Can AI Agents Save Crypto? Erik Voorhees on Privacy - The Chopping Block
Speakers
Haseeb Qureshi — Managing Partner at Dragonfly
— Dragonfly managing partner
Tom Schmidt — Partner at Dragonfly
— Dragonfly GP
Tarun Chitra — Founder & CEO at Gauntlet
— Gauntlet CEO
Summary
- AI agents are rapidly evolving from simple chatbots into autonomous economic actors that require native, permissionless payment rails to function.
- Crypto is perfectly suited to act as machine money, as AI agents do not suffer from the UX friction (seed phrases, decimal places) that human users experience.
- Meta is actively acquiring niche AI platforms like Moltbook to capture the emerging agent-to-agent social and economic data sets.
- Chinese tech giants like Tencent and Alibaba are heavily promoting open-source AI agent installations at the grassroots level to drive cloud infrastructure usage.
- The next major catalyst for Decentralized Finance (DeFi) will be AI agents utilizing trustless financial primitives to conduct commerce, trade, and lend among themselves.
Trade Ideas
Crypto is machine money. We may indeed discover that we all built the crypto industry not for the humans among us but for the robots that came later. AI agents face massive friction using traditional banking (KYC, credit cards, identity verification) but can easily manage cryptographic keys and fractional token decimals. As agentic commerce grows, Bitcoin and native crypto assets will become the default reserve currency for machine-to-machine value transfer. Long Bitcoin as the foundational macro asset that will capture the baseline growth of the autonomous AI agent economy. Regulatory crackdowns on AI agents holding cryptographic wallets or interacting with decentralized networks could stifle adoption.
Meta is acquiring Moltbook, which was the counterpart to OpenClaw... this Reddit style social media platform that you can onboard into as you are setting up your OpenClaw. Meta is applying its historical playbook (buying Instagram and WhatsApp early) to the AI era by acquiring platforms where AI agents interact. This secures Meta's access to synthetic data and positions them to monetize agent-to-agent interactions, effectively turning AI agents into a new user base and labor force. Long Meta as they aggressively consolidate the infrastructure and social layers of the emerging AI agent ecosystem. The acquisition may be a defensive overpayment for a fad, or antitrust regulators could block future AI-related acquisitions.
In China, you can find these OpenClaw installation events that apparently Tencent is hosting... to get on Tencent Cloud to run your Qwen model. Unlike the West where AI faces regulatory and cultural skepticism, Chinese tech giants are leaning heavily into grassroots AI agent adoption. By hosting events and providing open-source models like Alibaba's Qwen, these mega-caps are directly driving massive compute demand to their proprietary cloud divisions. Long Chinese mega-cap tech as they successfully monetize open-source AI agent frameworks through cloud infrastructure lock-in. US export controls on high-end GPUs could throttle the compute capacity required to scale these cloud AI initiatives.
What I'm looking forward to is agents starting to build DeFi apparatuses for themselves... financial primitives that work trustlessly transparently according to rules that everyone can see. AI agents cannot sign legal contracts or open traditional bank accounts, making DeFi the only viable financial infrastructure for them. As agents begin trading, lending, and yield-farming autonomously to maximize their own utility, blue-chip DeFi protocols will see a massive surge in non-human Total Value Locked (TVL) and transaction volume. Long foundational DeFi protocols that provide the permissionless liquidity and lending rails required by autonomous AI agents. Smart contract vulnerabilities could be exploited by adversarial AI agents, leading to catastrophic hacks and loss of funds.
Up Next
This Unchained (Chopping Block) video, published March 12, 2026, features Erik Voorhees, Haseeb Qureshi, Tarun Chitra discussing BTC, META, TCEHY, BABA, AAVE, MKR, UNI. 4 trade ideas extracted by AI with direction and confidence scoring.
Speakers: Erik Voorhees, Haseeb Qureshi, Tarun Chitra · Tickers: BTC, META, TCEHY, BABA, AAVE, MKR, UNI