‍Mintlayer Voices #2 with Jean-Marc Griffith

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems have become more autonomous, connected and capable of performing real economic tasks. A question that once seemed like science fiction just a few years ago, has now become a reality: how will machines transact with each other when humans aren't part of the loop?

If you take a look at traditional payment systems, they weren't built for such a high level of autonomy; they're slow, permissioned and oftentimes geographically restricted. The average bank needs business days to transact cross-border wires, which costs money and takes up time. Such a system doesn't work in a world where AI agents operate globally, making decisions in milliseconds, or they need to pay for resources or services on demand. 

This is where the use of cryptocurrency starts to make a lot of sense, no longer as speculation or a store of value, but rather as the natural financial layer for an AI-driven world.

What we are watching is the early stages of a new kind of economy, one where machines earn, spend, negotiate, and optimize value with minimal human involvement.

Why AI Needs a Native Digital Currency

AI systems operate globally, making decisions faster than we can. They never sleep and interact with other systems, AI agents, and networks to get things done.

Now imagine an AI system capable of such speed and efficiency, using a bank account with centralized approvals slowing everything down. Cross-border payments via banks are expensive, complicated, and banks can't authenticate or trust an AI agent the way they can a person or a corporation. The idea of processing thousands of tiny transactions every hour? Legacy financial rails just weren't designed for that.

Cryptocurrencies can solve these problems in ways that feel obvious once you see them. Transactions get verified in a decentralized way, so there's no gatekeeper deciding whether the AI is "allowed" to spend. Settlement happens instantly or near-instantly, not in “three business days” anymore. Anyone, anywhere, including an AI agent, can access the system without needing permission. Tools such as smart contracts make payments programmable, so the AI agent doesn't need to ask a bank to execute logic, creating an entire system that is natively compatible with code-based agents.

For example, if you're an AI that needs to buy cloud compute, sell data, pay for API access, or reward another agent for completing a task, crypto becomes the seamless medium of exchange that just works.

This is where infrastructures like Mintlayer become relevant. Mintlayer is building a blockchain system that supports this kind of machine-to-machine economy in practical ways. Their atomic swap technology enables decentralized, peer-to-peer trades across chains, including native Bitcoin interoperability without the need for wrapped assets or custodians. For AI agents that need trustless, censorship-resistant transactions, atomic swaps provide a way to move value directly between parties with no intermediary risk. And for use cases that require speed, Mintlayer's ZK Thunder Layer 3 offers one-second settlement times, making it viable for high-frequency microtransactions between agents. Whether it's a slow, secure Bitcoin swap or a rapid micropayment for compute resources, the infrastructure is starting to exist.

Autonomous Agents and Machine to Machine Commerce

We're entering an era where AI agents won't just assist us but will operate independently in ways that look a lot like economic participation.

Imagine an AI that buys its own computing resources when it needs more power, pays for real-time data feeds to improve its predictions, or gets paid for generating insights and then uses that income to fund its own development. These aren't hypotheticals—we're starting to see early versions of this behavior already.

By using crypto, these agents are able to operate without being tied to any single institution or jurisdiction. They can maintain their own wallets, manage a budget, and negotiate pricing based on market conditions.

AI Drones Paying for Weather Data: A delivery drone could autonomously purchase real-time weather updates from a data oracle to optimize its flight path through a smart contract, payment, allowing it better routing and all without human involvement.

AI Trading Bots Exchanging Value 24/7: Bots are already trading with each other, but imagine them trading not just tokens but compute power, proprietary data sets, or access to trained models, all peer-to-peer, automated, and settled in crypto.

Distributed AI Networks Funding Themselves: What if a decentralized AI collective could fund its own upgrades by earning revenue from services it provides, automatically paying contributors who improve the system, and purchasing the training resources it needs—just code and incentives, no CEO or board meetings required?

Crypto makes all of this possible in ways that fiat currencies simply can't match.

Privacy, Security, and Verifiable Actions

One thing we haven't talked about enough is the level of trust when using AI and Machines. If machines are going to participate in the economy autonomously, we need to know they're not manipulating their own accounting or hiding transactions.

Blockchain solves this in an elegant way because every transaction is logged immutably. The financial trail is auditable, but you don't have to reveal sensitive data to verify it and because the ledger is decentralized, we can be confident that the machine didn't tamper with its own records.

This becomes critical when autonomous agents are managing budgets or making financial decisions without human oversight, because transparency isn't optional anymore it’s a requirement.

Crypto as the Financial Incentive Layer for AI Networks

AI doesn't just need compute and code; it needs data, and lots of it, including human feedback in order to become better. Crypto thereby creates the incentive structures that make these ecosystems work.

Data Providers can be paid instantly in tokens for contributing high-quality datasets, with no invoicing or payment processing delays.

Compute Markets let AI models rent GPU or TPU resources from decentralized networks like Render or Akash, paying for what they need and stopping when they're done, allowing the market to clear itself.

Human Feedback Loops allow people who are training AIs (labeling images, moderating outputs, fine-tuning models) to get paid automatically and instantly, turning AI training into a viable income stream for anyone willing to contribute.

This token-driven model creates self-sustaining ecosystems where the AI improves because people are incentivized to help it, people participate because they're compensated fairly, and the whole thing runs without needing a company in the middle taking a cut.

Challenges and Risks

It would be a lie if we thought this was all upside. The convergence of AI and crypto comes with real challenges that we're only just starting to wrestle with:

Regulatory uncertainty around autonomous machine payments raises questions about who's responsible when an AI agent spends money and what laws apply.

Security concerns emerge if an AI agent gets hacked and someone gains access to its wallet, where the damage could be instant and irreversible.

Ethical questions about machines participating in the economy independently lead us to ask whether they should be allowed to and what happens to human jobs.

Scalability and energy issues depend on which blockchain gets used, since not all chains can handle the transaction volume it would require and Proof-of-Work blockchains consume huge amounts of energy to run.

Ownership and liability questions persist: if an AI makes a bad financial decision that affects a human individual, who's accountable (the developer, the user, or the AI itself)?

We're going to need new governance frameworks and will have to define what machine rights, responsibilities, and liabilities actually mean in the law. This isn't just a technical problem but a legal, ethical, and social one.

The Long Term Vision: A Fully Autonomous Economy

If we push this forward a few decades, the possibilities for this new technology gets wild (I'd dare say by multitudes of what the internet currently offers us).

We might see AI DAOs (fully autonomous organizations run entirely by artificial intelligence with no human management), machines hiring other machines for specialized tasks and paying them in crypto while coordinating work across global networks, and supply chains becoming autonomous with machines negotiating logistics, costs, and delivery in real time based on demand signals. AI agents might even start building, funding, and improving other AIs, creating a kind of recursive innovation loop.

All of it would run on cryptocurrency as the universal settlement layer.

The implications go way beyond technology: we're talking about changes to economics, governance, ethics, and the basic structure of human society, including how we work, how we're compensated, and what it means to "participate" in an economy.

Conclusion

As AI systems move from being passive tools to active economic agents, the need for fast, borderless, programmable money is only going to grow, and crypto provides that foundation.

This convergence isn't just about making things more efficient but about unlocking an entirely new economic paradigm, one where machines and humans coexist in a shared financial ecosystem, each contributing value in ways we couldn't have imagined a decade ago.

If the internet digitized information and crypto digitized value, then AI is digitizing participation itself. We're building an economy that operates at the speed and scale of intelligence, not just human intelligence but machine intelligence working alongside us.

The infrastructure is being built right now. The question isn't whether this will happen but how fast, and whether we're ready for it.

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About Mintlayer Voices

A special thank you to Jean-Marc Griffith for writing Mintlayer Voices #2, one of our most active and dedicated community members. Jean-Marc consistently helps answer questions across our channels and supports the network as a node operator.

Mintlayer Voices is our new series for community perspectives. We publish opinion pieces and timely analyses from builders, researchers, and curious minds across Bitcoin, DeFi, finance, regulation, and emerging tech. The goal is simple: bring more smart voices into the conversation and showcase them across our site and social channels. Writers may remain anonymous using a handle, or include a short bio.

Want to write the next installment? We’re accepting a limited number of guest contributors. Selected pieces will be featured on our blog, X, Telegram and amplified across all our communities to more than 100,000 followers across all channels.

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