The cryptocurrency industry is racing toward a future where AI agents handle everything from booking flights to executing trades and making payments, but new research suggests the infrastructure underpinning that shift may not be secure.

McKinsey recently projected that AI agents could mediate $3 trillion to $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030.

Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong said on X that “very soon” there will be more AI agents than humans making transactions on the internet. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao was more bold, predicting agents will make one million times more payments than people, all in crypto.

But a group of security academic and crypto researchers have released a paper explaining that a largely overlooked…