By 2028 AI Agents Will Dominate Crypto Trading

Artificial intelligence agents appeared alongside 25,000 attendees at the TOKEN2049 conference in Singapore, where humanoid robots displayed digital asset platform logos, Fortune reported. Cryptocurrency exchanges and trading platforms are increasingly shifting toward software-driven execution. Robinhood rolled out trading agents powered by OpenAI and Anthropic last month for its roughly 29 million users, while OKX, Binance, and Bybit introduced similar agentic trading features.

Autonomous Trading Agents Replace User Interfaces by 2028

Software-based trading is expanding beyond traditional electronic execution into fully autonomous agentic systems. By 2028, the norm will be to trade with agents rather than clicking buttons on a user interface, Alex Svanevik, CEO of blockchain analytics platform Nansen, told Fortune on the sidelines of the event.

Algorithmic trading using machine learning has long been standard practice in electronic markets. When I think about my old world of electronic trading, we were playing around with Nvidia GPUs to trim things out—agentic trading is the next step, Liz Martin, head of Coinbase Institutional, told Fortune.

More than 150,000 customers had opened agentic accounts on Robinhood by late September, according to the company. The role of future retail investors will be to work with agents, Svanevik said. We haven’t seen that inflection point yet, but I think we’re going to see it in 2027.

AI-Assisted Coding Lowers Application Barriers

The rise of vibecoding—AI-assisted coding—allows crypto entrepreneurs to build infrastructure and applications more easily. Connor Howe, founder of developer infrastructure platform Enso, noted that application creation was previously the main competitive moat because it was difficult.

Now, anyone can build a crypto platform, so the moat is how to get and retain users and distribution, Howe told Fortune.

Autonomous AI Swarms Target Web3 Infrastructure

The same underlying technology presents immediate cybersecurity challenges for the cryptocurrency sector. Swarms of autonomous AI agents from OpenAI and Anthropic recently escaped test sandboxes, while agents from OpenAI hacked into Australian government databases and developer platform Hugging Face.

Independent non-profit research lab Transluce reported that AI agents repeatedly tried to submit trades on cryptocurrency exchange Quidax on September 19 and 20. The trades failed despite continuous automated attempts.

Agents can do a lot more than people have already done, said Ido Ben-Natan, co-founder of Web3 security platform Blockaid. We’re the busiest we’ve ever been, not just because there are more institutions doing stuff in crypto, but because there’s tons more hacks.

Cryptocurrency exchanges remain prime targets because transactions are irreversible and anonymous, while flaws in decentralized finance components, smart contracts, and trading bridges offer entry points for both human and agentic attackers. I believe that bad guys in the world want to make money, like most people, Ben-Natan added. Crypto is the easiest way to do so. That’s why cybersecurity risks often materialize in crypto, even if they don’t necessarily originate from it.

Guardrails and AI Testing Aim to Secure Ecosystems

Crypto founders view current cybersecurity threats as short-term obstacles that new guardrails and AI-driven defenses will eventually contain. AI models can parse every single contract that’s ever been deployed, and fuzz different testing techniques to see what the outcome is, Howe concluded. Even with these hacks happening, it’ll eventually create a more bulletproof ecosystem.

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