Viewpoint: AI agents may betray the core commitment of the encryption world, as their "black box" systems cannot be verified and scrutinized.

According to BlockBeats news on October 20, Forbes reported that by 2025, autonomous AI agents have become one of the hottest narratives in the cryptocurrency industry, ballooning overnight from an experimental novelty concept into a $13.5 billion market. An AI agent named “Truth Terminal” managed to persuade well-known venture capitalist Marc Andreessen to donate $50,000, which propelled the market capitalization of the GOAT Token to $1.2 billion. Currently, there are over 11,000 AI agents running on the Virtuals Protocol platform, executing trades and managing portfolios with minimal human intervention. However, there is one issue that almost no one is willing to confront. These AI agents were originally designed to enhance the efficiency of DeFi, yet they themselves are often highly centralized. The vast majority rely on closed-source models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, leading to a concentrated monopoly at the expense of user data and trading flow. In an industry founded on transparency, AI agents simultaneously represent the most market-relevant product in the cryptocurrency world to date—and the most severe ideological contradiction. The question is no longer whether AI agents will reshape the cryptocurrency industry, but rather—they already are. Security researchers warn that many AI agents deployed on blockchain networks use unaudited smart contracts, and most delegate the decision-making process to centralized AI services. When an agent executes a $100,000 DeFi strategy, the real decision-making reasoning actually occurs on the servers of OpenAI or Google—these “black box” systems cannot be reviewed or verified by anyone.