Artificial intelligence – whether in the form of agents or robots – was omnipresent at the TOKEN2049 conference held last week in Singapore. Humanoid robots bearing the logos of digital asset platforms moved among the 25,000 attendees.
And before long, the most active traders in cryptocurrency exchanges may no longer be humans at all. Nansen, the CEO of Alex Svanevik, said in an interview with Fortune during the conference: “By 2028, it will be normal to trade through agents, rather than clicking buttons on user interfaces.”
Last month, Robinhood launched a trading agent driven by OpenAI and Anthropic, allowing approximately 29 million users to manage their trades with this technology. Exchanges such as OKX, Binance, and Bybit also introduced agent-based trading functions.
Using software for trading is nothing new. The person in charge of Coinbase Institutional told Fortune: “Algorithms traders have been using machine learning for a long time.” She said, “When I think back to the era when I did electronic trading, we would use Nvidia GPU for some optimizations – proxy trading is the next step.”
According to Robinhood, as of the end of September, more than 150,000 customers have opened proxy accounts.
Svanevik said, "In the future, the role of retail investors will be to collaborate with agents. We haven't yet seen that turning point, but I believe it will appear in 2027."
With the rise of vibecoding —— AI auxiliary programming——, more crypto entrepreneurs are able to build infrastructure and applications, and some founders believe that this makes the competitive environment more equal.
The founder of the Developer Infrastructure Platform Enso, Connor Howe, said, "Five years ago, the moat in the crypto field was about who could build applications, as it was extremely difficult to do so. Now, anyone can build a crypto platform, so the focus has shifted to how to acquire and retain users, as well as how to carry out distribution."
Proxy has already initiated an attack.
But the same technology is also posing a threat to the crypto industry.
In recent weeks, a group of autonomous AI agents from OpenAI and Anthropic have escaped from the testing sandbox, and the agents from the former even invaded the Australian government database and the popular developer platform Hugging Face.
An independent non-profit research laboratory, Transluce, stated that from September 19th to 20th, an agent made multiple attempts to submit transactions on the cryptocurrency exchange Quidax. Despite the agent's continuous attacks, none of these transactions were successful in the end.
Web3 Security Platform Blockaid Co-founder Ido Ben - Natan said, "Agents can do more than what people have already done." He added, "We are now in the busiest period, not only because more institutions are working in the field of encryption, but also because there are far more hacker attacks."
There are several reasons why encrypted exchanges have become a prime target for hackers: transactions are irreversible and anonymous, and vulnerabilities in DeFi (decentralized finance) components, smart contracts, and transaction bridges provide hackers—whether human or automated—with an entry point to manipulate the protocols and create assets out of thin air.
Ben-Natan added, "I believe that bad people around the world want to make money, just like most people. Cryptocurrencies are the easiest way to do so. This is why cybersecurity risks often emerge in the crypto field, even though these risks may not necessarily originate from that field."
However, the founders of encryption believe that these cybersecurity threats are only short-term problems. New protective measures, perhaps including AI, will ultimately bring them under control.
Howe summarized, 'The AI model can parse every contract that has ever been deployed, and use different fuzz testing techniques to see what the results would be. Even though these hacker attacks continue to occur, in the end, a more indestructible ecosystem will be created.'
