AI Agents Could Betray Crypto’s Core Promise. A Few Are Fighting Back
Autonomous AI agents have become crypto’s hottest narrative in 2025, ballooning from experimental novelty to a $13.5 billion market overnight. Truth Terminal, an AI agent, convinced Marc Andreessen to donate $50,000, launching the $GOAT token to a $1.2 billion market cap. Over 11,000 agents now operate on the Virtuals Protocol platform alone, executing trades and managing portfolios with minimal human oversight.
But there’s a problem nobody wants to talk about. These AI agents are designed to bring efficiency to decentralized finance, though they are often highly centralized. The vast majority rely on closed-source models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, creating centralized monopolies with privileged access to user data and…
