Crypto has spent more than a decade building blockchains, exchanges, lending markets, stablecoins and perpetual futures.
With nearly every familiar category now crowded, Wintermute, a crypto market maker and investor, says founders are asking the wrong question.
"The question worth asking is no longer 'what can crypto do,'" Wintermute wrote in an X article. "It is 'what does the rest of the world need crypto for'."
Its answer is the "machine economy," a future in which autonomous AI agents, robots and research systems can make decisions, buy services and move money without waiting for a person to approve every step.
Wintermute argues that existing financial systems were designed around identifiable people and companies that can be held responsible when something goes wrong.
But blockchains, by contrast, offer programmable rules. And public transaction records may be better suited to software acting continuously, the firm added.
"The wallet is missing, not the hands"
The firm sees opportunities in payment authorization and identity for AI agents, wallets for robots, and software that coordinates automated scientific research.
It pointed to agent-operated wallets and trading tools from Coinbase, Robinhood and Binance as early evidence that the idea is moving beyond small experimental projects.
- Coinbase offers AgentKit, a developer toolkit that equips AI agents with wallets and lets them autonomously transfer or swap tokens.
- Robinhood went further by allowing customers to create separate accounts in which outside AI agents can analyze portfolios and execute stock trades.
- Binance entered the field through Trust Wallet, its acquired crypto wallet, whose agent toolkit lets AI software execute trades and other onchain transactions across multiple blockchains.
Still, Wintermute admitted that the idea hasn't been proven at scale.
Wintermute
It also pointed to a prompt-injection attack that reportedly tricked an automated trading agent into moving about $150,000 to $200,000, and an AI-assisted coding error that left lending protocol Moonwell with nearly $1.8 million in bad debt.