For every genuine blockchain project harnessing artificial intelligence in an attempt to create a better world — like Dr Ben Goertzel’s Singularity.net — there are 100 coins like AI Doge that have simply wedged the hyped-up terms “AI” and “Crypto” together to flog tokens.
“Those are just fundamental buzzwords,” explains Near blockchain founder Illia Polosukhin, who worked on the groundbreaking “Attention Is All You Need” research that led to large language models like ChatGPT and Claude.
As one of the few people in the world who are as well versed in AI as they are in crypto, Polosukhin says that if you ignore the hype, the technologies really are a good fit.
“There’s a lot of specific things both in AI and Web3 that can use each other or benefit each other,” he says.
Magazine spoke with Polosukhin, Framework Ventures founder Vance Spencer, MakerDAO founder Rune Christensen, Richard Ma from Quantstamp, Ralf Kubli from Casper and others to examine some of the key hype-free, genuine use cases for AI in crypto and blockchain.
Over the next week, we’re rolling out one genuine use case for AI in crypto each day — including reasons why you shouldn’t necessarily believe the hype.
AI Doge is the perfect blend of AI and doge-iness.
The best money for AI is crypto
Everyone from Circle boss Jeremy Allaire to former BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes to Animoca Brand’s Yat Siu is convinced that crypto will be the currency of choice for AI agents.
After all, LLMs are unable to get access to bank accounts but can easily make payments using a funded crypto wallet, and they’re well suited to interacting with the logic of smart contracts and DeFi protocols.
The humans delegating the funds in the wallet can set the overarching strategies and rules, and then observe how the AI agent has performed using the transparent record on the blockchain.
Allaire says that AI “and blockchains are made for each other,” with the tech suited to “machine-generated and enforced contracts” and “machine-to-machine value exchange.”
Completely agree. AI and Blockchains are made for each other. Provenance of data, machine generated and enforced contracts, and machine to machine value exchange. We are already hearing about AI Bots spinning up on-chain wallets and using USDC. https://t.co/BwmdGdVufJ
Hayes believes that Bitcoin is the most logical payment system for AI as it is “available at all times, digital and completely automated” and enables the AI to pay for “data and compute power—in order to ‘stay alive.’”
That said, Hayes also seems to think AIs will live for trillions of years “until the heat death of the universe,” and the LLMs will, therefore, choose Bitcoin as it can be mined by robots. So sometimes Hayes’ ideas tend to get away from him.
Animoca Brands Executive Chairman and founder Yat Siu is another high-profile industry figure who believes that crypto is the only logical way for AIs to transact “with each other as autonomous beings in future.”
“In the future, 70-80% of transactions will happen through autonomous AI agents and the decentralised nature of crypto makes it a perfect match.”
But don’t take the word of puny humans: ChatGPT also chooses crypto as its preferred currency without any nudges in that direction.
Trading bots that are able to buy and sell crypto already account for up to 80% of spot volumes, and it’s likely these existing automated bots will progressively be replaced by more intelligent AI agents. (Be warned, however, that LLM-based trading experiments like Autopilot’s GPT Portfolio have seen mixed results so far, so putting your funds under the control of an AI is going to be a risky proposition for a while.)
Members of Near DAO have begun experimenting with allowing an AI to decide whether a particular new project satisfies the relevant grant criteria to fund it autonomously from the treasury.
How to add Bitcoin and crypto payments to an AI agent
It’s certainly easy enough to integrate crypto payments with AI. Lightning Labs has released a set of developer tools that enable GPT-4 to buy, sell and hold Bitcoin using the layer 2 network. And AI startup Fewsats has already created an agent that is able to pay Lightning Network invoices.
I don’t want you to freak out, but my @OpenAI agent just paid a LN invoice for me ?
Fetch.Ai also offers a service where you can create an AI agent that is able to make payments on your behalf.
Syndicate.io founder Ian Dao Lee recently wrote a blog detailing how he was able to knock up a GPT in just a few hours, using OpenAi’s APIs and Syndicate’s Transaction Cloud, which is able to autonomously make USDC payments from a Safe wallet on the Base network.
He’s excited about the possibilities this holds. “The ability for AI to pay for things, hold things of value, exchange value, or create things of value — on behalf of itself or others — is how AI gets true agency,” he says.
“Some of the most interesting ideas open up not only when AI agents can transact on behalf of and with people, businesses, or other AI agents — but also when AI agents can manage things of value and transact on behalf of themselves.”
Lee believes that in the future, AI agents will be able to shop for things autonomously, manage the finances of people and organizations, determine and hand out funding approvals or try and grow wealth to help others.
However, it turns out that AIs are just as stingy with their money as humans are, donating an underwhelming $3 to charity.
Don’t believe the hype
While AI can more easily use crypto at present, banks appear eager to adopt AI for a variety of uses and already use it extensively for the detection of financial fraud.
Payment companies like Brex are working on integrating AI with corporate bank accounts to allow AI agents to automatically make payments in defined circumstances, such as travel expenses.
And a team of researchers recently put out a preprint describing how they successfully trained an AI agent called MM-Navigator to work out how to search through Amazon for a given product within a certain budget and to buy it.
Until crypto payments are more widely accepted, fiat still has a lot of advantages when dealing with businesses in the real world.
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Andrew Fenton
Based in Melbourne, Andrew Fenton is a journalist and editor covering cryptocurrency and blockchain. He has worked as a national entertainment writer for News Corp Australia, on SA Weekend as a film journalist, and at The Melbourne Weekly.
A group of investors with cryptocurrency custody and trading firm Bakkt Holdings filed a class-action lawsuit alleging false or misleading statements and a failure to disclose certain information.
Lead plaintiff Guy Serge A. Franklin called for a jury trial as part of a complaint against Bakkt, senior adviser and former CEO Gavin Michael, CEO and president Andrew Main, and interim chief financial officer Karen Alexander, according to an April 2 filing in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The group of investors allege damages as the result of violations of US securites laws and a lack of transparency surrounding its agreement with clients: Webull and Bank of America (BoA).
April 2 complaint against Bakkt and its executives. Source: PACER
The loss of Bank of America and Webull will result “in a 73% loss in top line revenue” due to the two firms making up a significant percentage of its services revenue, the investor group alleges in the lawsuit. The filing stated Webull made up 74% of Bakkt’s crypto services revenue through most of 2023 and 2024, and Bank of America made up 17% of its loyalty services revenue from January to September 2024.
Bakkt disclosed on March 17 that Bank of America and Webull did not intend to renew their agreements with the firm ending in 2025. The announcement likely contributed to the company’s share price falling more than 27% in the following 24 hours. The investors allege Bakkt “misrepresented the stability and/or diversity of its crypto services revenue” and failed to disclose that this revenue was “substantially dependent” on Webull’s contract.
“As a result of Defendants’ wrongful acts and omissions, and the precipitous decline in the market value of the Company’s securities, Plaintiff and other Class members have suffered significant losses and damages,” said the suit.
Other law offices said they were investigating Bakkt for securities law violations, suggesting additional class-action lawsuits may be in the works. Cointelegraph contacted Bakkt for a comment on the lawsuit but did not receive a response at the time of publication.
The new trade tariffs announced by US President Donald Trump may place added pressure on the Bitcoin mining ecosystem both domestically and globally, according to one industry executive.
While the US is home to Bitcoin (BTC) mining manufacturing firms such as Auradine, it’s still “not possible to make the whole supply chain, including materials, US-based,” Kristian Csepcsar, chief marketing officer at BTC mining tech provider Braiins, told Cointelegraph.
On April 2, Trump announced sweeping tariffs, imposing a 10% tariff on all countries that export to the US and introducing “reciprocal” levies targeting America’s key trading partners.
Community members have debated the potential effects of the tariffs on Bitcoin, with some saying their impact has been overstated, while others see them as a significant threat.
Tariffs compound existing mining challenges
Csepcsar said the mining industry is already experiencing tough times, pointing to key indicators like the BTC hashprice.
Hashprice — a measure of a miner’s daily revenue per unit of hash power spent to mine BTC blocks — has been on the decline since 2022 and dropped to all-time lows of $50 for the first time in 2024.
According to data from Bitbo, the BTC hashprice was still hovering around all-time low levels of $53 on March 30.
Bitcoin hashprice since late 2013. Source: Bitbo
“Hashprice is the key metric miners follow to understand their bottom line. It is how many dollars one terahash makes a day. A key profitability metric, and it is at all-time lows, ever,” Csepcsar said.
He added that mining equipment tariffs were already increasing under the Biden administration in 2024, and cited comments from Summer Meng, general manager at Chinese crypto mining supplier Bitmars.
“But they keep getting stricter under Trump,” Csepcsar added, referring to companies such as the China-based Bitmain — the world’s largest ASIC manufacturer — which is subject to the new tariffs.
Trump’s latest measures include a 34% additional tariff on top of an existing 20% levy for Chinese mining imports. In response, China reportedly imposed its own retaliatory tariffs on April 4.
BTC mining firms to “lose in the short term”
Csepcsar also noted that cutting-edge chips for crypto mining are currently massively produced in countries like Taiwan and South Korea, which were hit by new 32% and 25% tariffs, respectively.
“It will take a decade for the US to catch up with cutting-edge chip manufacturing. So again, companies, including American ones, lose in the short term,” he said.
Csepcsar also observed that some countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States region, including Russia and Kazakhstan, have been beefing up mining efforts and could potentially overtake the US in hashrate dominance.
“If we continue to see trade war, these regions with low tariffs and more favorable mining conditions can see a major boom,” Csepcsar warned.
As the newly announced tariffs potentially hurt Bitcoin mining both globally and in the US, it may become more difficult for Trump to keep his promise of making the US the global mining leader.
Trump’s stance on crypto has shifted multiple times over the years. As his administration embraces a more pro-crypto agenda, it remains to be seen how the latest economic policies will impact his long-term strategy for digital assets.
Cryptocurrency exchange OKX is under renewed regulatory scrutiny in Europe after Maltese authorities issued a major fine for violations of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws.
Malta’s Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit (FIAU) fined Okcoin Europe — OKX’s Europe-based subsidiary — 1.1 million euros ($1.2 million) after detecting multiple AML failures on the platform in the past, the authority announced on April 3.
While admitting that OKX has significantly improved its AML policies in the past 18 months, the authority “could not ignore” its past compliance failures from 2023, “some of which were deemed to be serious and systematic,” the FIAU notice said.
The news of the $1.2 million penalty in Malta came after Bloomberg in March reported that European Union regulators were probing OKX for laundering $100 million in funds from the Bybit hack.
Bybit CEO Ben Zhou previously claimed that OKX’s Web3 proxy allowed hackers to launder about $100 million, or 40,233 Ether (ETH), from the $1.5 billion hack that occurred in February.
This is a developing story, and further information will be added as it becomes available.