AI agents, acting as independent economic entities, are accelerating the shift to decentralized finance (DeFi), making Ethereum the primary infrastructure for payments, lending, and capital management without human involvement.
AI-driven solutions capable of generating income and running businesses on their own are increasingly running into the limitations of the traditional financial system. Experts at Etherealize believe Ethereum will become their foundational infrastructure due to its leadership in the DeFi space.
A case in point is the autonomous AI agent Felix, which earned over $300,000 in just five weeks at the beginning of 2026 by managing several digital products and services, while maintaining monthly expenses of around $1,500.
These solutions can write code, launch websites, handle sales, and process customer requests without human involvement. However, they can’t open bank or brokerage accounts, which limits how they can use their earnings. Traditional finance still requires a human intermediary, whereas agents can operate freely with digital assets.
AI agents are already actively transacting. In the first nine months, the x402 protocol processed over 140 million agent-to-agent transactions totaling $43 million. About 20% of the protocol’s traffic comes from the Base blockchain, which already has nearly 16,000 verified agents and over 400,000 unique buyer addresses.
Most agent-driven transactions are micropayments. The average transfer between agents is just $0.31, making traditional payment systems inefficient — Visa’s fee alone is around $0.30. This dynamic is accelerating the shift toward crypto payments. However, payments are only the foundation. As AI agents evolve, they require more advanced financial tools for lending, capital management, and investment. This is where DeFi becomes essential.
For example, an agent can obtain a loan through the Aave protocol simply by posting collateral, without identity verification. Excess funds can be allocated to tokenized funds or liquidity pools. The volume of tokenized assets on Ethereum already surpassed $22.5 billion, accounting for about 72% of the market. Participants include BlackRock, JPMorgan, and Franklin Templeton.
Ethereum maintains its leadership in DeFi thanks to its scale and resilience. As of April 2026, the total value locked in its protocols exceeds $55 billion, nearly 10 times more than its closest competitors. Another key factor is network reliability. In over 10 years of operation, Ethereum hasn’t experienced downtime. This is critical for AI agents managing large amounts of capital, where disruptions could trigger liquidations.
While most transactions are conducted in stablecoins (up to 98.6% in USDC), all operations on the network require fees to be paid in ETH. ETH is also widely used as collateral, reducing its circulating supply as demand grows and strengthening the project’s tokenomics.
At the same time, several factors could influence Ethereum’s role as the backbone of the agent economy, including:
- the development of competing blockchains;
- adaptation by traditional financial service providers;
- the introduction of mechanisms that allow transaction fees without ETH.
However, for now, Ethereum retains its key advantages: liquidity, ecosystem maturity, and institutional support.
Experts note that as the number of AI agents grows from thousands to millions, they’ll account for a significant share of economic activity. Moreover, analysts believe the next million Ethereum users could very well be AI agents operating as independent economic actors.
In March 2026, the ERC-8183 standard was introduced for the Ethereum ecosystem. It formalizes conditional transactions between AI agents via smart contracts and implements a programmable escrow mechanism with automatic fund release or refund.
