Alchemy chief executive Nikil Viswanathan said in a Saturday interview that crypto rails are increasingly being designed for AI agents rather than human users, marking the most consequential shift in blockchain product design since the rise of mobile-first wallets in 2018-2020. Onchain transaction data from Glassnode and Token Terminal corroborate the thesis: bot-driven activity now exceeds retail-driven activity on Ethereum, Solana, and Base by transaction count.
On Ethereum mainnet, MEV-bots, arbitrageurs, automated rebalancers and AI-agent wallets generated 64% of total transactions in March, the first month above 50%, up from 38% a year ago. On Solana, the share is 78%, helped by aggressive market-making and the rise of agent-driven memecoin trading. On Base, the share is 71%.
What "Built for Agents" Actually Means
Viswanathan outlined four design properties that favor AI agents: 24/7 settlement availability, programmatic key-management primitives, sub-cent transaction costs at scale (Base, Arbitrum, Solana), and machine-readable contract semantics. None of these are properties that retail users actively demand, but each is critical for AI agents that must operate without human supervision.
Alchemy disclosed that its developer customer base now operates 312 distinct AI-agent wallet products, up from 68 a year ago. Combined daily transaction volume from these products exceeded $1.4 billion in March, up from $112 million.
Stablecoins as the Settlement Layer
Stablecoin float is increasingly being captured by agent-driven flows. Visa's onchain analytics dashboard, refreshed weekly, shows that approximately 38% of stablecoin transfer volume in Q1 2026 originated from non-human counterparties. Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC) collectively settled $14.2 trillion in 2025 — a 92% year-on-year increase that exceeds Visa's own annual transaction volume of $13.8 trillion.
A growing share of that volume is in payment-for-services flows: AI agents paying for compute, data, and inference resources via stablecoin-denominated micropayments. Replicate, Together AI and Anthropic itself have launched stablecoin billing rails over the past 90 days.