AI Adoption Drives Demand for Public Blockchains
Grayscale Research's head Zach Pandl believes that the increasing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) will create demand for public blockchains to serve. According to a recent note, AI and blockchain technologies are complementary, but traditional systems were not built to handle the demands generated by AI.
Pandl identified three emerging needs that public blockchains can fill: agentic finance, verifiable record-keeping, and decentralized AI. Agentic finance involves programmable wallets that hold and deploy capital without intermediaries, which would drive micropayments, instant cross-border settlement, and automated trading and risk management.
Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL) are the networks built for this kind of settlement, according to Pandl. He also pointed out that as AI agents take on more decisions, firms will need stronger ways to verify their actions and trustworthiness. This includes tracking which models, data, and rules influenced an agent's decisions.
Worldcoin (WLD) is one way to tell humans apart from agents through its identity service. Pandl wrote that public blockchains can anchor these records in transparent, neutral infrastructure rather than placing them under the control of a single corporation or government.