Crypto’s AI Pivot: Hype, Infrastructure, and a Two-Year Countdown

If Consensus Hong Kong 2026 had an unofficial theme, it wasn’t Bitcoin or regulation. It was synthetic intelligence — and the scramble to determine what it truly means for crypto.

AI surfaced in nearly each context: main-stage keynotes, side-event panels, enterprise capital conferences, and even the post-conference temper. But the conversations weren’t uniform. They ranged from Hong Kong authorities officers endorsing the machine economic system to enterprise capitalists declaring the AI hype cycle in crypto already over.

Enterprise AI Agents Are Already Deployed

At the Gate’s facet occasion, Sophia Jin, Hong Kong Tech Director at Byteplus — ByteDance’s enterprise know-how arm — revealed that a number of main crypto exchanges are already utilizing the corporate’s AI agent merchandise. She outlined three use circumstances in manufacturing: clever customer support that comes with deep analysis and buying and selling state of affairs matching; multi-agent analysis techniques with parallel knowledge assortment; and AML workflow automation with human oversight at resolution factors.

The most notable element was the protection structure. Byteplus locations guardrails exterior the agent orchestration layer — a kill swap that may halt brokers instantly in the event that they breach outlined boundaries. Jin projected that inside two years, each change worker can have an enterprise-grade AI assistant, whereas onboarding new customers will grow to be dramatically simpler by means of AI-powered personalised schooling.

Two Years Until AI Outthinks You

Ben Goertzel, CEO of decentralized AI market SingularityNET, supplied the convention’s most provocative timeline. He gave people roughly two years earlier than AI surpasses them in strategic considering.

“The human mind is healthier at taking the imaginative leap to grasp the unknown,” Goertzel mentioned iat Consensus. It received’t final, although. “We ought to take pleasure in it for a couple extra years.”

While his Quantium mission can already predict short-term Bitcoin volatility with high accuracy, Goertzel famous that long-term strategic considering stays uniquely human — for now. He described the present bear cycle as a “stress take a look at” for infrastructure that can finally host synthetic common intelligence.

Bitget CEO Gracy Chen supplied a extra grounded view. On a panel about agentic buying and selling, she in contrast present AI buying and selling bots to interns — quicker and cheaper however requiring supervision. Historical data-driven fashions have by no means encountered occasions like the ten/10 liquidations, she famous, making human intervention important in unfamiliar circumstances. But inside three to 5 years, she projected, AI may exchange many human roles.

Saad Naj, CEO of agentic buying and selling startup PiP World, countered that people will not be the suitable baseline. “As people, we’re too emotional. We can’t compete with AI options,” he mentioned, noting that 90% of day merchants lose cash.

Building the Payment Layer for Agents

If the primary stage supplied the imaginative and prescient, facet occasions tried to construct the plumbing.

At the Stablecoin Odyssey occasion at Soho House, the panel “Building Payment Blockchains for the Agentic Economy” targeted on what infrastructure AI brokers really need. Nellie Tan, Payment Head at Monad, launched Coinbase’s X402 protocol — an HTTP-native on-chain fee commonplace — and argued that agentic funds would generate transactions “on the velocity of knowledge,” requiring throughput of hundreds to hundreds of thousands per second.

Eddie, CEO of fee middleware AEON, framed the shift as an interface transition. When shoppers work together by means of AI brokers fairly than apps, each industrial interplay funnels by means of a single level — and the final mile is at all times a fee. His firm processes what he described as 80% of crypto funds by means of partnerships with OKX, Bybit, and others.

The query of which blockchain AI brokers would select remained open. Mate Tokay, CMO of OP_CAT Layer, famous that nobody but is aware of whether or not brokers will choose chains based mostly on coaching knowledge, expertise, velocity, or safety. The reply possible relies on the transaction — giant asset transfers prioritize safety, whereas client purchases prioritize velocity.

Crypto as Currency for AI — or Just Another Hype Cycle?

The most putting endorsement got here from exterior the business. Hong Kong Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po used his look to border AI brokers as an financial pressure that crypto is uniquely positioned to serve.

“As AI brokers grow to be able to making and executing selections independently, we might start to see the early types of what some name the machine economic system, the place AI brokers can maintain and switch digital property, pay for companies and transact with each other onchain,” Chan mentioned.

Binance CEO Richard Teng pushed it additional. “If you concentrate on the agentic AI, so the reserving of lodges, flights, no matter purchases that you’d make, the way you assume that these purchases will probably be made — it’ll be by way of crypto and stablecoins,” he mentioned. “So, crypto is the forex for AI, if you concentrate on it.”

But enterprise capitalists poured chilly water on the broader “AI + crypto” narrative. Anand Iyer of Canonical Crypto described the second as a trough. “We went by means of a frothy interval. Now it’s about determining the place the true power lies,” he mentioned. Both Iyer and Kelvin Koh of Spartan Group criticized overinvestment in GPU marketplaces and makes an attempt to construct decentralized alternate options to OpenAI or Anthropic — initiatives that require capital far past what crypto can muster.

Instead, each see potential in purpose-built options that begin with a particular drawback. Proprietary knowledge, regulatory edges, or go-to-market benefits now matter greater than technical novelty. Koh’s recommendation to founders was blunt: “Twelve months in the past, it was sufficient to have a wrapper on ChatGPT. That’s not true.”

What’s Forming

Conversations amongst business individuals pointed towards a framework taking form: stablecoins serving as worth rails for agent transactions, prediction markets dealing with info pricing, AI techniques executing trades and operations, and bodily robotics extending the loop into the true world. It’s not a single mission or protocol — it’s a thesis about the place crypto and AI intersect productively, with out counting on the speculative cycles that drove earlier bull runs.

A parallel thread runs by means of decentralized AI. Current techniques are centralized and opaque. The thought of clear, verifiable, community-governed AI networks aligns with crypto’s founding ideas — and Goertzel, amongst others, pointed to the expansion of such initiatives on the occasion as proof that convergence is underway.

The pure hypothesis cycle might not return. But at Consensus Hong Kong, the argument that AI offers crypto a motive to exist past buying and selling was made concurrently from the federal government podium, the change boardroom, and the enterprise capital assembly. That’s a totally different type of consensus.

The put up Crypto’s AI Pivot: Hype, Infrastructure, and a Two-Year Countdown appeared first on BeInCrypto.