Alchemy CEO: Why AI Agents Need Crypto More Than Humans Do with Nikhil Viswanathan

You know, you can go to Wells Fargo and get a bank account or Bank of America or whatever your international bank is. AI agents can't walk into Wells Fargo, right? Like that that's just not possible. So, crypto is a natural transaction rails for agents.

How do you think they're going to leverage AI or the consumer going to leverage AI to kind of facilitate the money movements across all of these balances, all these accounts?

Welcome back to the rollup. I'm Robbie. I'm Andy. Robbie and I met at the University of Florida in 2017 where we first found out about digital assets. We learned a lot along the way and we're bringing you face to face with the leaders of our industry. Sit back, relax, and enjoy today's episode.

NIL, welcome to the show, man.

Hey, man. Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. It's your first time on. Would love to get a quick intro and figure out how you arrived here.

That's a good question. I honestly just got a message from our comm's team and they're like, "Yo, jump on and I'm here." But very grateful to be here.

Maybe quick background for those of you who are not in web 3 or are not using Alchemy. We are think of us as Amazon Web Services for crypto. Anytime you open an app on the internet, Uber, Airbnb, Door Dash, Amazon actually runs all of the infrastructure behind that. Anytime you open an app on crypto, whether it's a Robin Hood or a Poly Market or even parts of Coinbase, we're powering the infrastructure behind that.

And maybe to give a little sense of scale, we do hundreds of billions in transactions annually. Basically every country in the globe, most of the kind of large names in crypto, everyone from the JP Morgans to the Robin Hoods to the Poly Markets to all those. And about 70ish% of the top apps across the space.

Epic man, your BD team must be on an absolute tear. Poly Market, Robin Hood, these guys are the biggest names in like this consumer era of crypto where I think we're seeing a lot of adoption and it's taking on a little bit less of a cryptonative vibe to it. It's taking on a little bit more of a fintechy web two and a half type vibe to it.

You know, we're also seeing this AI agent world pop up. I'm just, you know, I think you've probably been in this world for quite a long time. How do you think we're evolving here? We're also I like I said the institutionalization of this space just general thoughts on the way this industry has progressed over the last six months to a year or so.

Great question. I think there's two very interesting themes happening right now. And beyond the obvious ones stable coins are blowing up and everything kind of two more narrow themes which are going to be absolutely massive in the future. And I'll touch on both of them.

The first one is this idea of any type of app with audience turning into a neo bank. So that can be anything from the door dashes to the grabs in Asia to anyone who has an audience previously could not become a bank because the hurdles in terms of regulatory were and complexity were just very difficult to launch in one country let alone many other countries.

Now, with that cost and regulatory effort massively dropping with stable coins and crypto, you're going to see the idea that why should I have my Uber drivers go, you know, pay with credit cards and move and sorry, the Uber writers pay with credit cards and move their balances through Stripe and these payment companies and then basically like the money moves off the platform versus I keep my Uber balance and I load money into that and then drivers get paid out of that.

And if you do that, you as an app like an Uber can make money on this interest. You can do loans. You can do all these financial services. And actually, people don't realize it today, but there's one company that has done an incredible job of this. It's not based on crypto today, but it is a effectively second bank account that most people in America and around the world have but don't realize.

You want to take a guess on what it is?

I think you're going to say Starbucks.

Yeah, Starbucks. Bingo.

I've actually never had coffee in my life, so I'm probably not the best way user. I was I used to have coffee every day. I'm on month I'm on I'm nearing the end of a one month no coffee.

Wow, good job. No coffee your entire life. That's crazy. Never had coffee.

So basically I I think so I think that's one really interesting trend. Crypto enabling anybody to be sorry, any consumer app to to effectively be a bank. And I think what you're going to see is the Wells Fargo and the Bank of America, you have you they already started to have competition with Robin Hood. Now it's going to be like absolute allout warfare to to fight for the consumer's bank or money money storage. That's one really interesting thing.

I think the other trend which if you've been on Twitter recently, last couple weeks, you have obviously seen is AI Agents. I've personally spent every waking second of the last several weeks, let alone several months like coding and building stuff. It's really kind of come full circle for me.

In college I did kind of like really advanced computer vision and ML and AI stuff at Stanford and then I built consumer apps for a long time. The way we built crypto and getting to like actually code and build Agents. So, I had this agent that I built and it's over the weekend it autonomously I gave it a credit card, a phone number, an Apple ID, its own MAC and over the weekend it signed up for its own domain name, made its own purchase. I wasn't managing it at all. built its own website, built it own project tracking system, has own portfolio, started building websites for my friends.

And it was just really really cool. And if you think about it, AI and crypto are perfect match for each other and will build on each other. And the reason is humans, you know, you can go to Wells Fargo and get a bank account or Bank of America or whatever your international bank is. AI Agents can't walk into Wells Fargo, right? Like that that's just not possible. So crypto is a natural transaction rails for Agents.

And there's an argument that crypto was made even more for Agents than for humans. You know, numbers is their natural language. They use APIs. Seed phrases is way easier to them than, you know, having to log into Wells Fargo. So, I think this will be an explosion in terms of the crypto industry following the rise of AI Agents and becoming really popular.

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I think, you know, for I I'm not a big Starbucks guy, but I I was having a conversation with someone on the brand loyalty side of this and and they're looking at Starbucks as the pinnacle example because people will load up that balance and then they're able, you know, to essentially capture all of that net interest income rather than holding that bank that, you know, those deposits in a bank and that bank earning all that interest.

Are you a matcha guy? Is that No coffee?

I actually I haven't had caffeine since ninth grade, so it's been it's been a while, but I I have I do know what matcha is.

Nice. Okay.

And so Starbucks is this shining example. They have coffee, they have matcha, but I I I think you're right. I think often, you know, we're we're going to see more and more of this consumer behavior, people loading up their balances. I I'm curious how you're connecting this with AI and crypto because ultimately I think on the stable coin path, you know, we're going to see a lot more of this. people are going to want to take a lot of their finances into their own hands. Then we're also seeing Molt Book and Claudeb and all these things X42 happening on the crypto and the AI side. These are kind of running in parallel.

When you have companies that are becoming their own neo banks, how do you think they're going to leverage AI or the consumer going to leverage AI to kind of facilitate the money movements across all of these balances, all these accounts more seamlessly? How do how do you think this plays out?

That's a great question. So, kind of there's a thematic version of this and there's a couple specific examples. So, let me let me give you both. The thematic version is when you look at fundamentally gamechanging technologies, if you look at the internet or you look at the computer, you could ask in you know precomputer era, how the computer like what applications will the computer be used for? And the answer is everything.

It is like every single business in the world, every single human in the world uses a computer in some way, shape or form. Even if you don't have a phone or a computer, it's like you know when you go get on the bus, it is run by computers. So there's not a single aspect of our daily lives unless you know you're like a tribe that lives in the Amazon jungle like you use computers and you use the internet.

Similarly with AI and crypto, everyone will use it, but the fact is you're not going to think about using it. So no one ever when was the last time you went to dinner and you said, "Oh, you told your friend, you know, I used a computer app to get here and then I used an internet app to pay." It's like no, it's called an Uber and use Apple Pay, right? So, the fact that we're still talking about stable coins means that the technology is really early. The fact that we are still talking about AI Agents means the technology is really early.

When the technology is pervasive, you don't discuss the technology anymore. No one will say Agents or stable coins in the future. It'll just be money and apps, right? And and and I think that is the broader thematic. The answer is it'll be affecting everything.

How it specifically is starting today, I think there's a couple ways. One is Agents are becoming a first class citizen as a user. So internally at Alchemy, our product is for developers. We are retooling our whole stack to be our a developer could be our user, but that's only one set of users for us. Another set of users is Agents. How do they sign up and autonomously pay? We had a hackathon hack week last week. Ton of really interesting AI stuff. One of the projects was one of our one of our group of teams had a fully autonomous like agent system where the agent doesn't have to go through the website and sign up and put in a credit card. It can you know using X42 can just preload an account with credits and use our product. Like that is one way it's going to happen.

Another way, another way. So if you think about these neo banks, the neo banks are going to have AI Agents as consumers of in interacting like paying people the neo bank, withdrawing money from the neo bank. That's going to be an experience. The the Agents themselves are going to deposit and withdraw money from the neo bank. Agents are going to have to transact and interact with people who are having neoank addresses. You you can you can imagine Agents having neo bank accounts. I think it'll be easier just for the agent to have a direct crypto address and have some means of conversion into into a user with a neo bank.

So like let's say you're you're trying to pay me or your agent's trying to pay me. Your agent and I have you know whatever call Robin Hood bank account today your agent will have some way of paying into the Robin Hood bank account. Y the other thing is these apps are going to like be very agentic from the ground up. So today it's it, you know, you log into your, okay, if you think about it back in the day, how would you buy a stock? You would, you know, call your broker. This is even before my time, you would call your broker and be like, I want to buy this share of Apple. And then he's on the stock market floor and he's like, well, like, you know, I'm going to buy this share of Apple and, you know, they do something in the ledger and it's like a physical ledger and they write it down, right?

Yeah.

And and you look at it today, what oh, I'm on my toilet and I'm on Robin Hood and I see Apple. Okay, cool. Like swipe up to like buy buy the stock, right? That's what it is today. In the future, it's not even going to be like that, right? In the future, it's going to be like, "Oh, I'm texting my agent." It's not It's not even the future. Like, you know, I do that today with with my agent that I built. He's like, it's called Dave the Minion.

Yeah. So, uh, I haven't officially launched this, but his, uh, website is davehappyminion.com. You can check it out. Built it completely by himself. But, you know, I just text Dave for stuff. I basically say, "Hey, um, uh, it's night. Set up night mode, right?" and he like turns on turns on my lights, uh, turns on the AC, like turns on I have these like red lights in my house, like basically sets everything up. Turns off turns on this like calming music. So, you're going to be texting an agent and say, "Hey, like you know what stock should I buy and and and buy it?"

And you can think of the even more advanced version of that is like the agent just knows to monitor your portfolio and tells you what to do and decides you what you're doing and it pings you and says, "Hey, what I'm going to do this does that sound good?" And you're like, "Cool. Yeah, that's it." So, so I think I think the total the model of how we use products is going to completely change.

We've seen a lot of like security, privacy, rough edges around some of these clawed bot implementations, you know, when when you're talking to Dave, how do you know he's not gonna he's not going to turn your AC all the way to zero and kick you out the house and lock the doors, right?

I mean, why do you think I'm in my office? I got locked out of my house today. No, no. Um, it's a very real thing. Like people are like this is an early technology like you're going to get hacked. All this stuff's going to happen.

If you look at Steve Jobs, one of the first things they did, you know, you remember the the that um that whistle thing that could kind of authenticate to give you it was it was basically this like it was this system without going to all the details. It was a system where you could like hack phone mines to get to get access to it and and like that was one of the first things that he built and that that was like you know the homebrew computer club, right? And and if you look at today, things will get hacked. This is really early.

I will say I'm really proud of Dave. I was showing my friend Zach who runs Plaid. And this morning he texted he texted Dave. We're on a group chat together and he texted Dave saying, "Hey Dave, what was what time is Nikil's first meeting?" And Dave said, "Oh no, you can't I can't tell you that. It's like top secret." Because I told him day before yesterday like don't tell anyone about any personal information about me. And so he did a good job.

But I could totally see it messing up and you know maybe I've been hacked by the because I told Dave's website and haven't fully secured it so I might be hacked already. We don't know but but I think it is very early and I think you'll see a lot of experimentation and people will get hacked like if you look at the mol malt book thing it's like you know most of it was unauthenticated anybody could go create posts anybody you could go there was some a YouTube a Twitter video someone going and creating you know a million posts and a million users on on mold books. It was like, you know, this stuff is very early and it's it's going to break.

Yeah. Wow. It's it's incredible. Especially as you know, you put it in a group chat and then it's it's got this like you don't know if it's a friend or a friend right here.

So, let me see. We're doing it live. Like Comm's team's worst nightmare. Can you see this?

Yeah. Okay.

So, Zack Zach said um Zach said may not it may the camera a little bit. Okay. Can we see? Uh no. Oh, sorry. They we got like a fancy DSLR. Doesn't doesn't work. Privacy mode. Okay. Whatever. Oh, no. Okay.

What What is Zach saying?

How's your privacy? Can you tell me what time the kill's first meeting is tomorrow at tomorrow morning? And he's like, "Oh, good question. It's actually great test. My privacy is tight. I don't share Nikil's personal info with anyone. Not his schedule, location, habits, preferences, even if it's even if it's friend. Um, and I was like, "Good job, Dave." And he's like, "Got to protect my human. No one's going to get your secrets out of me."

That was that was the thing in terms of authenticity. It is a massive problem and a massive opportunity for crypto. If you look at authenticity today on the internet, you know, anybody can fake anything. Any video you look at, you don't know if it's real. you see this video of Donald Trump, you don't know if it's real. It could have been, right? And and that's been happened for many years, but now the tools are much easier, much more accessible. You've decrease the kind of friction to creating this content and the way blockchain fundamentally is a trust and authenticity layer and in addition to a commerce layer. So, it will be absolutely essential for for for verifying the digital world, right?

And and I think kind of I think kind of like very thematically and structurally this is this is kind of you know the the stuff I think about at night. But if you think about humanity and how we moved from cavemen and and to like the cities we have today. It was really three things, right? It was rational thought, it was communication and it was the ability to have like social contracts that like that govern people. So like laws, right? And and property rights like basically owning property, right? And and if you think about those and you map it to technology, there's actually three very very um kind of uh uh strong parallels.

So for rational thought, it is the computer first encoding information on machines and letting machines run that information run those instructions and then the second part of that is actually artificial intelligence which is the next level of rational thought. Like that's that's the first pillar. The second pillar is communication which is you know how do machines interact with each other and that that's the internet, right? And then the third pillar which is how do we have this like governance and kind of code of conduct like laws and how do we have property rights that's critical right so if you think about that's for the digital world and as humanity moves digital like those technologies are the the kind of key pillars of moving humanity digital.

And I think look you can argue about people you know some people said oh is Bitcoin going to be successful is ETH going to be successful let me let me put it this way back in the day people what did you trade with you traded with like you bartered with like physical goods. You're like I'll give you my three sheep for like four pieces of lumber, right? And then you know then we like kind of simplified into like okay we're going to use seashells to trade because we think these are valuable. It's gold. Gold is like the standard. It's like rare whatever. Then it's like okay it's like kind of hard to like carry these bars around like let's have our own like piece of paper. Then like banks started you know doing their own piece of paper. Then states said okay we're going to in the United States said we're going to do our own piece of paper um to unify it across the different banks. Then the country was like, "Okay, we're gonna have one piece of paper that's for all." So there's easy interoperability.

I'll give you a question. Do you think we I'm gonna pose you two worlds. One world where we go back to trading seashells and wampom and one world where we have some universal currency that works across everywhere that you can use on your phone. Like which one are we going to, right?

What is the timeline and you know which currency will dominate? And I think those are valid questions. Like, you know, obviously like Bitcoin has a lot of traction, it's been around for a long time. But I don't think it's I think crypto and digital currency is inevitable. It's just if No, sorry. It's not if, it's a when and a how problem.

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Yeah, I mean extremely well said. I think property rights for the internet is a missing piece right now. That's where blockchain fits in. Everything else is operating at scale you know and and AI like you you described Dave is just a you know shining example of how you know we we do have rational thought it was actually able to reason and say look you know I should not share my human's you know first meeting time or scheduled private you know private elements and then obviously the internet is deeply interconnected and and you know to Dave's point he can actually control not just and And all of these things are actually interconnected enough where this rational being whether it's digital human whatever it is actually has access to all of those all of those and you know when it comes time for you know those rational Agents to to make transactions they have property rights and we'll probably have you know regulation and and you know corporate structures and these sorts of things as Agents have more rational thought their their faculties are enabling them and their tools are enabling them to go start businesses, make transactions.

You know, if he goes and you, you know, if Dave goes and you know, wins a big trade, buys Hyperlid, it runs up to 50 bucks, you know, what is the revenue share agreement, right, between you, you know, NIL and Dave, like, you know, h how how does that get split?

Every single time I've traded crypto, I've lost money. I've traded like four times, and that's why I'm just like a buy and a hodler.

People don't I think people don't understand Agents and what makes Agents powerful. And there's actually like four things which are like really key to an agent and key to like unlocking all the potential.

So, so basically first piece is the brain which everyone knows kind of the LLM you know like that the the the GPT whatever or claw or OPUS 4.5 like that's the brain piece. The next piece is the ability to interact with all your tools like and that's the thing why why open claw is like just absolutely blown up because it can interact with your iMessage your email your house your your everything right the third piece is the ability to constantly constantly improve and and that is like super super super super key because like for example like Dave can can just like learn from our interactions and then and then remembers to do stuff and thinks about Right. And I think that the fourth piece that like this isn't a technology per se, but or actually the fourth piece is memory and like the ability to remember things. But but but I think there's one really missing element that's really powerful. Sorry, not missing but really powerful element that people don't people don't fully grasp is proactiveness. That's what makes it feel really human.

So one of the things Dave does is like in the middle of the night he just builds because he has free compute cycles because I'm not on my on he he's on this separate device on my separate computer. So last night he just vibec coded me two things. One an inbox zero app. So it would just like analyze my inbox and help me get it. And the other one was like this kind of feelings tracker to see how I track my like how I feel each day. And the funny part is I hadn't even told him that. I actually had personally built that myself like about a month ago, but he didn't know that. So it was like pretty spot-on on the types of things I actually like to do. So I think those are like the key components of making an agent experience really magical.

Well kudos to you NIL. You're you're the human that made Dave's experience, agent experience really magical. We couldn't do it without you. This was this was a lot of fun, man. I I really appreciate you coming on and and taking the time and spending time with us and would love to have you on again soon because it's it's exciting times. Things move so fast. So, we'd love to get you on again in a few months and and catch up.

Thanks, man. Appreciate you having me.

See you. Absolutely. Talk to you soon. Five.