Cryptocurrency can accelerate artificial intelligence adoption by helping AI startups onboard users, according to Polygon’s co-founder Sandeep Nailwal.
“You can use crypto incentives and disincentives to onboard users to onboard the ecosystem players,” Nailwal said during a panel discussion at the LONGITUDE by Cointelegraph event.
He added that projects with effective onchain incentive structures might even “build a better AI because you have this incentive engine that brings in developers,” Nailwal said on May 1.
Cointelegraph’s LONGITUDE is an event series that brings together leaders and innovators from the blockchain and Web3 space for exclusive discussions.
Joining the panel, Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of the Near Protocol, expanded on crypto’s long-term synergy with AI, forecasting that crypto-native AI agents could replace traditional web application front-ends as the primary user interfaces for Web3.
“We don’t need applications or websites anymore. Your AI becomes the interface to computing and the internet,” Polosukhin said.
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However, Nailwal cautioned that the rise of AI-related tokens onchain has also attracted a wave of opportunistic scams. “We know that 99% of those projects are literally token scams, but very few projects are actually trying to have some meaningful AI project,” he said.
The era of Web3 AI agents
AI agents are expected to take on a more prominent role within decentralized communities, J.D. Seraphine, co-founder of Web3 developer Raiinmaker, recently told Cointelegraph.
According to a report by VanEck, over 1 million AI agents could enter the market in 2025, with many of them tied to decentralized finance applications. Such agents are already reshaping the digital economy, building decentralized applications, launching tokens, and interacting with humans autonomously.
“AI is an extremely centralizing force. A few companies could become the warlords of the world,” Nailwal said.
“That’s why crypto-native, peer-to-peer AI solutions are so important—they enable privacy-preserving innovation,” Polosukhin said.
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