AI Could Boost Crypto Activity, But Fidelity Digital Assets Warns Tokens May Not Capture the Value

Fidelity Digital Assets said in a report published Wednesday that rising AI-driven activity may not translate into higher value for crypto tokens, even as artificial intelligence agents increasingly transact on blockchain networks. 

The firm argued that the more relevant question is not how much activity AI generates, but which companies and assets capture the economic value from it.

The Infrastructure Race Already Underway

AI agents settled more than $73 million across roughly 176 million blockchain transactions in the year through April, according to a report from Keyrock, a crypto market-making firm. 

Coinbase, Stripe, and Visa are separately building competing systems for machine-to-machine payments, positioning multiple established financial players to compete for the same emerging transaction volume that crypto proponents have argued belongs naturally to blockchains.

Fidelity Digital Assets analyst Max Wadington wrote that as AI lowers the cost of building and launching new applications, the advantages that matter most may shift away from the underlying technology itself and toward factors such as liquidity, distribution, security, trust, and regulatory standing. 

That framing suggests cheaper development could flood the market with new crypto products without guaranteeing any of them find real demand or a sustainable place in the market.

Why Blockchains Might Not Win the AI Economy by Default

Crypto industry proponents have argued that blockchains and stablecoins are particularly well-suited to an AI-driven economy because they support programmable, continuous micropayments that are difficult or uneconomical to process through traditional card networks. 

Alchemy CEO Nikil Viswanathan has framed that argument in blunt terms, saying crypto was built for AI agents, not humans.

Fidelity’s report complicates that narrative on two fronts. First, autonomous AI agents may simply choose alternatives to public blockchains if banks, fintechs, or established technology companies offer lower costs, better performance, clearer regulatory standing, or more established distribution networks. 

A surge in AI-driven economic activity, the report argued, does not necessarily translate into a surge in blockchain-specific activity.

The Token-Capture Problem

Second, even AI activity that does occur on blockchains may not benefit the tokens tied to those networks. Micropayments, one of the activities AI agents are expected to drive in high volume, tend to generate low fees individually and are often routed to Layer 2 networks or settled off-chain entirely, limiting what flows back to base-layer tokens. 

Fidelity said stablecoin issuers and service providers built around those payment flows may be better positioned to capture that value than the underlying blockchain tokens themselves. That dynamic already appears in Coinbase’s x402 payment system, which primarily settles transactions using Circle’s USDC stablecoin rather than a native blockchain token. 

Fidelity said higher-value activities such as trading, lending, and borrowing may offer stronger value-capture potential for tokens than high-volume micropayments.

Security Risk as a Growing Factor

The report also flagged security risk as a growing concern tied to AI’s expansion into crypto. AI systems are increasingly capable of identifying vulnerabilities not just in smart contracts themselves but across the broader infrastructure surrounding them. 

This includes key management systems, cross-chain bridges, and oracle networks that feed external data onto blockchains. 

That capability cuts in both directions: the same tools available to attackers can also be applied defensively, and some crypto firms have begun adopting AI models specifically to find and patch vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.

Separating the AI Narrative From Token Value

Fidelity’s overall framing treated AI’s growth in the space as a near-certainty rather than an open question, while treating crypto’s ability to capture the resulting economic value as the genuinely uncertain variable. 

The firm said the more important question for crypto investors is not whether AI succeeds, but where the value from that success ultimately accrues.

The report arrives as AI has become one of the dominant investment narratives across crypto markets. Token prices for AI-linked projects frequently move on announcements of agent integrations or partnerships regardless of whether those integrations have produced measurable transaction volume. 

Fidelity’s analysis pushes against treating that narrative connection as a reliable proxy for future token value.  They argue instead that the two trends, AI adoption and crypto token appreciation, could diverge if the infrastructure AI agents ultimately rely on looks more like traditional fintech rails than public blockchains.