When AI Starts Spending Our Money, How Do We Solve the Trust Problem?

In early 2026, daily active AI agents on-chain reached 250,000, up more than 400% year over year.

These agents are no longer just chatbots. They are actually trading, arbitraging, managing funds, and hiring other agents to complete tasks. In 2025, AI agents generated $31 billion in DEX trading volume, accounting for about 2% of all DEX trading volume. Among DeFi protocols newly launched in Q1 2026, 68% include at least one autonomous AI agent.

But a core contradiction follows: AI makes execution at scale extremely cheap, but cheap does not mean trustworthy. The execution process is like a black box, and it is hard for users to verify whether an agent acts as promised.

The role of blockchain is to provide verifiable state changes, auditable records, and coordination mechanisms that do not require trusting a third party. In other words, AI solves “how to do it,” while blockchain solves “why should we trust it.” Only by combining the two can a real agent economy emerge.