Alliance co-founder says AI agents, not humans, may be crypto’s real users
Alliance co-founder Imran Khan argues that Chris Dixon’s core thesis on crypto remains largely intact: blockchains add an economic and ownership layer that the internet never fully built into its base architecture. In Khan’s view, early attempts to embed payments into the web, from Netscape’s work with Visa to the long-unused HTTP 402 status code, showed the idea was old even if the tooling was not ready. Crypto later introduced concepts such as user-owned assets, permissionless markets, decentralized identity, open social graphs, portable reputation, decentralized storage, and programmable finance, but most people never prioritized decentralization over convenience.
That is where Khan sees AI changing the picture. He says AI agents are becoming a new class of internet participant and may be the real demand-side users for open protocols. As machine-to-machine activity grows, agents may need permissionless access to services, datasets, markets, identity systems, programmable money, storage, reputation, and discoverability across open networks. Khan’s broader conclusion is that the next internet will not be defined by crypto alone. He describes it as a stack shaped by crypto, AI, robotics, compute, energy, and eventually biotech, with crypto serving as the ownership layer and AI handling intelligence and interaction.
