Written by: Wanxiang Blockchain Lab

This article is translated from Pantera Capital's article “The Next Great Tech Convergence: Why AI Needs Blockchain,” which details the fusion trends of AI and blockchain in the four major areas of payment, identity authentication, open ecosystems, and resource aggregation, revealing how the two empower each other to jointly build the next-generation economic infrastructure. Original author: Paul Veradittakit

Original link: https://open.substack.com/pub/veradiverdict/p/the-next-great-tech-convergence-why?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Summary

• AI and blockchain are converging in four directions: payments, identity authentication, open ecosystems, and resource aggregation, all of which have mature applications in place.
• Fundamentally, the two are naturally complementary: AI brings “abundance,” with infinite content and infinite agents; blockchain provides “scarcity,” with verifiable ownership and native settlement mechanisms. One is responsible for creation, while the other is responsible for verification and payment.
• The market has not fully realized this yet. Although AI and blockchain are interconnected, the valuation gap between the two is at a historically high level.
• AI agents will not open bank accounts, will not use clearing systems, and will not wait for ACH to settle slowly. They will transact on-chain using stablecoins and complete transactions at machine speed. The agent economy is accelerating the construction on an infrastructure that most institutional investors have not yet allocated to.

Today, the whole world is watching artificial intelligence, but AI is only half of the puzzle. The next significant technological convergence is quietly taking shape at the intersection of AI and blockchain. Massive capital is pouring into the AI field, driving the valuations of leading AI companies to extremely high levels; on the other hand, digital assets, which are also pointing towards this long-term technological transformation, remain systematically undervalued.

What is truly exciting is not one particular technology, but the way they achieve success together. For years, AI and blockchain have been treated as two independent super trends. In fact, they are just two sides of the same trend.

AI is giving rise to an entirely new economic role: autonomous agents. These agents need to own assets, exchange value, collaborate on a large scale, and interact with one another. Blockchain (or more broadly, distributed ledger technology) is the only financial and collaborative infrastructure designed from the ground up to serve non-human participants. On blockchain networks, agents and robot programs are already “first-class citizens.” For this reason, we believe that most agent-driven transactions in the future will occur on-chain.

Lessons from History

History repeatedly tells us one thing: the most significant economic leaps often occur at moments when two powerful technologies meet. The steam engine met the railroad, electricity met manufacturing, the internet met smartphones… each time, a powerful new capability, combined with a set of infrastructure that brings this capability to fruition, has spawned entirely new economic forms and long-lived companies.

AI brings “unlimited abundance,” producing intelligence, content, agents, and digital identities at nearly zero marginal cost; blockchain provides “certain scarcity,” verifiable ownership, trust-minimized collaborative mechanisms, and cryptographically assured authenticity. The talent bases of both are highly overlapping, rooted in mathematics and open-source culture; philosophically speaking, they are yin and yang, with AI creating unlimited abundance and blockchain establishing limited scarcity.

The Ongoing Convergence

Equipping AI Agents with “Machine Native” Finance

Our current financial system is designed for human users: slow, permissioned, and reliant on centralized intermediaries. We are entering an era that requires building infrastructure for a completely new user: AI agents. Blockchain is the technology that can provide this efficient solution at scale.

Transactions and Payments

Companies have already demonstrated that this path is viable. OpenFX uses stablecoins for its settlement layer, with an annual total payment volume exceeding $60 billion. They state clearly: the next wave of users is not human, but software. It is expected that within ten years, AI agents will become the largest user group in foreign exchange trading.

Agents do not need bank accounts, nor do they need traditional cross-border clearing systems. What they require is: speed, low cost, no permissions, 24/7 operation, and programmable settlement. This is precisely what blockchain offers.

Another notable company is Alchemy, known as the “AWS of the Web3 world.” As a core developer platform, from natively supporting agent wallets to the on-chain execution layer, it is powering the next generation of “AI + blockchain” applications. Alchemy significantly reduces the difficulty for developers to build the underlying infrastructure that agents will actually use.

Identity Authentication is an Increasingly Inescapable Element

When the world is filled with AI agents and AI-generated content that looks real, distinguishing whether the entity is a real person, a machine, or AI-generated material has become a necessity.

Traditional identity systems, like passports, government records, and bank accounts, are designed for centralized human interactions and are difficult to apply directly to new environments. What we need is a global, cryptographically secure, privacy-protecting, censorship-resistant method to prove identity attributes on the internet.

This sounds like exactly what blockchain should do.

The World team is working on this, through “personality proof,” using cryptography to prove that a specific individual is both real and unique, thereby building a global privacy-protecting identity and financial network.

• Users validate their identity through iris scanning via World Orb biometric devices.
• Users receive a World ID that is hash-encrypted and protected on Worldchain.
• Currently, World has covered over 18 million verified individual human users, becoming one of the five most widely used blockchains.

Recently, its collaborations with companies like Reddit (which only allows verified human users to interact) and Zoom (integrating deepfake detection and video identity verification) indicate that its utility in the real world is growing. World was co-founded by Sam Altman while leading OpenAI, and he is acutely aware of the identity authentication challenges brought by the technology his company creates.

Additionally, the TransCrypts team is also building a blockchain layer for decentralized identity and verifiable credentials. This allows users to genuinely own verified records (such as work history, income, qualification credentials) on-chain, becoming a powerful tool against AI-driven fraud, deepfakes, and synthetic identity attacks. In a world dense with agents, this programmable trust will be the most fundamental threshold.

AI is Overvalued, Blockchain is Undervalued

As company valuations soar, blockchain, on the other hand, is being undervalued, creating one of the most attractive relative value opportunities we have seen.

As of May 2026, mainstream AI indices are about 49% above their four-year trend line, while the overall valuation of digital assets is significantly below long-term trends. This is the largest valuation divergence in history, despite the close links between both, as AI agents will ultimately operate on the blockchain.

Competition in this converging direction is becoming increasingly intense. As BlackRock's Robbie Mitchnick recently stated, AI agents will not use traditional banking infrastructure; they will use blockchain-based monetary tools. Digital assets are the machine-native money in the machine intelligence economy. *This article is translated and organized based on publicly available material for industry information exchange only. All views and content belong to the original author and do not represent any stance or advice from this platform.

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