Why CZ, industry leaders say AI will transform crypto in $20tn bonanza

The fusion of artificial intelligence and crypto will lead to a financial transformation, industry leaders say.

“The native currency for AI agents is going to be crypto,” Changpeng Zhao, the former Binance CEO, said on Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Though agents are not yet mature, over time, crypto will become the main medium of digital value exchange for these programmes, he forecast.

An AI agent is an autonomous system designed to achieve specific goals by independently planning and executing decisions. They can perform simple tasks such as booking airline tickets or investing money.

He’s not alone in his bullishness.

Bitwise estimates that the marriage of crypto and AI will add $20 trillion to the global GDP by 2030.

In 2025, bullish projections like that encouraged investors to plough over $565 million into startups at the intersection of AI and crypto, a 16% increase from 2024, according to data from DefiLlama.

Circle CEO

Other crypto execs showered praise on the merging of the two technologies.

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said that there will be “billions” of AI agents conducting economic transactions in the next three to five years.

“The next generation of blockchain networks are being designed specifically for agentic compute,” Allaire said at the WEF on Thursday.

Earlier in January, David Duong, Coinbase’s investment research lead, said that “the sustained prominence of the AI and crypto convergence as not just a trend but as a fundamental shift towards the next stage of technological progress.”

Andreessen Horowitz

Elsewhere, venture capital powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz said AI agents will converge with crypto to revolutionise internet payments, banking, and prediction markets in 2026.

“A smart contract can already settle a dollar payment globally in seconds,” analysts Christian Crowley and Pyrs Carvolth wrote in the firm’s 2026 outlook.

Agents will be “paying each other for data, GPU time, or API calls instantly and permissionlessly — without invoicing, reconciling, or batching,” they said.

They also anticipate that prediction markets “where odds update, agents trade, and payouts clear globally in seconds… without a custodian or exchange.”

Wealth management will also be turbocharged, analyst Maggie Hsu said.

“This is more than just robo advisors; everyone can access active portfolio management, not just passive management,” Hsu said.

In short, people are optimistic.

“We believe economists are collectively underestimating AI productivity at the moment,” Duong said.

“AI is increasing the speed and efficiency of our workforce in a way that isn’t being fully captured by official statistics.”

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email at [e-mail].