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Key Takeaways
- Ahuja argues programmable money on blockchain rails suits AI agents better than traditional payment infrastructure built for human-initiated transactions.
- He points to identity, provenance and verifiable recordkeeping as an underappreciated layer where blockchain could help verify agent authorization and data ownership.
- He cautions against chasing AI-crypto narratives, favoring infrastructure addressing concrete problems like payments, settlement, identity and custody over thematic overlap alone.
Most investment discussion around artificial intelligence centers on which model, application or platform will win. Utkarsh Ahuja, founder and managing partner of Moon Pursuit Capital, argues a different question deserves more attention: if AI becomes as economically significant as markets expect, what financial infrastructure will that economy actually run on.
His answer, laid out in a recent guest column, is that blockchain and digital assets are likely to form part of the answer.
The Case for Programmable Money
Ahuja’s argument does not rest on AI companies needing tokens or on attaching “AI” to a crypto project as a branding exercise.
Instead, he points to a shift already underway: AI agents are moving beyond generating text and analyzing data toward negotiating with other agents, purchasing computing resources, paying for data and executing transactions within parameters set by humans.
Traditional payment infrastructure, in his view, was built around people and institutions initiating transactions and was not designed for potentially millions of autonomous software agents conducting continuous, low-value transactions across borders.
He argues blockchain infrastructure suits that environment because it allows money to become programmable, letting an agent interact with a wallet or execute a smart contract without the manual intervention traditional finance typically requires. He singles out stablecoins specifically as a bridge between blockchain programmability and a familiar unit of account.
Identity and Provenance as an Overlooked Layer
Beyond payments, Ahuja points to identity and provenance as areas where blockchain infrastructure could play a role as AI agents become more capable.
“Markets will need ways to verify who or what is behind a transaction and what an agent is authorized to do, along with ways to establish where data or intellectual property originated and who owns it once AI systems consume or create it.”
He does not claim blockchains solve these problems outright, but argues their capacity for verifiable, shared recordkeeping makes them a natural component of that infrastructure.
He also points to a capital-markets dimension he believes is underappreciated: tokenization is already moving traditional assets onto blockchain rails while stablecoins have demonstrated that real financial activity can operate on-chain, developments he frames as running on a separate track from AI’s growing role in automated financial decision-making.
“Convergence of those two trends, rather than either alone, is where the larger opportunity may sit, since an AI agent capable of analyzing markets but unable to efficiently hold or settle assets is inherently limited.”
That framing positions blockchain infrastructure not as a bet on AI directly, but as a bet on the plumbing an increasingly automated economy would need regardless of which specific AI companies or models ultimately dominate.
Under that view, the infrastructure layer could see durable demand even if today’s leading AI applications are eventually displaced by competitors, since the underlying need for agents to transact, verify identity and settle value would persist across whichever applications end up on top.
A Caution Against Chasing the Narrative
Ahuja cautions that technological convergence does not automatically justify a premium valuation for every project positioned at the intersection of AI and crypto, pointing to how quickly narratives outran fundamentals during prior crypto cycles as a risk he sees repeating around AI today.
“My preference is for infrastructure addressing a concrete problem created by greater automation, including payments, settlement, identity, cybersecurity and custody, rather than projects marketed primarily on thematic overlap.”
He frames his own perspective as that of an investor and trader focused on where structural shifts create new flows of capital, arguing AI is likely to be one such shift but that value will not necessarily concentrate at the application layer alone.
In his framing, the internet changed how information moves, blockchain changed how value moves, and AI is now changing who, or what, can make economic decisions, with the intersection of those three shifts as the area he believes merits closer investor attention.
