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In 2025, crypto finance made a quiet, decisive turn toward autonomy. What used to be fragmented “tools” and bolted-on bots began to resemble a new operational layer. These systems continuously monitor, decide, and execute, with people moving upstream in monitoring and intent.
Summary
- 2025 marked crypto’s shift from tools to autonomous infrastructure: AI-driven systems now continuously monitor, decide, and execute, with humans moving upstream to oversight and intent.
- Repeatability, not intuition, is the real benefit: automated execution reduces emotional errors, enforces risk discipline, and fits 24/7 markets where people are structurally disadvantaged.
- By 2026, autonomy will become the default interface: AI agents will quietly manage portfolios within TradFi and DeFi, shifting human attention from reactive trading to goal setting, restrictions, and monitoring.
It’s crypto finance growing up: away from manual speculation as the default interface, and towards machine-guided execution as the foundation for how digital assets are managed, traded and deployed – especially in markets that never close.
Which came together in 2025
Two parallel developments made this shift possible. First, the technology has matured. AI and machine learning execution models became significantly more stable, auditable, and explainable. Tools once reserved for quantitative funds are now available to regular users. Secondly, policy has caught up.
In the EU, the second part of the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation – which covers crypto asset service providers and the wider digital asset offering – has been applicable since December 30, 2024. It has turned a patchwork of interpretations into a clearer boundary for services, responsibilities and supervision.
More importantly, regulators have indicated that they are less interested in whether an algorithm exists and more interested in whether it can be explained, monitored and controlled. That gave industry players the confidence to adopt automation rather than avoid it.
Why repeatability beats intuition
But regulatory clarity alone does not explain the shift. The deeper argument is behavioral.
If you spend long enough trading, you learn that the greatest benefit is not insight, but repeatability. The ability to do the same sensible thing at the same sensible time, without fatigue, without FOMO, without revenge trading, is rarer than any market thesis.
In fast markets, people are slow, emotional and limited in their bandwidth. Automated systems can take in more signals, respond faster and apply risk rules consistently – even when volatility arrives at 2am on a Sunday. The argument is not that people don’t matter. It’s that people shouldn’t have to do millisecond work with an attention span of minutes, especially in 24/7 crypto and FX.
The myth of retail has always been romantic: intuition, timing, the one perfect entry. The institutional reality is much less cinematic: processes, boundaries and ruthless adherence to rules while your nervous system begs you to do the opposite. If your system pre-commits to position sizing, stop logic, and diversification before the market becomes chaotic, you have separated the quality of decision-making from the adrenaline.
Autonomy is less of a superpower than a seatbelt: it doesn’t eliminate volatility, but it does reduce self-inflicted damage.
There’s a lazy version of this trend that deserves to die: the idea that autonomy means outsourcing responsibility. Good systems are not magic. They are monitored, paused when market conditions change dramatically, and adjusted when assets that normally move together suddenly stop moving. Any honest entrepreneur will tell you that past performance is never a guarantee. That’s not a disclaimer; it is the single most important design constraint for autonomous finance.
From 2025 to 2026: Agents will become the interface between TradFi, DeFi and everyday life
If 2025 was the year when autonomy became permissible, 2026 could be the year when autonomy became invisible.
Not because everyone is becoming a quantity, but because AI-driven workflows are spreading everywhere. Virtual agents are already here embedded in end-to-end processes within asset management, where enormous operational efficiency is at stake. Meanwhile, 80% of asset management organizations do this to expect AI should drive revenue growth, which is another way of saying that the incentives to automate are now structural and not trendy.
Crypto inherits that gravity and then accelerates it. Once you can navigate between locations, manage risk continuously, and connect execution to DeFi liquidity, payments, and everyday apps, “portfolio management” is no longer an episodic activity. It becomes an always-on operating system.
I expect a hockey stick effect as these agents mature. The most compelling argument for autonomy is not that it makes everyone rich. It’s because it reallocates human attention away from staring at the screen and reactively clicking, toward higher-value work like designing constraints, setting goals, and deciding when not to be in the market.
Autonomy becomes clear in two places
For institutions, this shift means operational efficiency. For individuals, the impact is more personal – and it manifests itself in two different places. Firstly, productivity and income. AI tools are already helping people launch products faster, create new revenue streams, and reclaim hours from their workdays. This is not about replacing human work. It’s about strengthening it.
Second: investing. AI-powered strategies can reduce emotional errors and provide access to execution quality that previously required a trading desk. Creating wealth starts to look less like timing the perfect trade and more like making disciplined systems do small, consistent work every day – while staying involved enough to remain the ultimate decision maker.
None of this is a promise of returns, and it shouldn’t be read that way. It’s an opinion about direction: crypto finance is moving from manual speculation to autonomous infrastructure.
Because in a 24/7 market, autonomy is not an unnecessary luxury. It is the only interface that is scalable.
