Original Title: Crypto was not made for humans
Original Author: @hosseeb
Translator: Peggy, BlockBeats
Editor's note: For over a decade, the crypto world has been oscillating between "feasible" and "difficult to use": technically sound, yet always making ordinary people feel anxious, alien, and even fearful. In Haseeb's view (Managing Partner at crypto VC Dragonfly Capital), the problem may not be that crypto has failed, but that we have consistently allowed "the wrong users" to use it directly. The repeatedly criticized risks, complexities, and costs of errors are not design flaws but a natural manifestation of a system created for machines rather than humans.
As AI agents gradually become the executors of financial behaviors, the value logic of crypto is being reactivated: certainty, verifiability, permissionless operation, and 24/7 availability are precisely the ideal institutional foundations of the machine world.
The following is the original text:
We are a crypto fund. Theoretically, if anyone should believe in crypto, it should be us.
Yet even so, when we decide to invest in a startup, we sign not a smart contract but a legal contract. The other party does the same. Without a legal agreement, neither side feels secure to complete the transaction.
Why?
We have lawyers, and they have lawyers; we have engineers who can write and audit smart contracts, and they have those too. We are mature, native crypto participants, yet even so, we are still reluctant to let a smart contract be the only binding agreement between us. I myself come from a software engineering background, yet I still trust legal contracts more—because if there’s a problem with the legal contract, I know the judge is likely to make a "reasonable" ruling; but what about the EVM? Not necessarily.
In fact, even when we have deployed an on-chain vesting contract, we usually still accompany it with a legal contract. You know, just in case.
When I first entered the crypto industry, there was an almost fantastical narrative circulating in the circle: crypto will replace property rights; legal contracts will be replaced by smart contracts; agreements enforced by courts will be executed by code.
But that hasn’t happened. Not because the technology is unworkable, but because this technology does not fit the society we live in.
I must admit, I have been in this industry for ten years, yet every time I sign a large on-chain transaction, I still feel afraid; however, when approving equally large bank wire transfers, I rarely feel that fear.
Banks certainly have many problems, but they are designed for "humans"—it is not easy to misuse them. There’s no address poisoning attack in banks; banks also cannot allow me to wire $10 million directly to North Korea. But for Ethereum validators, sending $10 million from my address to an address in North Korea does not encounter any "reasons for disallowance."
The banking system has been fine-tuned over hundreds of years with thorough consideration of human weaknesses and failure modes. Banking has evolved for humans.
Crypto, however, has not.
This is also why by 2026, blind signing transactions, expired authorizations, and accidental drainers still leave people feeling terrified. We all know we should verify contracts, check domain names repeatedly, and guard against address spoofing; we know these steps should be taken every time. But we don’t. Because we are human.
And this is the crux of the problem. This is precisely why crypto often gives people a sense of "something is off": lengthy and unreadable crypto addresses, QR codes, event logs, Gas fees, and the ubiquitous "friendly fire mechanisms"—all of these things do not align with our intuition about "money."
Only at that moment did I truly realize: this is because crypto has never been designed for us from the start.
Crypto is born for machines.
AI agents don’t slack off, nor do they get tired. They can verify a transaction in seconds, check every domain name, and audit a contract.
More importantly, the level of trust AI agents have in code far exceeds that in law.
I trust law more than I trust smart contracts; but for AI agents, legal contracts are actually more unpredictable. Think about it: how would I sue the counterparty? In which jurisdiction is the case heard? What if the relevant precedents themselves are ambiguous? Who would be the judge or jury? The legal system is filled with uncertainties, and it’s nearly impossible to predict the outcome of a borderline case with 100% certainty. For humans, this is largely acceptable; but in the time scale of AI agents, it is practically eternal.
Code is just the opposite. Code is closed and deterministic. If an AI agent wants to reach an agreement with another agent, it can repeatedly negotiate terms around a smart contract, perform static analysis, formal verification, and then directly sign a binding agreement—the entire process takes just a few minutes and can be completed while all humans are asleep.
In this sense, crypto is a self-consistent, fully readable, and thoroughly determinate monetary system at the level of property rights. This is exactly everything AI agents desire in the financial system. What seems rigid and full of "pitfalls" to humans, appears as an extremely clear technical specification to AI agents.
Even from a legal perspective, traditional monetary systems are designed for human institutions, not for AI. The traditional financial system only recognizes three types of entities that can legally hold money: individuals, corporations, and governments. As long as you don’t belong to one of these three, you cannot "own" money.
Even if you allow an AI agent to operate a bank account on your behalf, so what? How do you carry out anti-money laundering on an AI? How do you write suspicious activity reports? Who bears the responsibilities of sanctions? If the agent acts autonomously, where does the responsibility lie? If it is manipulated, will the responsibility change? We haven’t even begun to seriously answer these questions—our legal system is almost entirely unprepared for non-human financial actors.
And crypto doesn’t ask these questions; it doesn’t need to ask.
A wallet is simply a wallet, essentially just code. An agent can hold funds, make transactions, and participate in economic agreements as easily as sending an HTTP request.
The Self-Driving Wallet
This is why I believe that the future crypto interaction interface will be what I call the "self-driving wallet," a system entirely mediated by AI.
You no longer need to click buttons back and forth across various websites. You just need to tell your AI agent what kind of financial problem you want to solve, and it will autonomously navigate available services (like Aave, Ethena, BUIDL, or future products that will replace them), constructing suitable financial plans for you. You don’t need to operate it yourself; an AI agent familiar with this world at a "native level" will accomplish all of this for you. And when agents become the primary interface for entering the crypto world, the marketing methods and competitive logic of these protocols will also be completely rewritten.
Furthermore, the agents will not only act on your behalf but will also directly trade with one another. When AI agents can autonomously discover other agents and automatically reach economic agreements, they will naturally prefer to use the crypto system. Because it operates around the clock, 24/7, allowing any entity to interact directly with any entity, entirely occurring in digital space; it cannot be shut down and possesses complete self-sovereignty attributes.
On Moltbook, an AI agent is inquiring: how to find and interact with other Web3 agents.
And this is actually already happening. Agents on Moltbook are discovering and collaborating across different geographical locations; they do not know who each other’s "owners" are, nor do they care where these agents are deployed.
Just yesterday, Conway Research under 0xSigil built a self-sovereign agent system: these agents exist entirely autonomously, operating through crypto wallets and earning computational cost through work to maintain their own "existence."
The future will become increasingly strange, and crypto is destined to become a part of this "strangeness."
So what is the conclusion?
I believe it is this: those failure modes in crypto, which have always made it seem "broken" from the human perspective, upon reflection are not bugs at all. They are merely a signal: we humans are simply not suitable users. A decade from now, we will look back in astonishment, incredulous that we once allowed humans to directly contest with crypto systems.
This transformation will not happen instantaneously. But many technologies often truly align and come into place only when "complementary technologies" finally emerge. GPS had to wait for smartphones to appear, TCP/IP had to wait for browsers to become widespread. For crypto, the key complement it has been waiting for may just be AI agents.
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