Scott Melker sits down with Yat Siu at Consensus 2026 to break down why the next wave of crypto adoption will not come from people at all, it will come from AI agents.
Key Points
Key Highlights:
- Every person will eventually have hundreds of AI agents working for them, and each one needs its own wallet, this finally solves the "how do we get a billion people onchain" problem the industry has chased for years
- Crypto stayed lonely for years because onchain traffic never grew past 50 to 60 million users, but billions of AI agents transacting with each other could push that number into the hundreds of millions almost overnight
- Microtransactions that make no sense on Visa or Mastercard work perfectly onchain, which is exactly the kind of payment volume agents will generate as they negotiate, trade, and shop on a person's behalf
- Tokens tied to AI inference and compute are positioned to become real commodities, similar to how chips or energy are traded today, since people already spend tokens using OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini
- Mainstream adoption from actual humans will still happen, but only after agents arrive first and create enough onchain business activity to pull people in behind them
Takeaway The industry spent a decade asking how to bring a billion humans onchain. The real answer may be that humans were never the ones meant to show up, their AI agents are about to do it for them.
