Blockchain analytics firm Nansen has projected that by 2028, the most common way people invest in crypto may no longer involve manually selecting tokens, reading charts, or actively managing positions themselves. Instead, autonomous AI agents could become the default investment interface, acting on behalf of individuals, institutions, and even protocols.
The forecast points to more than a simple upgrade of existing trading bots. In Nansen’s view, crypto investing is approaching a structural transition in which software agents monitor markets continuously, manage risk, execute trades, rebalance portfolios, and interact with decentralized finance applications around the clock with minimal human input.
From Manual Investing to Agent-Driven Execution
Nansen compares this shift to one of the most important changes in software development over the past decade. In the past, engineering teams often wrote, tested, and deployed code through largely manual workflows. Today, continuous integration systems, automated testing, and deployment pipelines handle much of that repetitive operational burden.
According to Nansen, investing may be moving in a similar direction. Rather than manually responding to every market move, users could increasingly rely on autonomous agents to operate inside predefined decision frameworks. These frameworks would reflect an investor’s goals, constraints, and risk preferences, while the agent would take responsibility for execution.
Applied to crypto markets, that means an AI agent could monitor changing market conditions, manage risk parameters, execute trades, perform portfolio rebalancing, and interact directly with DeFi protocols on a 24/7 basis. Nansen predicts that by 2028, there could be billions of active agents, each representing a user, an institution, or a protocol and operating under automated decision-making systems that can be adjusted over time.
More Than Traditional Trading Bots
Automation is hardly new in crypto. Exchanges and market participants have used algorithmic tools and trading bots for years. But Nansen’s description of AI agents suggests a more advanced paradigm than the rule-based systems commonly associated with crypto automation today.
Traditional bots generally react to a narrow set of triggers, such as price thresholds or predefined spread conditions. By contrast, the AI agent model described by Nansen is more goal-oriented. These systems could reason across multiple data feeds, evaluate changing market states, and execute more complex, multi-step strategies across decentralized protocols, centralized exchanges, and onchain positions simultaneously.
That distinction matters. It suggests a move away from single-purpose automation toward intelligent operational systems that combine analysis, execution, and risk control in one layer. In such an environment, the investor’s role may evolve from hands-on trading to defining strategy boundaries, acceptable risk, and target outcomes.
Potential Market Impact on Liquidity and Infrastructure
If Nansen’s timeline proves accurate, the implications for crypto market structure could be significant. Widespread adoption of AI-driven investing could reshape how liquidity moves through decentralized finance, alter trading microstructure across both centralized and decentralized venues, and increase pressure on platforms to build infrastructure capable of handling high-frequency autonomous activity.
Nansen specifically argues that this transition could fundamentally change liquidity mobility in DeFi markets. If large numbers of AI agents are constantly reallocating capital, optimizing yield, adjusting exposure, and responding to market or protocol changes in real time, liquidity may become more dynamic and more mobile than it is today.
That could create both opportunities and challenges. Faster allocation of capital may improve efficiency in some areas, but it may also require exchanges and DeFi protocols to operate in environments with far denser and more automated activity. Infrastructure design, execution reliability, and system responsiveness could become increasingly important competitive factors.
A Broader Industry Direction
Nansen is not the only voice arguing that AI agents will play a dominant role in the future of investing. Still, its position carries weight because the firm is one of the most frequently cited analytics platforms in the digital asset industry. Its public endorsement of a 2028 timeline gives the idea additional credibility, even if the precise date ultimately proves optimistic.
The company’s argument also reflects a broader trend emerging across crypto: the convergence of large language models, onchain automation, and increasingly composable financial infrastructure. As these capabilities improve, the case for delegating operational investing tasks to software agents becomes easier to understand.
In practical terms, the shift envisioned by Nansen would not necessarily remove humans from the investment process altogether. Instead, it would reposition them. Investors would still choose objectives and define strategic intent, but the day-to-day mechanics of execution could be offloaded to systems designed to act continuously and autonomously.
Why the Forecast Matters
Whether or not billions of AI agents are active by 2028, Nansen’s forecast captures a direction of travel that is becoming harder to ignore. Crypto markets already operate around the clock, span multiple venues, and involve increasingly complex interactions across chains and protocols. Those characteristics make them especially well suited to automation.
As a result, the rise of AI agents may not simply represent a new product category. It could become a defining layer of market participation—one that changes how users invest, how liquidity behaves, and how exchanges and DeFi platforms design their systems. If that happens, the central competitive question may no longer be just which platform offers the best products or lowest fees, but which one is best prepared for an ecosystem where autonomous agents are major market actors.
For now, Nansen’s message is clear: the future of crypto investing may be less about humans clicking buttons and more about intelligent agents executing strategies at scale.