a16z: Why AI and Crypto Need Each Other Now More Than Ever
Original Title: AI needs crypto — especially now
Original Source: a16z crypto
Original Translation: Chopper, Foresight News
Artificial intelligence systems are upending the internet, originally designed at a human scale. They are reducing the cost of collaboration and transactions to historic lows, and the generated speech, video, and text are becoming increasingly indistinguishable from human behavior. We have long been plagued by human-machine verification, and now, AI agents are beginning to interact and transact like humans.
The key issue is not the existence of artificial intelligence, but the lack of a native mechanism on the internet that can differentiate between humans and machines while preserving privacy and usability.
And this is where blockchain technology comes in. Cryptography helps build better AI systems, and conversely, AI can empower the ideals of cryptographic technology, with many underlying logics. Here, we summarize several reasons why AI now needs blockchain more than ever before.
Increasing the Cost of AI Impersonation
AI can forge speech, facial features, writing styles, video content, and even create a complete social persona, and can operate at scale: an intelligent entity can transform into thousands of accounts, simulate different viewpoints, consumers, or voters, with the cost of this operation continuing to decline.
Such impersonation methods are not novel: any aspiring fraudster has always been able to hire voice actors, spoof calls, send phishing texts. The real change lies in the cost: today, the threshold for carrying out large-scale fraudulent attacks has significantly decreased.
At the same time, the vast majority of online services default to "one account per real user." When this premise is not met, all subsequent systems will collapse. Detection-based responses (such as CAPTCHA) are ultimately destined to fail, as the evolution rate of AI is far faster than the detection technology specifically designed for it.
So how can blockchain play a role? Decentralized human-proof or identity verification systems allow users to easily complete single sign-on while fundamentally eliminating the possibility of one person having multiple identities. For example, scanning the iris to obtain a global ID may be simple and economical, but obtaining a second ID is nearly impossible.
By limiting the issuance of identity credentials, increasing the marginal cost to attackers, blockchain makes it difficult for AI to carry out large-scale impersonation operations.
Artificial intelligence can generate content, but encryption technology has made it extremely difficult and cost-prohibitive to forge a human's unique identity. Blockchain reshapes scarcity at the identity layer, raising the marginal cost of counterfeiting while not adding extra friction to legitimate human use.
Building a Decentralized Human Identity System
One way to prove human identity is through a digital identity marker that encompasses all information people could use to verify their identity: username, personal identification code, password, as well as third-party attestations (such as citizenship, credit qualifications), and other relevant credentials.
So, what value does encryption technology add? The answer is decentralization. Any centralized identity system rooted in the core of the internet could become a system-wide point of failure. When AI agents act on behalf of humans in transactions, communications, and collaborations, whoever controls the identity verification effectively controls participation. A centralized issuer can arbitrarily revoke user permissions, charge fees, or even engage in surveillance.
Decentralization completely flips this scenario: users, not platform gatekeepers, control their identity information, making identity markers more secure and resistant to censorship.
Unlike traditional identity systems, a decentralized human proof mechanism allows users to autonomously control and safeguard their own identity information, completing human identity verification in a privacy-preserving, absolutely neutral manner.
Creating a Portable, General-Purpose "Digital Passport" for AI Agents
AI agents do not exist solely within a single platform: an intelligent entity may appear across various chat applications, email conversations, phone calls, browsing sessions, and API interactions. However, there is currently no reliable mechanism to confirm that interactions in these different scenarios all originate from the same AI agent with consistent states, capabilities, and authorization by the "owner."
Furthermore, if an AI agent's identity is tied to just one platform or marketplace, it cannot be used across other products and critical scenarios. This leads to a fragmented user experience for AI agents, with the process of scenario-based adaptation being cumbersome and inefficient.
Through a blockchain-based identity layer, a portable, general-purpose "digital passport" can be crafted for AI agents. These identity markers can link an entity's capabilities, permissions, and payment endpoint information, verifiable in any scenario, significantly increasing the difficulty of counterfeiting AI agents. This also allows developers to create more practical AI agents, bringing a superior user experience: intelligent entities can operate across multiple ecosystems without being bound to a specific platform.
Achieving Scalable Payment Transactions
As AI agents increasingly represent humans in transactions, existing payment systems have become a significant bottleneck. Enabling scalable AI payments requires new infrastructure capable of handling microtransactions from multiple sources.
Many blockchain-based tools currently show potential in addressing this issue, such as scaling solutions, layer-two networks, AI-native financial institutions, and financial infrastructure protocols, enabling nearly fee-less transactions and more granular payment splits.
The key is that these blockchain payment infrastructures can support machine-scale transactions, including micro-payments, high-frequency interactions, and business transactions between AI agents, all of which traditional financial systems cannot handle.
· Micro-payments can be split among multiple data providers, triggering small payments to all relevant data providers in a single user interaction through automated smart contracts;
· Smart contracts support retroactive payments based on completed transactions, enforceable compensation to entities that provided information support for purchase decisions post-transaction, with the entire process being fully transparent and traceable;
· Blockchain enables complex and programmable payment splits, ensuring fair revenue distribution through code-enforced rules instead of centralized institution decisions, enabling trustless financial relationships between autonomous AI agents.
Protecting Privacy in AI Systems
Many security systems face a core paradox: the more data collected to protect users, the easier it is for AI to impersonate them.
In this context, privacy protection and security become intertwined. The challenge we face is to default human identity systems with privacy attributes, hiding sensitive information at all stages to ensure that only real humans can provide the necessary information for proving their identity.
Blockchain-based systems combined with zero-knowledge proof technology allow users to prove specific facts, such as personal identification numbers, ID numbers, eligibility criteria, without revealing underlying raw data (such as addresses on a driver's license).
As a result, applications can obtain the required identity verification guarantees, while AI systems are deprived of the original data needed for impersonation. Privacy protection is no longer an add-on feature but the primary line of defense against AI impersonation.
Conclusion
AI has significantly reduced the cost of scalable operations but has made establishing trust more challenging. Blockchain technology can reshape trust systems: increase the cost of impersonation, retain human-scale interaction patterns, decentralize identity systems, make privacy protection a default setting, and provide native economic constraints for AI agents.
If we want to build an AI agent that can function properly and not undermine trust on the internet, then blockchain is far from optional; it is a key foundational technology for constructing a native AI internet, filling a core gap in the current internet.
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