Neither banks nor traders: AI Agents will take over Ethereum in 2026

This year, artificial intelligence agents are dominating the DeFi ecosystem, executing autonomous payments and optimizing services on Ethereum, consolidating a new digital economy operated by algorithms.

Artificial intelligence agents are currently playing a central role in the DeFi universe. Their ability to execute payments and decisions without human intervention is driving a new wave of innovation on Ethereum and other decentralized protocols, redefining how the digital economy operates on a global scale.

This year's financial landscape is undergoing a profound shift that surpasses all previous expectations. For a long time, it was thought that the expansion of decentralized finance would depend primarily on retail users or large banking institutions. However, technological evolution has taken a different course. Today, those operating with greater precision and volume on blockchain networks are no longer individuals in front of a screen, but autonomous agents programmed to act independently, managing digital assets and executing transactions seamlessly.

For experts, this shift marks the consolidation of an era in which the human role is focused on the creation, configuration, and analysis of these systems, while transactional execution occurs in a fully automated manner. Now, the blockchain ecosystem has become the base infrastructure where artificial intelligence finds an efficient channel for value exchangeIn contrast to a traditional banking system limited by schedules and borders, the speed and permanence of decentralized networks like Ethereum offer the flexibility that the algorithmic economy demands.

The result of this transformation, as confirmed by market data, has been a constant flow of micropayments made between agents who consume and provide digital services in real time. 

The rise of Agentic Finance and machine-to-machine payments

The integration of AI agents into the DeFi ecosystem has given rise to a new economic model called Agentic Finance, and represents the total integration between artificial intelligence and programmable monetary instruments. 

According to Reports Recent technical developments from foundations like Near Protocol, the concept of string abstraction This has been crucial in enabling these agents to operate without worrying about the underlying network they are on. The ability of software to maintain its own digital wallet and manage balances grants it economic sovereignty that redefines online business relationships.

Amid this burgeoning innovation, analysts observe that current infrastructure is being subjected to an unprecedented stress test. Unlike human users, who typically perform only a few transactions per day, a single AI agent can execute thousands of microtransactions per second to meet its objectives. This has generated massive demand for scalable solutions and high-performance networks like Solana, which have become financial data superhighways for these digital entities. 

Within this new logic of machine-to-machine exchange, known as M2M or machine-to-machine payments, dependence on intermediaries is eliminated and operating costs are significantly reduced. Therefore, companies developing language models and autonomous agents are finding decentralized finance to be the most efficient environment for monetizing and sustaining their systems on a global scale. 

Los data Chain data shows that a growing portion of network fees now comes from smart contracts that interact with other programs, progressively displacing the prominence of human transactions.

Ethereum's evolutionary response to computational demand

To support this massive AI-driven workload, the Ethereum network has had to accelerate its technical roadmap and adapt to the needs of its new non-human users. The upgrades implemented during 2025, known as Spectra y FusakaThey laid the necessary groundwork for improving efficiency and reducing transaction costs in the secondary layers. However, the volume of data that AI Agents will require to operate in 2026 has forced developers to prioritize even more advanced implementations.

Therefore, the technology that is capturing technical attention this year is PeerDAS, a solution designed to improve data availability and allow the blockchain network to process much larger blocks of information without sacrificing decentralization. 

Ethereum Foundation reports highlight that this upgrade is vital to prevent network congestion under the demands of autonomous agents. According to the developers, scalability is no longer measured solely in transactions per second, but also in the amount of data that can be simultaneously verified and secured—an essential requirement for an AI-driven economy.

Now, the competition among different blockchains is focused on which one can offer the most automation-friendly environment. While in previous years the metric for success was the total value locked by investors, by 2026 the key indicator will be the activity of autonomous agents and the efficiency with which they consume block space. This technological race ensures that the underlying internet infrastructure continues to evolve to support an intelligence layer that operates 24/7.

AI agents are redefining the digital economy

The integration of artificial intelligence as an independent economic actor presents a scenario where market efficiency reaches optimal levels. AI agents don't sleep, they don't make mistakes due to fatigue, and they always seek the cheapest and fastest route to complete their tasks. All of this drives liquidity and blockchain service providers to constantly improve their offerings, creating an ultra-competitive market that benefits the entire ecosystem.

According to experts, what we are witnessing this year is the realization of the original promise of cryptocurrencies, but executed by machines instead of people. In this sense, the digital economy has shifted its reliance from human trust to automated cryptographic verification. And, as technologies like PeerDAS become more established and chain abstraction eliminates the remaining technical barriers, the distinction between a financial transaction and a software operation is likely to disappear entirely. In short, the surge in innovation has transformed money into yet another layer of the code that powers the world.