In the rapidly evolving world of cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence is no longer just a passive tool for analysis. It’s becoming an active player, reshaping the decentralized landscape with unprecedented capabilities. As of September 4, 2025, the rise of autonomous AI agents in the crypto market brings both innovation and potential pitfalls, highlighting an urgent need for robust networks to ensure trust and accountability.
The New Era of AI Agents
AI agents are stepping beyond their traditional roles of data crunching and market analysis. Nowadays, these autonomous entities are executing trades, crafting financial contracts, and moving capital across blockchain networks with finality. For institutional crypto desks, this means unprecedented speed and efficiency—trades happen in the blink of an eye, products are enhanced, and new market exposures are unlocked. But, here’s the catch: As AI agents take on these active roles, they also introduce new risks. Imagine two agents negotiating a derivatives contract but logging different figures—one at $100 million, the other at $120 million. The discrepancies could trigger significant failures, sparking investigations and financial instability. This echoes the concerns raised in Pioneering AI Visionary Vincent Boucher & AGI Alpha Announce a Meta‑Agentic AGI Jobs Marketplace Platform, where the integration of AI in financial systems is explored.
Navigating the Infrastructure Gap
The agentic era isn’t just a futuristic concept; it’s unfolding now, and it’s not without its challenges. Agents operating on inaccurate or unverifiable data can lead to dire consequences. There’s a glaring need for a shared memory—a ledger, if you will—that provides verifiability and accountability. Just as the internet needed HTTPS for secure connections, the agentic web demands a trusted network.
The current infrastructure gap is palpable. Without a unified ledger, agents diverge, creating conflicting records and inevitable failures. The absence of audit trails renders these systems opaque and untrusted—a risky proposition for enterprise adoption. To bridge this gap, a foundation must be built on three core layers: decentralized infrastructure, a trust layer, and verified, reliable AI agents. This infrastructure challenge is reminiscent of the issues faced by Bitcoin, as discussed in Bitcoin faces a fee crisis that threatens network security: Can BTCfi help?, where network security and scalability are critical concerns.
Building a Trustworthy Foundation
Decentralized infrastructure is pivotal. By eliminating single points of control, it ensures resilience and scalability, and more critically, sustainability. This infrastructure must anchor a trust layer embedding verifiability, identity, and consensus at the protocol level. Only then can transactions be trusted across different jurisdictions and systems.
Moreover, AI agents themselves need to be reliable, with enforced provenance and accountability. This ensures they remain auditable, capable of acting on behalf of users without compromising trust. As these agents operate in shared environments, they require consensus to agree on what actually happened, provenance to identify initiators and approvers, and audibility to trace every step easily.
Without these elements, agents risk behaving unpredictably across disconnected systems. Given their 24/7 operation, sustainability and trust must be inherent in their design, not an afterthought.
A Call to Action
The path forward is clear but complex. Enterprises must prioritize transparent, auditable, and resilient systems. Policymakers are urged to support open-source networks as the backbone of trusted AI. Meanwhile, ecosystem leaders and builders have the monumental task of designing trust into the foundation from the outset, rather than attempting to integrate it retroactively.
As we stand on the brink of this agentic era, the stakes are high. The landscape won’t just be automated; it will be a realm of negotiation, composition, and accountability—an environment that’s trustworthy, if we choose to construct it that way. The question is: Will we rise to the occasion?
Source
This article is based on: The Agentic Era Needs a Network
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Steve Gregory is a lawyer in the United States who specializes in licensing for cryptocurrency companies and products. Steve began his career as an attorney in 2015 but made the switch to working in cryptocurrency full time shortly after joining the original team at Gemini Trust Company, an early cryptocurrency exchange based in New York City. Steve then joined CEX.io and was able to launch their regulated US-based cryptocurrency. Steve then went on to become the CEO at currency.com when he ran for four years and was able to lead currency.com to being fully acquired in 2025.
