Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi said he would trust an autonomous AI agent to manage all of his crypto holdings within the next 6 to 12 months, while Dragonfly’s Haseeb Qureshi put that figure at just 5%.
The exchange took place at NEARCON 2026, where both speakers agreed on one broad point: AI agents will eventually manage capital. Their disagreement was about timing, operational reliability, and how much risk is acceptable before those systems touch meaningful sums of money.
Qureshi argues money systems need a much higher reliability bar
Qureshi said a system that works with money 90% of the time is unusable for real economic activity. In his view, even 95% reliability does not clear the bar. He described the current phase as long stretches where nothing happens, followed by a failure that changes everything, a framing that reflects how damaging low-frequency errors can be in financial systems.
He also warned against drawing conclusions from social media demos and hype cycles. Autonomous systems, he said, have already shown they can malfunction, and impressive demonstrations should not be confused with infrastructure robust enough to handle meaningful capital. For large consumer-facing platforms, his position was blunt: a flashy demo is not the same as something ready for production finance.
Sethi says the technology is improving fast and Kraken is already building
Sethi took the opposite side on pace. He said the speed and level of innovation are exponential and are already reshaping financial infrastructure. According to him, Kraken is building agent-like capabilities for customers on a timeline measured in weeks and months, not years.
On the question of security, Sethi argued that the growth in attack surface will be matched by growth in defensive capacity. He did not dismiss the risks. His point was that iteration is moving fast enough that security and usability can improve together as deployment expands.
A rapid-fire question reduced the debate to 5% versus 100%
The sharpest contrast came during a rapid-fire round when both men were asked what share of their own portfolios AI could manage better today. Qureshi answered 5%. Sethi answered 100%.
When asked whether he would place all of his crypto into an autonomous agent within a year, Sethi responded without hesitation: everything. He put that decision within the next 6 to 12 months.
The discussion captures a widening divide in crypto. One camp sees autonomous finance as close to real deployment, while the other sees it as an experiment that still has not met the reliability threshold required for actual capital, onchain transfers, and automated trading at meaningful scale.