jin projected that inside two years, each alternate worker can have an enterprise-grade AI assistant, whereas onboarding new customers will develop into dramatically simpler by way of AI-powered customized schooling.
Two Years Till AI Outthinks You
Ben Goertzel, CEO of decentralized AI market SingularityNET, provided the convention’s most provocative timeline. He gave people roughly two years earlier than AI surpasses them in strategic considering.
“The human mind is healthier at taking the imaginative leap to know the unknown,” Goertzel stated iat Consensus. It gained’t final, although. “We must always get pleasure from it for a pair extra years.”
Whereas his Quantium mission can already predict short-term Bitcoin volatility with excessive accuracy, Goertzel famous that long-term strategic considering stays uniquely human — for now. He described the present bear cycle as a “stress take a look at” for infrastructure that can ultimately host synthetic basic intelligence.
Bitget CEO Gracy Chen provided a extra grounded view. On a panel about agentic buying and selling, she in contrast present AI buying and selling bots to interns — quicker and cheaper however requiring supervision. Historic data-driven fashions have by no means encountered occasions like the ten/10 liquidations, she famous, making human intervention important in unfamiliar situations. However inside three to 5 years, she projected, AI may exchange many human roles.
Saad Naj, CEO of agentic buying and selling startup PiP World, countered that people is probably not the fitting baseline. “As people, we’re too emotional. We will’t compete with AI options,” he stated, noting that 90% of day merchants lose cash.
Constructing the Fee Layer for Brokers
If the principle stage offered the imaginative and prescient, facet occasions tried to construct the plumbing.
On the Stablecoin Odyssey occasion at Soho Home, the panel “Constructing Fee Blockchains for the Agentic Economic system” centered on what infrastructure AI brokers really need. Nellie Tan, Fee Head at Monad, launched Coinbase’s X402 protocol — an HTTP-native on-chain cost customary — and argued that agentic funds would generate transactions “on the velocity of information,” requiring throughput of 1000’s to tens of millions per second.
Eddie, CEO of cost middleware AEON, framed the shift as an interface transition. When customers work together by way of AI brokers quite than apps, each business interplay funnels by way of a single level — and the final mile is all the time a cost. His firm processes what he described as 80% of crypto funds by way of partnerships with OKX, Bybit, and others.
The query of which blockchain AI brokers would select remained open. Mate Tokay, CMO of OP_CAT Layer, famous that nobody but is aware of whether or not brokers will choose chains based mostly on coaching information, expertise, velocity, or safety. The reply possible is determined by the transaction — massive asset transfers prioritize safety, whereas shopper purchases prioritize velocity.
Crypto as Forex for AI — or Simply One other Hype Cycle?
Essentially the most placing endorsement got here from outdoors the business. Hong Kong Monetary Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po used his look to border AI brokers as an financial power that crypto is uniquely positioned to serve.
“As AI brokers develop into able to making and executing selections independently, we could start to see the early types of what some name the machine economic system, the place AI brokers can maintain and switch digital property, pay for providers and transact with each other onchain,” Chan stated.
Binance CEO Richard Teng pushed it additional. “If you concentrate on the agentic AI, so the reserving of lodges, flights, no matter purchases that you’d make, the way you assume that these purchases might be made — it’ll be by way of crypto and stablecoins,” he stated. “So, crypto is the forex for AI, if you concentrate on it.”
However enterprise capitalists poured chilly water on the broader “AI + crypto” narrative. Anand Iyer of Canonical Crypto described the second as a trough. “We went by way of a frothy interval. Now it’s about determining the place the actual energy lies,” he stated. Each Iyer and Kelvin Koh of Spartan Group criticized overinvestment in GPU marketplaces and makes an attempt to construct decentralized alternate options to OpenAI or Anthropic — tasks that require capital far past what crypto can muster.
As an alternative, each see potential in purpose-built options that begin with a selected drawback. Proprietary information, regulatory edges, or go-to-market benefits now matter greater than technical novelty. Koh’s recommendation to founders was blunt: “Twelve months in the past, it was sufficient to have a wrapper on ChatGPT. That’s now not true.”
What’s Forming
Conversations amongst business contributors pointed towards a framework taking form: stablecoins serving as worth rails for agent transactions, prediction markets dealing with data pricing, AI programs executing trades and operations, and bodily robotics extending the loop into the actual world. It’s not a single mission or protocol — it’s a thesis about the place crypto and AI intersect productively, with out counting on the speculative cycles that drove earlier bull runs.
A parallel thread runs by way of decentralized AI. Present programs are centralized and opaque. The concept of clear, verifiable, community-governed AI networks aligns with crypto’s founding rules — and Goertzel, amongst others, pointed to the expansion of such tasks on the occasion as proof that convergence is underway.
The pure hypothesis cycle could not return. However at Consensus Hong Kong, the argument that AI provides crypto a cause to exist past buying and selling was made concurrently from the federal government podium, the alternate boardroom, and the enterprise capital assembly. That’s a unique sort of consensus.
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