[DigitalToday reporter Jinju Hong (홍진주)] Autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents are emerging as a next axis of change in the blockchain industry.

On April 21 local time, blockchain outlet Cryptopolitan reported that at the Hong Kong Web3 Festival, AI programs that manage funds and execute trades without human intervention were cited as a key factor that will change the digital asset ecosystem, rather than new cryptocurrencies or exchanges.

These AI agents go beyond simple automation in a structure that makes its own decisions and follows through with execution. In the cryptocurrency trading market, where trading takes place 24 hours a day, there is strong demand for buying, lending and managing assets without people having to handle tasks directly. The industry sees such systems as capable of carrying out significant economic activity based solely on code-based rules.

The industry also pointed to limits in existing financial infrastructure. Bank-centered systems are designed around accounts, intermediaries and manual verification, making them suitable for large-scale transactions but inefficient for small, high-frequency tasks performed by AI. By contrast, blockchain can execute automatically according to pre-set code and process transactions without intermediaries, and is seen as a structure better suited to an agent economy.

Market indicators also support this trend. A significant portion of global venture capital investment in the first quarter of this year flowed into AI, and global AI investment is forecast to exceed $2 trillion in 2026. Some platforms showed that nearly half of all activity is carried out automatically without user intervention.

The industry sees these changes as going beyond simple automated trading and potentially reshaping the broader economic structure. A model centered on human-to-human transactions is shifting to transactions between humans and machines, and further to machine-to-machine transactions. New designs such as a "dual-token structure" are also being proposed to support this. This is a method that manages computing use and value flows separately using different tokens.

Reliability and traceability are also cited as key factors. All activities of AI agents operating on blockchain are recorded and can be verified, and this is seen as an important foundation as the market expands in the future. The related market is expected to grow sharply over the next 10 years.

Signs of an on-chain shift are also being detected in traditional finance. Jamie Dimon (제이미 다이먼), CEO of JPMorgan Chase, recently acknowledged that blockchain is no longer in an experimental stage and cited tokenization and smart contracts as signals of finance moving on-chain.

Services have already emerged. Fetch.ai and SingularityNET support service transactions between agents, and Autonolas helps run agents that execute decentralized finance strategies. Layer 2 networks and zero-knowledge proof technology are also being used as complementary measures for performance and privacy protection. Speed, safety and regulation remain challenges.

The industry is paying attention to the possibility that around 2030, AI agents could become everyday tools like smartphone apps. If structures in which trading and execution occur without human intervention spread, there are forecasts that the way digital asset markets operate and their scale could also change fundamentally.