What to know : Chappy Asel argues that crypto’s most important role in AI will be powering low-latency, programmable payment rails for autonomous software agents rather than consumer-facing chatbots. While stablecoins and smart contracts could enable always-on, micro-sized “agentic payments,” real-world adoption remains limited as most companies still rely on centralized APIs and traditional payment systems. Asel says the near-term overlap between crypto and AI is more likely to center on infrastructure such as compute, data centers and energy, with bitcoin miners and other crypto firms repositioning to serve AI workloads and future machine-to-machine commerce.
The crypto industry’s embrace of AI is less about chatbots and more about building financial infrastructure for autonomous machines, says Chappy Asel, a former Apple engineer and founder of AI nonprofit The AI Collective.
Speaking at Consensus Miami, Asel, founder of The AI Collective, a global nonprofit AI community with more than 200,000 members across 150+ chapters, argued that as software agents increasingly make economic decisions on behalf of users and businesses, they will need payment systems capable of handling low-latency, programmable transactions at scale.
“When agents make the majority of financial decisions, economic decisions, how do they transact with each other?” Asel said during the panel. “You want them to be highly systematic, mechanistic. You want very small, micro transactions. You want very low latency.”
Asel, who previously worked on Apple’s Vision Pro and early Apple Intelligence efforts before launching The AI Collective, framed the convergence of crypto and AI through a practical lens.
“The number one thing that I've heard kind of throughout this conference... even my friends who only know about AI, they know nothing about blockchain, is they've heard about agentic payments,” he said.
Stablecoins already offer 24/7 settlement and smart contracts allow programmable execution. Marrying them together is the only logical way agentic payments — without a human in the middle — can become mainstream.
Still, the thesis remains early. AI agents are still nascent, and many companies today rely on centralized APIs and conventional payment systems. Attempts to build “agentic payments” infrastructure have so far generated little meaningful commercial activity, suggesting the narrative may be developing faster than actual demand.
Even if machine-to-machine commerce takes longer to materialize, Asel argued the broader overlap between crypto and AI may emerge elsewhere first.
“A lot of people will tell you, oh, it’s the models aren’t good enough,” Asel said. “It’s none of that. It’s literally compute, data centers, energy that is driving pretty much all decision-making in AI right now.”
That framing reflects a wider shift in the AI economy, where access to chips, power, and data center capacity is becoming the defining competitive advantage.
Parts of the crypto industry are already moving to capture that opportunity. Several bitcoin miners have spent the past year repositioning toward AI hosting and high-performance computing, betting that infrastructure originally built for mining can be repurposed for AI workloads.
For Asel, the practical advice for founders navigating the uncertainty was simple: experiment.
“When the world is more uncertain than it ever has been... things will only get crazier,” he said. “That warrants that you are spending more and more time playing around with the new technology.”
Crypto’s consumer adoption problem has always been partly a usability problem.
But AI agents do not need onboarding tutorials, aren't intimidated by MetaMask, or need help remembering seed phrases. If autonomous software becomes a meaningful economic actor, crypto may have found a user base that actually thinks in code.
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