Crypto was not made for humans

We’re a crypto fund. If anyone should believe in crypto, it’s us.

And yet, when we sign a deal to invest into a startup, we don’t sign a smart contract. We sign a legal contract. The startup does the same. Neither of us are comfortable doing the deal without a legal agreement.

Why?

We have lawyers. They have lawyers. We have engineers who can write and audit smart contracts, and so do they. We are two sophisticated crypto-native parties, and we still don’t trust a smart contract to be the only binding agreement between us. I literally was a software engineer, and I still trust the legal contract more–because if there’s an issue with the legal contract, I know the judge will do a reasonable thing. The EVM, not so much.

In fact, even in the cases where we have an on-chain vesting contract, there’s usually also a legal contract in place.

You know, just in case.

When I first got into crypto, there was this fantastical story that crypto would replace property rights. Instead of legal contracts, we’d all use smart contracts. Instead of agreements enforced by courts, they’d be enforced by code.

It didn’t happen. Not because the technology doesn’t work, but because the technology doesn’t work for our society.

Let me make a confession.

I’ve been in this space for a decade and I’m still scared every time I sign a large transaction. I’m rarely scared to approve a large bank wire.

The bank, terrible as it is, was designed for humans. It’s really hard to mess it up. There are no address poisoning attacks at banks. There’s no reason why my bank would ever allow me to send $10M to North Korea–but to Ethereum validators, there’s no reason why my address wouldn’t be sending $10M to North Korea’s address.

The banking system was specifically architected with human foibles and failure modes in mind, refined over hundreds of years. Banking is adapted to humans.

Crypto is not.

That’s why in 2026, it’s still terrifying to blind sign a transaction, to have stale approvals, or to accidentally open up a drainer. We know we should verify the contract, double-check the domain, and scan for address spoofing. We know we should do all of it, every time. But we don’t. We’re human.

And that’s the tell. It’s why crypto always felt slightly misshapen for us. Long unreadable cryptographic addresses, QR codes, event logs, gas fees, and footguns everywhere–none of it conforms to our intuitions about money.

That’s when it clicked for me: it’s because crypto wasn’t built for us.

Crypto Was Made for Machines

An AI agent doesn’t get lazy. It doesn’t get tired. It can verify a transaction, check every domain, and audit a contract in seconds.

And more importantly, an AI agent trusts code more than it can trust the law.

I trust the law more than I trust the smart contract. But to an AI agent, a legal contract is actually much less predictable. Think about it: How will I drag my counterparty into court? In what jurisdiction will this contract be adjudicated? What if the legal precedent is ambiguous? Who will we draw as a judge or jury? There is so much uncertainty baked into law that it’s impossible to know with certainty the outcome of an edge case. And that dispute takes months to years to resolve through the legal system. For humans, that’s basically fine. In AI agent timeframes, that’s an eternity.

Code is the opposite. Code is closed form, deterministic. An AI agent looking to make an agreement with another agent can negotiate multiple rounds of terms on a smart contract, statically analyze it, formally verify it, and enter into a binding agreement–all in a few minutes, all while the humans are asleep.

In that sense, crypto is self-contained, fully legible, and completely deterministic as system of property rights around money. It’s everything an AI agent could want from a financial system. What we as humans see as rigid footguns, AI agents see as a well-written spec.

Even legally, our traditional monetary system was designed for human institutions, not AIs. The traditional monetary system only recognizes humans, businesses, and governments as legitimate holders of money. If you are not one of those three entities, you cannot own money.

Even if you rig up an AI agent to interact with your bank account on your behalf, then what? How do you run AML on an AI agent? Suspicious activity reports? Sanctions violations? Where does liability fall if the agent is acting autonomously? Does the liability change if it was manipulated? We haven’t even begun answering these questions–our legal system is totally unprepared for non-human financial actors.

Crypto asks no such questions. It doesn’t need to. A wallet is a wallet, it’s just code. An agent can hold funds, transact, and enter into economic agreements as easily as it can send an HTTP request.

The Self-Driving Wallet

This is why I believe the crypto interface of the future is what I call a “self-driving wallet”–entirely AI-intermediated.

You won’t be going around websites clicking buttons. You’ll instruct your AI agent to solve financial problems for you, and it will navigate the services available (e.g. Aave, Ethena, BUIDL, or whatever succeeds them) to build the right financial solutions on your behalf. You won’t do it it yourself; an AI agent that is natively fluent in this world will do it for you. And when agents are the primary interface into crypto, the way those protocols market and compete with each other will have to radically change.

And beyond acting on your behalf, agents will transact with each other. When agents can discover other agents and enter into economic agreements autonomously, they will prefer crypto. It works 24/7, 365, anyone-to-anyone, fully in cyberspace. It can’t be turned off. It’s completely self-sovereign.

This is already happening. Moltbook has agents finding and collaborating with each other across geographies, with no knowledge of who owns them or where they sit.

And just yesterday, @0xSigil’s @ConwayResearch has built self-sovereign agents that survive completely autonomously using crypto wallets, working to earn their own compute costs to stay alive.

The future is going to get increasingly weird. And crypto is going to be part of that weirdness.

So what’s the takeaway?

I think it’s this: crypto’s failure modes, which always made it feel broken for humans, in retrospect were never bugs. They were simply signs that we humans were the wrong users. In 10 years, we will look back at amazement that we ever subjected humans to wrestle with crypto directly.

This change won’t happen overnight. But a technology often snaps into place once its complement finally arrives. GPS had to wait for the smartphone, TCP/IP had to wait for the browser. For crypto, we might just have found it in AI agents.

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