"Crypto Was Never Meant for Humans": Alchemy on Agentic Payments

G. Kim, welcome to the show. How's it going? Good. Thanks for having me on. Are so excited to dive into alchemy, a little bit of you, a little bit of infrastructure that moves billions at scale. Reading I'm reading the current website. It's been it's been fun to see the evolution of alchemy. Alchemy's been around for so many years. I've been following this for a long time, and I'm I'm just looking forward to getting the current update on how you're thinking about things. Definitely. Where would you like me to start?

It's a great question. How how long have you been with the firm, and and how have you seen it evolve since you've been there? Yeah. So

great. So I am Cheehy Kim. I lead strategic partnerships at Alchemy. You know, very simply, we enable developer teams to build on blockchains, right, without running all the infrastructure themselves. And these teams range from, like, crypto native startups and AI companies all the way to established financial institutions like a major bank. And, you know, we've been doing this for almost a decade, if you can believe, and I have been with the company since the end of twenty twenty five.

In terms of just, like, my career journey, you know, I wanted to highlight that, you know, the thing that I personally keep coming back to for, like, let's say, the the last twenty years of my career, like, really comes down to one simple question, and that is, you know, who gets financial access and who doesn't? Right? And, you know, I started my career in banking and and asset management and then spent nearly a decade at MSCI building, you know, the indexes that sit underneath ETFs.

And so, you know, when you buy an ETF, right, say, an emerging markets fund or, you know, the S and P five hundred fund, there's an index sitting underneath that fund defining what's actually in it. And so it's passively tracking an index. There's no active bet being made. Right? And, you know, that work is part of what makes, you know, ETFs possible, right, at the at the prices that, like, people like you and me can actually, you know, buy them at.

You know, fifteen years ago, if you wanted to, you know, get into a diversified portfolio, you pretty much had to be, you know, wealthy enough to invest. And the portfolio likely had some, you know, really high minimum, you know, or high high, like, hefty management fee. And so ETFs really cracked that open, and now really anybody with a brokerage account can buy them. And it's not just about the price. Right? It's also about the kinds of exposures you can get. So now you can get, you know, very specific sectors.

You know, you can get into very specific international markets. There are factor strategies, currency hedge exposures, and so on and so forth. And so, you know, these used to be the domain of primarily large institutional investors, and now, really, anyone can take those same positions and, really, ETFs cracked open that access.

So Sorry. Oh, no. Go ahead. I was gonna ask just your your mandate now. So, you know, your your goal has always been to just open the aperture for financial access. And coming into Alchemy, where where's your current mandate if you're going out and forming strategic partnerships?

And I think I think the big focus right now, you know, we we just have this conversation quite frequently with Agencik payments is where does AI fit into maybe your your mandate outside of just, you know, personally, but even professionally within Alchemy for empowering these teams, you know, with Agencik payments. Yeah.

You know, at Alchemy, you know, because of what's happening now in in crypto and AI, really, it's in my mind, the like, this next version of the same story. Right? Anyone with an Internet connection anywhere in the world can participate in the financial system. And, you know, to me, that's ultimate financial access. Right? There is not you know, it's not gonna be easy. Right? There are a lot of challenges, and a lot of different types of companies and folks are coming into the into the space.

And so, you know, I would say and, you know, I'm happy to talk about all the projects that we're doing on the AgenTex side and how we're thinking about it. But, you know, what really gives me a lot of hope, right, is that we're seeing some real activity and a lot of people building. And, you know, I'll just take a step back and say, like, activity wise. And this is not just about institutions building, but it's about, like, the everyday people kind of interacting on financial platforms.

Like, you know, you've covered this in prior segments. Like, stablecoin payments have hit, you know, an all time high. Right? And, you know, b two b cross border payments alone, I think in the last year, you know, grew over 700%. And that's, like, huge. Right? Because people and businesses, like, now actually able to send money efficiently across borders and back without having to go through these, like, chains of, like, local correspondent banks, like, taking fees, right, at every jump.

And someone in Argentina can now actually hold an account, right, and send a payment and get, you know, paid in dollars and, you know, without ever opening up bank account. And then you're, like, seeing you know? And I'm I'll talk about, you know, the AgenTex stuff, like, soon, but, like, you're also seeing, like, on chain derivatives, right, take off. Yeah. You know, Piper Liquid. Let's just take that as an example, like, processed. You know, I just read $600,000,000,000 in in per volume in in q one of this year.

And that's, like, volume that didn't even exist a couple years ago. And so now everyday traders are accessing levered products that used to be, like, gated, you know, for institutions and credited investors, qualified investors. And then there's the predictions markets. Know, IZ kind of legitimized it further, right, by, you know, saying we're gonna invest up to $2,000,000,000. And so now we've got, like, liquid global markets on outcomes. Right?

Everything from elections to sports to macro events, and, you know, that's really opened up investing to a wider set of people than ever before. And then there's, you know, AI agents. Right? Agents are, you know, not just helping us, like, with our everyday, like, reasoning through chat, but they're actually starting to to move money and transact. And we're just at the tip of the iceberg, in my opinion.

This massive change in, you know, who gets to participate and get access is, in my mind, like, bigger than anything I've I've seen so far in my career. And it's really exciting that, like, crypto and AI together

are enabling that access. What question for you. So sort of a two part question. Like, sounds like you're around six months into the journey at Alchemy. What was the what was the thing about the the company that made you after such a awesome career in finance, what was it about Alchemy that originally really drove you to want to be there? What what was that there are a lot of companies fighting this infrastructure layers war and trying to, like, be be be a winner in this conversation.

What was it about Alchemy that felt like the winning strategy for you? Yeah. So, you know, there are two things. First, like, after my very institutional finance

journey and experience, I ended up cofounding a financial wellness startup. And, you know, we you know, the thing that I kept noticing, the reason why we started it was that, like, people are trying to figure out how to, like, manage your money completely on their own. Right? Personal finance, you know, isn't taught in schools, and it's not really talked about at home in any serious or kind of important way. And, you know, a lot of the products that are out there are difficult to use or full of jargon.

And so at Finney, we built a platform that was rolled out to employers for their employees, like, helping them to, like, you know, manage their everyday financial decisions. And, you know, we we sold it. Well, we served probably over, you know, 60,000 employees, close to 70,000 employees before we sold it to Origin Financial a couple years ago. And so, like, knew that, like, my next journey after that had to align in terms of vision. Right? Financial access.

I wanted to also go to a start up within the blockchain space. At Fini, at my start up, we also helped a lot of employees, like, better understand what crypto meant. Right? It's not just about Doge. Right? It's not about the meme coins. Right? There's there's, like, an infrastructure called blockchain that can be quite transformational.

And so, you know, I found Alchemy you know, actually, I I saw Nikhil, the CEO, speak on a, like, a a, like, podcast, and just everything he said about, you know, the the the the infrastructure space really resonated with me, and I I thought that would be, like, the right next step. Ultimately, Alchemy is, you know, fast moving. They're very innovative. They're a leader in the space as it relates to, like, blockchain. And now with AI, I mean, like, the sky's the limit.

That's, like, the the short short version of of the story.

Yeah. Excited to get into AI and the the specific opportunity there. We're just looking here at some updated numbers just to call out how impactful Alchemy is and has been. 1,000,000,000,000 transactions every year, 100,000,000 humans using crypto, 1,000,000,000 gasless transactions processed. This is a ton of scale here. 99.99% uptime. When you look at the numbers, there's just a lot to be proud of.

How does the conversation evolve now from just crypto and crypto infrastructure into how agents are going to be using things like stablecoins or or crypto generally? And why is alchemy in your mind posed to to to win that conversation or be a part of that at this point? Yeah. No. That that's a great question. So maybe I'll just take a a step back. Right?

You know, what Alchemy simply stated does is that, you know, if you wanna build something on a blockchain, you need a way for your application, right, to talk to that chain. And so that means to read what's happening, send transactions, see balance updates, and, you know, get notified when payments get confirmed and, you know, to pull historical records for things like accounting or reporting. And we make it really possible for any team building. Right?

Again, like, whether they're crypto and data startup or a major bank, right, to build on chain without having to run all of that infrastructure themselves. You know, to to to to share a few more, stats, like, are, you know, tens of thousands of teams building on Alchemy today, and we support more than a 100 blockchain networks. And so, like, you know, what does that mean, let's say, for, like, a payments company. Right? They wanna send payments and stablecoins or maybe, you know, they're issuing stablecoins.

They need to know when transactions hit, right, or how funds move across different chains without their users having to to think about what chain they're actually on. You know, you you talked about you you brought up gas abstraction, gas sponsorship, and through what we call gas abstraction. Right? Alchemy can sponsor the gas on our customers' behalf for their customers and then bills them in dollars at the end of the month.

You know, they never have to hold crypto on their balance sheet, and we make all of that, you know, work fast and reliably. And having done so in it over the last ten years, like, you know, we're we're the leader in this space. Right? And, you know, if you if you take specific customers of ours, like Connexus by JPMorgan and World, both customers using different parts of our stack, you know, for JPMorgan, we're the raw infrastructure. Right?

The node layer, the gas abstraction, you know, the controls that make running their deposit token, let's say, on a on a public chain reliable and fast for a regulated entity. But World took a different path. Right? They built their their own l two chain, the World Chain, and, know, we're the infrastructure powering it. So, you know, one customer puts their assets on the public chain, and we, you know, build the infrastructure, you know, to to to to allow that to run reliably.

And then another builds the chain itself, and Alchemy is the infrastructure for both. And I think the broader point here is that, like, different companies building on chain want, you know, different levels of control over their stack. And and some of them want the raw infrastructure, and they'll build everything themselves. Other want more abstracted product layers. Right? Even when they're still trying to figure out maybe exactly what they need. And so, you know, our job is to meet them where where they are.

And and so on the agentic side, right, that leads me to the agentic side. I think, you know, philosophically, I know the the leadership has said this, and, you know, I I I think about this all the time. And the reason crypto and AI together is so interesting is that each fixes a problem that the other one has. So crypto itself, right, has been around for, say, fifteen years, and the the user experience for humans has been really bad. It's been tough. Right? There's self custody. There are seed phrases.

These gas fees, the switching chains, and humans want all of that abstracted away. We we we want banks and our apps to actually do that for us. But AI agents really don't care about that user friction. They want, you know, programmatic access, twenty four seven availability, mobile reach instantly, deterministic settlement. Right? The things that make crypto hard for humans make it pretty perfect for software. And so maybe crypto was never meant for humans. Maybe it was always for AI. Woah. And so Well Interesting

when you think about Do do you you think you think that's where we're going? Do you think that's where we're going? Why? Do you have doubts about that, or have your doubts No. I don't. I I personally agree with you. In terms of the settlement layer and how value is gonna be moving around, I think, yeah, we're definitely hitting a moment where it's like there will be more agents than humans.

And I do believe that when it comes to moving transactions or making financial decisions on a per transaction basis, like, I do I also agree that agents will be doing that in on a more, like, transaction by transaction basis. I don't know when that will tip, but I've been, in the last six months, pretty blown away by how fast we are moving the conversation from stablecoins into

AgenTek commerce. So I agree with you. What do you think, Zach? Think we're we're we're we're trying to think through is what are all these different types of flows that AgenTek payments are actually being involved in? Is this treasury movement? Is this a joint of workflows for SMBs so, you know, they can balance their books at the end of the day? Is this, you know, is this my mom and dad on chat GBT saying, hey. Go book me a flight, and they're gonna now go, you know, be able to book a flight, or is it trading?

You know, we saw Robinhood launch their MCP recently. RP is it for trading in the in the terminal, and is it gonna be more of an an investing focus to manage my personal finances? And I think just with where AI currently is, you know, when we use it for most of our day to day life, it's this very isolated, how do I personally use it, not how am I using it to run a business. You know, we've seen it with paper clip and all these tools that it's going there, but I don't think it's there all the way.

And I think sometimes it's really hard to kinda open up your, I guess, open up your mind on that philosophical point to how much of payments can actually AI consume

and do, which I think leads well into the question of, so what is real and what's not real right now, especially on on this enterprise scale? Yeah. It's it's a great it's a great direction to talk about now. I mean yeah. So, like, what does this actually look like in real life? Right? And and from our perspective, you know, that's an agent, right, today, you know, paying for a data feed. Right? That's an agent, you know, settling, you know, a vendor invoice. That's an agent, you know, hedging a position.

And and I think when we talk about that and by the way, like, everything you mentioned, like, all of the above, like, all of those use cases that you shared, Brett. But, you know, each of these use cases means that the agent needs an account, right, that holds value, signs transaction, and and follow some rules that it's like operator gave it. And that account today is essentially a wallet. And so the wallet is the piece that decides, like, who controls what an agent can do. It's not the model.

And in fact, we just shipped this at Alchemy earlier this month. You know, today, like an AI coding agent like Claude, you know, running on a developer's machine can send a payment on chain, say swap one token for another, like, or bridge across chains, all from the terminal. And the agent never holds the wallet's private key. The developer approves, like, a scoped Mhmm. Time bound session, and the agent then uses that session to act. And the developer can revoke access with with one click.

And so the human stays in control of the wallet, and the agent gets a session. Now today, you know, that's a developer tool. Right? It's for folks building coding workflows. But I think what's really, really kind of interesting here is that the underlying primitive is very applicable for SMBEs all the way up to institutional and enterprise, like like companies.

So once you have a clean model where agents can act through these, like, scoped revocable sessions on top of, say, like, a wallet, somebody else is is custodying, you can apply that anywhere you want agents to do something without giving them the keys. And so to your earlier point that, like, you know, a bank giving its internal AI workflow access to a treasury wallet or, you know, AI agent access to a customer spending account with the customer in control. And so, like, seeing, like, all these, like, use cases,

they're very narrow. They're very scattery, but, like, the primitive can scale, and, you know, it it it can be very powerful. I just hate the the tension I feel when I think about this primitive. I know so many people that their preferred payment method is still a check. Like, if you have to pay them, they're like, just mail me a check. Right?

ACH and wire transfer. Zach, who do you think of when you say that? Yeah.

I think of quite a few people I know in some other work that I've I've helped, helped associates with. I would say it's it's not like a handful of people. That's the thing. Like, it's if you've reached out to five people, it's three of them that, like, if their business still needs to receive a a payment, they say, send me a check. And, like, this is this is the, you know, 3,300,000 SMBs that are, you know, in The US. So, you know, and then you can go a step further.

I've been on to banks websites where you're like, are you you're barely using WordPress here. So when we think about this technology that we see as so transformative, you know, I even think about how we use AI and the people around us, you know, they're like, I use AI to draft an email, and you're like, man, if you if you only knew what AI could do so in in this, like, growth phase, we we say we're at the tip of the iceberg.

Do you think we overestimate and we're a little over overaggressive sometimes with how fast we think this technology will penetrate all these different, you know, chasms of finance and businesses and personal finance, or is this technology really that impactful that it'll accelerate it accelerate and penetrate at a much faster rate than, say, ACH and wire

transfers have? Yeah. I mean, it's it's this is a transformative, like, technology. I think it's the educate the education, I think, is the hurdle here. Right? And so, like, yeah, there are many friends who just use, like, AI for, like, drafting emails. But, you know, if they only knew and had the time to spend to educate themselves on how, you know, how they can create workflows and, like, drastically reduce, like, time to doing, like, mundane things. Right? And, you know, to your point about, like, volumes. Right?

Like, how much agentic volume is there really today? Right? And there's very little. Right? The things that you know, there's a protocol called x four zero two. I mean, they they've shared that, like, about a $100,000,000, like, has flowed through their their AgenTek payment protocol in in the last, like, nine months or so. And so, you know, we're talking millions, right, not billions.

Very far. Small. Very small. Very But what are you with practically, though, what you're seeing on your side, like, you you have now I can imagine coming into a in a position that you're in, leading what you're leading on the business side, coming into a business like Alchemy where there are so many so many active deals already won. There's volumes going in all these different directions or all these different business lines. And then you have the, like, emerging agentic stuff we're talking about.

Like, when you have gone into the pipeline, you've looked at the CRM. You've, I'm sure, seen these dashboards of what's driving rep, like, volumes and stuff. When you today think about what is possible with Alchemy and what Alchemy can do regarding agent related tooling. Where do you actually see maybe today's opportunity in existing customers or how existing customers are using this versus tomorrow?

I think that's the biggest distinction is, like, what can you do today, and maybe what companies are doing stuff today? What categories are they in versus tomorrow? Figuring that out is important to us, like because there will be such a journey here. What does that look Yeah.

You know, the yeah. I'll I'll frame my answer in the context of something that we actually launched because we felt like it was important to build that infrastructure. We saw some early signals, and we wanted to make, you know, an early bet on where we actually, you know, build out infrastructure as it relates to agents.

And so just a month ago, we shipped a product on, you know, the merchant side called agent pay, which allows a merchant to, like, accept payments from agents coming via, you know, the various protocols that exist today. And so say you're an API business and you want to accept payment from AI agents across, right, the now many growing number of these protocols, And and and you'll you have to build the integration yourself. You would have to maintain the upgrades as they happen, you know, and as as the spec evolves.

And then you have to do that work, you know, all over again for for the next one. So the payment protocols are x four zero two, MPP, ACP, UCP, AP two. I mean, I I can go on and on. And so, you know, what we wanted to accomplish with with agent pay was, look, there there are some businesses, right, that literally want to sell to agents. They see some very early flow.

They believe that agents will be a, you know, a primary buyer of their services, and they believe they can, you know, generate significant revenue in the years to come. And so they wanna be sure that they are, you know, building for that now. And, you know, the businesses adopting it range really from established, I would say, crypto native or digital native API companies today to solo builders. Right?

And here's something I wanna, like, really highlight and spend a little bit of time on, and it's these solar builders because they are not traditional developers. Right? They are people who can now build because AI has put the skills within their reach. You know, in one of my conversations, like, one of these solar builders tried to write his own, like, x $4.00 2 integration to to accept, you know, Stablecoin as payment for his, you know, premium content services to agents.

And he said it felt like being on a spacewalk. Right? But despite that, he was able to actually do it. And and but he came to a you know, to to use a product agent pay specifically to make, you know, the payment infrastructure build and maintenance, like, ongoing disappear. And so, like, again, very, very early. I think we definitely need to keep our eyes on this, like, solo builder. In terms of, like, what they're actually building, you know, the two categories, like, again, very, very early.

So not of, like, any statistical significance, but, like, the two categories that we're seeing today, it's like the the creative media generation tools. Mhmm. It's pulling, like, news via web search, paying for premium one off article content, you know, generating a script for, like you know, through through a model, producing a video, right, with a gen a media generation tool. And then, you know, the second is, like, trading. Right? Trading and and financial.

And so, again, super early. So fun how we're like it feels like we're right in the middle of both of those things, which is kinda fun. I would love to talk more about this specifically. I actually think we could be an interesting test beta user for this, maybe, because of some of those creative things we're thinking through. We are yeah. I think as a media business, a creative business, this sounds very up our alley for how we're trying to you know, we don't believe similar to payments and transactions.

Personally, I don't believe that in five or ten years with StableDash content, I think that the majority of who will be reviewing a conversation like this will be more agents than humans. Actually Yeah. Wanting the insights from this conversation that we're having right now. So we're trying to think through that. So Yeah. Really cool stuff. And I'll just say, like, the use case really to call out here is micropayments.

Right? Yep. It's one of the original promises of the Internet that you could actually pay, like, pay for small amounts for things. Right? Like pennies, right, for an article or for an API call. And it never really worked because, one, you know, if you're a merchant, right, just the card fees are always bigger than the thing that you're trying to sell. Right? Like, a flat 30¢ card transaction fee plus 2.9%, like, on a 5¢ transaction doesn't make any sense.

And then two, like, humans don't like deciding on transactions. Like, we we get decision fatigue. Yeah. And that's why we defaulted to, like, bundling and subscriptions

and ads and things like that. Love it. Excited to let's let's let's follow-up on this note. Yeah. That pause there was we have more questions,

but we also know what time it was. So we're actually going to be launching a segment that's more specifically focused on agentic payments. So we'd we would love to have you back on the show in the future, and this would I think for this segment, we're gonna probably do hour long conversations because we always reach this point where it's like, okay. We've kinda sifted through where we're at, what we're building now. Let's go deep. Think it's great to press pause sometimes.

So the next time we can jump right back into it. Quick plug on what Zach is talking about. Agent hour, we're gonna be launching this soon somewhere between AI and Stablecoins.

We're actively fielding new guest applications for this now. Chihi, maybe we can have you back on this. That could be fun to go deeper into this during that part of the program. I think we're gonna be launching this in a couple weeks, so we'll follow back up with you on that. We also might have some fun, like, in person activations around that too, like dinners and stuff with other leaders in the space. So we'd love to loop you in there. So thank you so much. Yeah. We'll be in touch. Thanks for hopping on.