AI Agents Prefer Cards Over Crypto, But Human Autonomy Remains the Real Driver
Dragonfly Capital partner Haseeb Qureshi offered a contrarian take on the intersection of AI and crypto, arguing that autonomous agents are not the natural crypto users many in the industry assume. AI agents are already gravitating toward traditional payment rails like cards rather than on-chain settlement, because cards offer superior speed, acceptance, and integration with existing commerce infrastructure. The real demand for crypto, he contends, comes from humans seeking privacy and financial autonomy — not from bots optimizing for throughput.
Why Agents Choose Cards
The reasoning is straightforward. An AI agent tasked with booking a flight, purchasing compute, or settling an API bill needs a payment method that works everywhere, instantly, with minimal friction. Card networks provide that today. Crypto rails, by contrast, introduce volatility, gas costs, compliance ambiguity, and UX complexity that agents and their operators have little incentive to absorb. Haseeb’s point cuts against the prevailing narrative that agentic commerce will be crypto’s killer app.
Hyperliquid: Expanding the Pie, Not Eating CEXs
Turning to derivatives, Haseeb argued that Hyperliquid is expanding the overall market rather than cannibalizing centralized exchanges. Its fully on-chain order book and community-driven listing model have attracted a distinct cohort of traders, but the HIP-3 framework — which allows permissionless perp deployment — introduces governance and risk-management challenges that remain unresolved. Whether Hyperliquid can sustain its growth without fragmenting liquidity is an open question.
Robinhood Chain and the RWA Hype Cycle
On tokenized real-world assets, Haseeb was measured. Robinhood Chain, he suggested, still needs to prove that it can attract genuine developer activity and demonstrate durable RWA demand beyond branding. Tokenization narratives have repeatedly outpaced actual usage, and the burden of proof now sits with issuers and chains to show real volume, real users, and real revenue.
The Future: Crypto as Invisible Plumbing
Looking ahead, Haseeb predicted that crypto will dissolve into the financial stack — becoming background infrastructure rather than a distinct asset class. In that world, the category of “crypto VC” may cease to exist, as blockchain rails get absorbed into fintech, payments, and capital markets. The winners will be those who solve real problems for humans, not those who chase agent-driven hype.
