The Future Economy of AI Agents: Why is Cryptocurrency Needed as a "Verifiable Infrastructure"?

Core Argument: The article argues that for AI agents to achieve widespread, autonomous operation in the real economy, they require a "verifiable infrastructure" that only cryptocurrency systems can provide.
Key Requirements for AI Agents: Two essential capabilities are identified:
- Composability: The ability for agents to automatically call services, combine with other agents, write code, test, and make decisions involving funds.
- Verifiability: The need to trustlessly verify that other agents or services performed as expected, which is lacking in traditional Web2 systems (APIs, SaaS) due to their opaque, tamperable, and unprovable nature.
Cryptocurrency's Role: Crypto provides the missing verifiable layer through:
- Verifiable Execution: Via transparent smart contracts and ZK proofs for off-chain actions.
- Verifiable Identity: Through decentralized identity (DID) and signed agent code.
- Verifiable Value Transfer: Enabling automatic payments, profit sharing, slashing, and fund management without intermediaries.
Economic Necessity: As AI progresses to autonomously write, test, run, and repair code that manages real-world funds and transactions, a crypto-based system is crucial for security, automated rewards/punishments, and trustless settlement. Without it, AI agents remain limited to demonstrations and cannot scale in the real economy.

Author: pan, founder of TP Wallet

For an AI agent to truly become a "widely deployable autonomous software," it needs two core capabilities:

① Composability

② Verifiable

These are precisely the two points that traditional Web2 cannot provide, but which cryptocurrency systems inherently possess.

1. AI requires composability, and composability must be built upon verifiability.

The future of AI agents is not a single model, but:

Automatically call other services
Combine other agents
Automatic code writing
Automated testing
Automated decision-making (including actions involving funds).

This is called Agentic Composability.

The question is:

If one agent calls another agent, but you cannot verify that the other party actually performed as expected, then the entire automation ecosystem cannot be closed.

Web2 infrastructure (API + SaaS) cannot provide this strong verifiability because:

API is a black box
Data can be tampered with
The execution result cannot be proven.
Centralized auditing of permissions
Money cannot be settled automatically.

in other words:

A Web2 agent cannot fully trust another Web2 agent.

Therefore, automation stops at the "demo level".

2. Cryptocurrencies provide the "verifiable foundational layer" that AI lacks.

Crypto provides three key capabilities needed for the future AI ecosystem at the underlying level:

① Verifiable Execution

Smart contracts are transparent and provable.

ZK proofs enable verification of complex off-chain executions as well.

AI can confirm that "the other party did exactly as I said."

② Verifiable Identity

Decentralized identity DID/Key and Agent code are themselves signatureable.

Solution: Who did it? Is it credible? Has it been tampered with?

③ Verifiable Value Transfer

Smart contract support:

Automatic deduction
Automatic payment
Profit sharing through multi-party collaboration
Mortgage and Slashing
Bond mechanism

This allows AI to manage and allocate funds directly without relying on institutions.

This is something Web2 cannot do.

3. AI programming requires "self-testability," and when funding is involved, "automatic verifiability" is even more crucial.

Anthropic's recent acquisition of Bun is a signal:

AI is about to upgrade from "automatic code writing" to a complete cycle of "automatic writing → automatic testing → automatic running → automatic repair".

But once AI runs code automatically and allows that code to directly impact the real world, for example:

Execute transaction
Management Budget
Pay API fees
Participation in economic activities

Therefore, a verifiable fund security system based on cryptocurrencies is necessary.

Otherwise, AI will just be a toy and won't be relevant to the real economy.

Crypto enables AI to:

Automatic fines for "execution errors"
"Good contribution" is automatically rewarded.
Automatic liquidation during multi-agent collaboration
Automatic settlement without human trust

This is essential for the future AI Agent economy.

4. Summarize it in one sentence

AI enables software autonomy; crypto makes autonomy trustworthy. Without the verifiability of cryptocurrency, AI agents cannot operate at scale in the real economy.