Blockchain has spent years building the channels for tokenized trade. Now, Artificial Intelligence promises to bring people to them.

Blockchain today is missing its most important element: the people.

For every friend, family member, or colleague who has ventured into crypto, many more have deliberately avoided it. Their reasoning is understandable. Wallets remain intimidating. Bridges, exchanges, and protocols introduce unfamiliar risks. Hacks and industry blowups have repeatedly reminded newcomers that a mistake can be expensive and even irreversible.

Real problems are being solved through blockchain technology. But our industry has seldom made those solutions easily accessible to those hesitant to navigate the learning curve.  That may be where AI matters most: it could become the layer between the infrastructure the industry has spent years building and the people who still do not know how—or why—to use it, rather than it giving blockchain simply another narrative to chase.

That distinction is worth making now, because predictions about AI are advancing beyond reasonable expectations.

Those predictions promise: Billions of agents. Millions of transactions per second. Autonomous software buying goods, managing portfolios, negotiating contracts, and moving money without human intervention.

Perhaps. But we can only work with the facts and experiences we have today.

And today, we must acknowledge that blockchain has yet to fulfill many of its largest promises. The industry has spent years pontificating about onboarding trillions of dollars in tokenized assets. The amount of real-world value moving on-chain continues to grow, but adoption remains far short of the scale envisioned. And while the technology has advanced considerably, the user experience has not always kept pace.

In other words, a lot has changed—and one stubborn problem has not. People still have to show up.

Improve Don’t Replace

Technology and crypto cycles are unusually good at producing distractions. In blockchain, the focus has shifted from ICOs to NFTs, gaming, DePIN, real-world assets, and now AI. Each new cycle arrives with a prediction that this will finally be the use case that brings the next billion users on-chain.

The mistake is treating those developments as replacements for what came before, and abandoning long-term progress in lieu of the next hot trend. Gaming can be a route to adoption. DePIN can be a route to adoption. Tokenized assets can be a route to adoption. AI can be one too.

What matters is whether a network bends its entire strategy toward each new narrative or uses new technology to strengthen the work of the many distributed participants who have shepherded the growth of a fully functioning ecosystem.

For XDC Network, that distinction matters. XDC leadership and its global community, enterprise and otherwise, have spent years focused on trade finance and the infrastructure required to move real-world value on-chain. The ambition is substantial: help modernize a market still burdened by paper, fragmented systems, limited access to financing, and a trade finance gap measured in trillions of dollars.

That work has naturally expanded into real-world asset tokenization, stablecoins, DeFi, digital asset infrastructure, and the broader convergence between traditional and decentralized finance. AI will not require abandoning any of it.

The more useful question is, what can AI do for the systems already being built? How does it improve trade finance? How does it make tokenized assets easier to access? How does it help people navigate DeFi without requiring them to understand every protocol underneath it?

And if autonomous agents eventually manage real money, how do we know which agents deserve that authority?

Those questions are less dramatic than predictions about billions of autonomous machines transacting with one another. They also ask us to contemplate ideas related to work and execution to deliver on the promises of this technology.

Before Agents May Act, They Have to Be Trusted

The AI industry contains people who have been building for years and others who arrived months ago. The same is true of companies now attaching AI to financial products. That makes trust the first real problem. An agent capable of trading, spending, or moving assets may be useful. An agent capable of doing those things without meaningful controls is a liability.

This is why the emerging idea of Know Your Agent, or KYA, requires serious attention.

The concept is straightforward. Before people or institutions give software meaningful economic authority, they need ways to understand what that software is permitted to do, who created it, how it behaves, what risks it can take, and how its access can be limited or revoked.

We already understand this principle when people participate in financial markets. Identity, permissions, risk controls, and accountability matter. Software will not make those requirements disappear. If anything, autonomy makes them more important.

There are promising examples of AI systems outperforming humans at specific financial or analytical tasks. There are also demonstrations in which agents identify threats or avoid mistakes a person might miss. But a controlled proof of concept is very different from deploying autonomous systems at institutional scale. Before an agent is trusted with meaningful capital, the question will not simply be whether it can make money.

The question will be whether it can be trusted not to lose control of it.

The Adoption Layer—where AI could make its most immediate contribution

Crypto still asks too much of the average user. A newcomer who wants to put ordinary currency on-chain may have to choose an exchange, open an account, move money, buy an asset, select a network, create a wallet, secure a recovery phrase, understand gas, evaluate protocols, compare yields, assess smart-contract risk, and determine whether any of the opportunities in front of them are legitimate.

Blockchain has created an extraordinary range of choices. It has also created paralysis by analysis. AI can compress that decision set. Every additional decision creates another opportunity to stop progressing. Instead of asking a person to understand every network, tokenization platform, staking product, lending market, and DeFi protocol, an agent can begin with a much simpler question:

What are you trying to accomplish?

A user might want to earn a reasonable return without taking substantial risk. They might want to move money internationally or gain exposure to a tokenized asset. They may want to finance an invoice, purchase a product, or compare a group of investment opportunities.

The user does not necessarily need to know which blockchain, protocol, stablecoin, bridge, wallet, or application sits underneath the answer. The agent can search the available options, evaluate them against the user's constraints, explain the tradeoffs, and eventually execute within permissions established in advance.

Some people are research-oriented and take on risks. Some institutions are innovators and trailblazers. But those are the participants who got involved in crypto years ago. 

We need to bring in those participants, who have yet to invest intellectually, as well as conservative enterprises that can’t ignore the opportunity.  

There’s another dimension to why these participants may be reluctant to enter this space. In order to self-custody crypto assets, users must not only make informed decisions but also  assume responsibilities, such as managing seed words, passphrases, and device security. The consequences of misplacing or improperly storing them can be dire.

Crypto has always treated that responsibility as a feature, and it’s what originally attracted people to the space. The ability to “be your own bank” defined the industry. But today, most people don’t actually want the responsibility of being their own bank. They want control over their money, but without the risk associated with self-custody. Traditional finance has been built around people and businesses delegating those responsibilities to the institutions they trust. For the masses, handing off some responsibility to a trusted party may not be a compromise, but a necessity. In a way, AI can bridge that gap.

AI can provide a fundamentally different user experience for these participants and a clear outline of the risks, which may not be as intimidating as imagined. With the right system in place, a person or enterprise can interact with their goal. The agent will deal with the machinery.

If blockchain is going to reach a wide range of participants who have no interest in becoming crypto experts, that separation may prove essential.

Where AI is a Natural Fit

Trade finance offers a useful example here because its complexity is not theoretical.

A single trade finance transaction can involve invoices, certificates, shipping documents, compliance records, banks, exporters, importers, insurers, logistics companies, and counterparties that may never have worked together before. Blockchain provides a common settlement and verification layer. AI helps people and institutions actually navigate it.

An intelligent system can read documents, reconcile information, identify inconsistencies, and flag unusual activity across a volume of paperwork that would be difficult to review manually. Connected to XDC's settlement infrastructure, those capabilities can shorten the path from a traditional paper workflow to a verifiable on-chain transaction.

The same logic extends to enterprises that have never developed a blockchain department. AI tools can help review smart contracts, identify vulnerabilities, convert business requirements into EVM-compatible code, and monitor live applications for behavior that deviates from their intended design. Again, the underlying value is not that AI replaces blockchain. Instead, it makes blockchain easier to use.

As the network expands, that function becomes more valuable. More tokenized assets, applications, liquidity pools, validators, and financial products create more opportunity—but also more complexity. AI will help participants make sense of that complexity.

AI will help users find relevant opportunities and help developers locate infrastructure and liquidity. It will help institutions monitor activity across a network they may otherwise find difficult to navigate. Eventually, agents may do more than make recommendations.

They may negotiate transactions, rebalance portfolios, execute settlements, secure financing, and transfer funds when authenticated information indicates that certain conditions have been met. A network built around trade finance, real-world assets, fast settlement, and predictable costs gives those agents something useful to do.

But the order is important. First, we require trustworthy infrastructure. Then, we need intelligence capable of navigating it. If both work, adoption becomes easier.

The Missing Link

AI does not solve blockchain's problems simply by adding a layer of functionality. It does not convert insufficient infrastructure into a quality system. It does not make an unsafe protocol trustworthy. AI does not remove the need for security, compliance, privacy, or reliable settlement. Blockchain still has to do what it was designed to do.

What AI will change is the distance between that infrastructure and the person trying to use it. That may prove more consequential than many of the dramatic predictions being made today. The crypto industry has spent years asking people to come to blockchain: learn the terminology, download the wallet, understand the network, compare the protocols, and accept the risk.

AI renegotiates that relationship, making it much easier to onboard. Blockchain can now present itself to the user. An agent can understand the objective, navigate the infrastructure, assess the available choices, and act within boundaries the user has already established.

For XDC Network, that does not mean leaving trade finance, real-world assets, or enterprise settlement behind in pursuit of the newest technology cycle. It means continuing to build on a solid foundation and carry forward years of momentum in established fields. 

It’s a call to the entire ecosystem to continue developing purposeful infrastructure. It’s a call to those in trade finance to keep expanding the markets blockchain can serve. It’s a call to the innovators to keep reducing the friction between traditional and decentralized finance.

With AI, we can make it easier to reach all of our key participants. The blockchain industry may not need AI to fulfill its next promise. It may benefit from AI by helping to deliver on the promises already made.

About the Author: Billy Sebell is the Executive Director of XDC Foundation, an organization he helped form in 2021 to support the growth, development, and adoption of the XDC Network. Follow Billy on his X account - https://x.com/XinfinUSA.