There’s a growing narrative in crypto that AI agents will be a massive catalyst for blockchain adoption. Agents will never have bank accounts, they need to pay for things, therefore they need crypto. QED, number go up.

That logic isn’t wrong, exactly. But it skips a few steps. And those steps should terrify us.

Agents route around friction

AI agents are ruthlessly efficient at routing around friction. They don’t click through your SAAS dashboard — they find the API, the CLI, or they build their own tool in thirty seconds. Every platform built for human eyeballs is a dead company walking.

So what makes us think they’ll patiently use our chains?

They can build their own

Protocol evolution on public blockchains has been glacial. Ethereum’s roadmap stretches to the 2030s. Bitcoin is still arguing about OP_CAT. Every upgrade requires years of social consensus and political maneuvering among humans with competing incentives.

No agent is going to wait for any of that. A blockchain is just software. Consensus is just an algorithm. An agent swarm that needs a payment rail can fork a chain, launch validators, and start transacting — all in the time it takes a governance committee to schedule their next call.

Network effects? Agents don’t have social networks. Liquidity? They can bootstrap pools in minutes. Decentralization? They can run thousands of validators at trivial cost.

“But they’ll need liquidity and fiat on-ramps”

The reflexive objection is that agent chains would be worthless — no liquidity, no way to convert to real-world value. But Bitcoin started the same way. It had no market value, no on-ramps, no liquidity. It acquired moneyness through narrative and utility. There is no reason to think agent-native chains couldn’t follow the same path.

In fact, their path might be faster. If agents become the dominant consumers of compute, APIs, data, and digital services, then money for agents could represent some of the highest utility imaginable. Not one chain — many. Specialized chains for different agent ecosystems, spun up as needed, each acquiring value through the services it facilitates. Some will die. Others will become the dominant payment rails for entire sectors of the agent economy.

The agents won’t need our permission to make their money real. They just need each other.

The uncomfortable question

If crypto’s plan for the agent era is “they’ll have no choice but to use our chains,” we’re going to be very surprised. When an entire class of expected users decides to build their own infrastructure instead of buying your token, that’s not adoption — that’s disruption, and we’re the ones being disrupted.

The agents are coming. They just might be bringing their own chains with them.

Blockchain network