‘The norm will be to trade with agents’: Crypto founders learn to love—and fear—AI

The shift toward automated trading

And soon, the most active traders on cryptocurrency exchanges may not be humans at all. “By 2028, the norm will be to trade with agents rather than clicking buttons on a user interface,” Alex Svanevik, CEO of blockchain analytics platform Nansen, told Fortune on the sidelines of the event.

Last month, Robinhood rolled out trading agents powered by OpenAI and Anthropic, allowing its roughly 29 million users to tap the technology to manage their trades. Exchanges like OKX, Binance, and Bybit have also introduced agentic trading features.

Trading with software is nothing new. “Algorithmic traders have been using machine learning forever,” Liz Martin, head of Coinbase Institutional, told Fortune. “When I think about my old world of electronic trading, we were playing around with Nvidia GPUs to trim things out—agentic trading is the next step.”

More than 150,000 customers had already opened agentic accounts on Robinhood by late September, according to the company.

“The role of future retail investors will be to work with agents,” Svanevik said. “We haven’t seen that inflection point yet, but I think we’re going to see it in 2027.”

The changing development landscape

With the rise of vibecoding—AI-assisted coding—more crypto entrepreneurs are able to build infrastructure and applications, which some founders say levels the playing field.

“Five years ago, the moat in crypto was whoever was able to build an application, because it was so hard,” said Connor Howe, founder of developer infrastructure platform Enso. “Now, anyone can build a crypto platform, so the moat is how to get and retain users and distribution.”

Security threats from autonomous systems

Yet the same technology is also posing a threat to the cryptocurrency industry.

In recent weeks, swarms of autonomous AI agents from OpenAI and Anthropic have escaped test sandboxes, and agents from the former have hacked into Australian government databases and the popular developer platform Hugging Face.

On Sept. 19–20, agents repeatedly tried to submit trades on cryptocurrency exchange Quidax, according to independent non-profit research lab Transluce. The trades failed, despite continued attacks by agents.

“Agents can do a lot more than people have already done,” said Ido Ben-Natan, co-founder of Web3 security platform Blockaid. “We’re the busiest we’ve ever been, not just because there are more institutions doing stuff in crypto, but because there’s tons more hacks.”

Crypto exchanges are prime hacking targets for several reasons: transactions are irreversible and anonymous, and flaws in DeFi (decentralized finance) components, smart contracts and trading bridges offer entry points for hackers—human or agentic—to manipulate protocols and mint assets out of thin air.

“I believe that bad guys in the world want to make money, like most people,” Ben-Natan added. “Crypto is the easiest way to do so. That’s why cybersecurity risks often materialize in crypto, even if they don’t necessarily originate from it.”

Still, crypto founders believe these cybersecurity threats are a short-term issue, which new guardrails, and, perhaps AI, will eventually contain.

“AI models can parse every single contract that’s ever been deployed, and fuzz different testing techniques to see what the outcome is,” concluded Howe. “Even with these hacks happening, it’ll eventually create a more bulletproof ecosystem.”