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This is the 108th edition of The Web3 + AI Daily - your definitive guide to the intersection of blockchain and AI! The 2026 edition of TOKEN2049 recently wrapped in Singapore, with an agenda centered on several main topics: asset tokenization and institutional adoption, post-quantum preparedness, and AI. Today I’m sharing the key takeaways on how Web3 + AI is evolving.
Thank you for being here! Let’s dive in.
The Agent Economy: Why AI Needs Crypto?
Gauntlet‘s Tarun Chitra moderated a panel with NEAR Protocol‘s Illia Polosukhin and Base‘s Jesse Pollak to discuss the state of crypto and AI convergence. All three agreed that crypto’s value proposition is shifting toward offering sovereignty for businesses and equipping companies with the infrastructure to build better products.
This pivot reflects an evolution in crypto’s identity and confidence - from targeting consumers to enabling enterprises to run their businesses on these new rails, where the proposition is simply better, faster, and cheaper. As Pollak put it:
We’re no longer selling cryptocurrencies, but infrastructure. It’s no longer “I as a consumer need to be a crypto person,” it’s more “I as a business can choose this better technology to let me run my business better, and all my customers can benefit.”
While many expected AI agents to disrupt retail commerce, Polosukhin argued that business commerce is the area in most desperate need of optimization. Characterized by a lack of trust, it stands to benefit from integrating both blockchain and AI - blockchain supplying the trust infrastructure, escrow, derivatives, and payments, and AI powering product discovery, communication between parties, and facilitation.
Privacy is another critical area where Web3 and AI intersect. As AI becomes increasingly embedded in people’s lives, concern for privacy grows, making it perhaps the killer app that crypto can offer in the AI era.
Polosukhin noted a palpable shift over the past few months: businesses are starting to realize they’re feeding all of their corporate data to AI models, and anyone with access to the logs can reconstruct the entire company from it. As founders and tech leaders entrust more and more critical decisions to AI, they now want to verify which model runs in the background and who has access to the logs, prompts, and data.
The panelists also echoed a thesis that has fueled the Web3 movement for years: that people should be able to own their data and monetize it if they choose to.
Consumers have not historically appreciated the value of their data, but in the age of AI they are beginning to, whereas businesses already regard it as a core asset. Crypto and AI ventures like NEAR are now enabling both to capitalize on it - Polosukhin clarified the exact process:
NEAR AI provides private inference, but if you want you can contribute your traces back and get paid either in more inference or in some other way. And effectively that data will then be used to train models. So, the interesting thing is figuring out how to value that data.
Agents + Crypto: What’s Real & What’s Cope
Dragonfly‘s Haseeb Qureshi took the TOKEN2049 stage to admit that he was wrong: AI agents won’t need crypto. But you will.
Since the launch of x402, Coinbase‘s agentic payments protocol, everyone in crypto claimed that AI agents would be transacting in crypto. We couldn’t imagine a scenario where traditional payment rails could handle the imminent explosion of agentic commerce.
Everybody was like: “Oh my God, it’s so obvios! The real users of crypto are not going to be humans - they’re going to be AIs.”
Yet monthly transaction volume through x402 peaked in November 2025 and declined straight after, with over 90% of it not being agentic activity.
As it turns out now, agents run just fine on cards: Stripe, Meta, Ramp, Nous Research, Visa, and Rain have all equipped agents with virtual credit cards.
Qureshi argues that whatever payment method you’re using, your AI will use too. Credit cards won’t work perfectly everywhere and will create the same limitations for agents that they do for humans. But they’ll still work better for consumer applications than crypto - most things on the internet you still cannot buy with crypto.
While I agree that payment providers with established user bases and retailer relationships will win this race, I don’t entirely agree with Qureshi’s take and believe it needs clarification. Agents may not be transacting via crypto wallets, but they’ll still be transacting on blockchain rails. Companies like Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard are leveraging their existing payment infrastructure while simultaneously investing in stablecoin projects and integrating blockchains - because there’s no other way to accommodate the microtransactions agents will be performing.
However, Qureshi’s main argument with this talk wasn’t really about agentic payments, but about the other ways in which agents will change our relationship with crypto. His thesis:
Agents will be the intelligence layer that helps you interact with crypto and refashions your trust relationship with it. You’re never going to be hacked or phished again. Agents will verify your transactions the same way banks do it for you.
He also highlighted privacy, especially private AI, as the main domains in which crypto can help users.
I think this is going to be the most important battle from the perspective of civil liberties over the next decade. One, how are going to protect yourself from the increasing power of the state, and second, how are you going to maintain your control over AI, because AI is going to become the most politicized technology of the next decade.
The Exponential Age and Crypto + AI
The last TOKEN2049 topic I want to highlight addresses unprecedented capital flowing into AI data centers and how long this surge can continue. While I used to believe the bubble was about to burst soon, Raoul Pal, co-founder and CEO of Real Vision, argued that hyperscalers will only accelerate their spending.
The Big 4 hypersclers are running the second-largest CapEx (capital expenditure - the money a company spends to buy, build, maintain, or upgrade long-term physical or intangible assets) event in history, after US railroads. It’s funded mainly by cash - their annual operating cash flow jumped from $100B in 2017 to $650B today, all in cash rather than debt, making the buildout resilient even if cycles wobble.
These are the highest cash-generating businesses in history, and that cash generation is accelerating as their own technology drives the productivity gains fueling demand. The result is a self-reinforcing loop: more AI infrastructure → more productivity → more cash flow → more infrastructure.
Pal states that frontier labs are deploying their full cash flow and borrowing additional capital, yet debt sits at just 3.5% of total market capitalization. This gives them runway to continue for a very long time.
Moreover, supply-side bottlenecks mean only 30% of planned data centers for this year will actually be built, pushing the timeline well into the 2030s, possibly the 2040s. If intelligence keeps rising, so will the demand for data centers, compute, and energy.
There’s infinite capital that needs to be spent on this. And if that includes printing of money, if that includes any single way changing the banking system laws, doing everything, this is the game they will play. It’s the game even Japan is playing. That’s why it’s steepening its yield curve. That’s why it’s been weakening its currency. It’s all about reigniting the banking system, steepening the yield curve, and getting the lending going.
Meanwhile, Hack VC‘s Alex Pack asserted that crypto has been quite critical for the AI buildout and can financialize it in several different ways:
DeFi lending for financing GPUs: something GAIB AI and USD.AI are doing.
Tokenizing compute, i.e., ceating new financial products to finance and hedge the compute buildout: Ornn is an example here.
On-chain inference and offering private, transparent, and trusted AI workflows: NEAR AI, Venice.ai, Ritual, Sentient Labs, and 0G all fall under that category.
$1.5 trillion of external financing the AI buildout needs through 2028.
I’m looking forward to hearing your opinion on these points.
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