Agents are the future of finance - Enter the Agentic Revolution

About this session

Sam Green argued that the real fix for crypto's UX was not AI in the abstract but agents specifically, defining an agent as a program that decided and acted on a user's behalf through a continuous loop of sensing its environment, reasoning, and acting. He framed a coming shift he called the agentic revolution as the moment AI stopped only advising and started executing directly, and treated crypto as the natural setting, since programmable money paired with autonomous decision-making was what agentic finance required. He backed this with a taxonomy of live products, not just a speculative pitch.

He built the case historically. Steam power launched the industrial revolution roughly three hundred years ago by his account, centralised electricity started a second revolution about 120 years later, and the transistor opened the information age some 75 years ago; each, he argued, laid the infrastructure for the next. He placed a coming agent era as the fourth in that sequence and claimed, without elaborating, that it would have more impact than the three before it combined. He tied its timing to two compounding trends: computing power under Moore's law, and what he described as a yearly doubling in AI model performance since GPT-3.5, which he said reached mass adoption faster than Instagram had, his own comparison.

Green named this market segment AgentFi and mapped its products on two axes, autonomy (advice versus direct on-chain action) and intelligence (rule-based logic versus AI-driven decisions), then walked through five categories: agents trading on prediction and betting markets, agents managing trading and portfolio decisions, information agents acting as co-pilots rather than executors, agents provisioning liquidity across exchanges, and lending agents that reallocate a user's collateral to chase yield. He named lending as the segment with the strongest product fit and, by his account, the largest share of assets under management so far.

On numbers, all self-reported and unverified, Green said assets under management in agentic finance were near zero at the start of 2025, reached roughly $20 million by October, and stood around $500 million by the day of the talk, a jump he did not explain further. He also cited stablecoin holdings growing from roughly $20 billion to $300 billion over five years, stablecoin transaction volume overtaking Visa's, and an Ernst & Young survey putting institutional interest in DeFi at 24 percent at the time, projected to pass 75 percent within two years.