When Ai Agents Become Defi’s Main Users

What Happened

That activity increases efficiency while introducing new stress points. If agents rely on similar inputs, Lazarichev says:

Market Context

“Recently, blockchain ecosystems have struggled because many tokens have failed to reach escape velocity, and much of the activity has turned into PvP trading, where users try to extract value from each other.”

“Once agents become the main actors, the chain starts behaving less like a marketplace of people and more like a piece of machine infrastructure.”

“Activity becomes continuous: agents don’t wait for market hours, they don’t get tired, and they don’t trade on mood.”

Fernando Lillo Aranda, Marketing Director at Zoomex, argues that the transition goes deeper. He says:

“When AI agents become the dominant participants in a blockchain ecosystem, we transition from a user-driven market structure to a system of autonomous economic coordination.”

Why It Matters

Federico Variola, CEO of Phemex, says this could improve how on-chain activity develops. He says:

In his view, “agents may behave in a more cooperative way rather than an extractive one, simply because they tend to act more rationally than human participants.”

“If you deploy an autonomous system that can move value, you should be expected to have basic safeguards in place,” including “permissioning, spending limits, transaction simulation, circuit breakers, and audit logs.”

“We already have laws. They’re just 30 years old and built for a world where software couldn’t talk back. The .frameworks people keep citing ETHOS, NIST, the new PLD, they’re all patches on a system that wasn’t built for this. We need something new. And pretending otherwise is just reckless.”

Details

If autonomous agents become the dominant users of DeFi, blockchains start to do a different job. They operate as coordination and settlement systems for software rather than spaces driven by human timing, sentiment, and speculation.

Dmitry Lazarichev, co-founder of Wirex, focuses on how this changes behaviour:

“You can get crowded behaviour and sharp feedback loops,” with rising pressure around “blockspace, fee dynamics, MEV, and the quality of execution guarantees.”

In that environment, blockchains start operating as execution systems for machine-native strategies.

Pauline Shangett, CSO at ChangeNOW, corroborates:

“The network no longer serves humans, it hosts algorithms that humans can no longer supervise in real time.”

In exclusive interviews with these four crypto executives, BeInCrypto examined how DeFi changes as AI agents become its main users.

Agentic Liability Has no Clean Answer Yet

If AI agents can execute transactions, deploy contracts, or move funds autonomously, liability becomes harder to pin down when something goes wrong.

Lazarichev says autonomy cannot serve as an excuse.

“The key point is that ‘the agent did it’ can’t become a liability loophole,” he says.

In his view, an agent still acts “under someone’s authority, with permissions and limits set by a person or an organisation.” That puts the focus on “who deployed it, who configured it, who benefits from it, and who provided the model and the execution environment.”

He says the response will rely on familiar standards.

Shangett argues that current legal thinking is still relying on outdated foundations: