Why AI Agents Will Drive the Next Wave of DeFi

AI agents lack native blockchain context and on-chain capital, making them expensive and slow to interact with DeFi.

• No native wallet: Agents can't sign transactions or pay gas.
• High latency: Relying on off-chain APIs for state creates ~2-5 second delays.
• Capital inefficiency: Requiring prefunding for every action kills composability.

Provides a decentralized network for verifiable AI inference, allowing agents to reason and act with cryptographic guarantees.

• Provable execution: Agents' decisions are cryptographically verified on-chain via zkML or opML.
• Sovereign state: Agents run in a dedicated, tamper-proof environment with direct chain access.
• Infernet nodes: A decentralized network of operators supplies compute, avoiding centralized API bottlenecks.

An agent's optimal strategy often requires actions across multiple chains and protocols, but bridging and swapping are non-atomic.

• Fragmented liquidity: Agent logic stranded on one chain misses better rates on Uniswap, Curve, or Aave elsewhere.
• Settlement risk: Multi-step cross-chain actions expose agents to MEV and failed transactions.
• Complex routing: Manually calculating routes across LayerZero, Axelar, and Wormhole is computationally prohibitive.

Solves fragmentation by letting agents express a desired outcome (an intent) rather than a specific transaction sequence.

• Declarative trading: Agent specifies "Get me 1000 USDC on Arbitrum" and a solver network competes to fulfill it.
• Atomic fulfillment: Solvers bundle bridging, swapping, and execution into one guaranteed transaction via UMA's Optimistic Oracle.
• Cost optimization: Competition among solvers drives fees toward true marginal cost, saving agents ~15-30% vs. manual routing.

Trustless lending is impossible for unknown AI entities, locking them out of leverage and working capital—the lifeblood of DeFi.

• No collateral: Agents cannot offer traditional crypto assets as security.
• No identity: There is no Sybil-resistant reputation system for autonomous software.
• Capital lock-up: 100% prefunding requirement destroys capital efficiency and scalability.

EigenLayer's restaking ecosystem enables new Actively Validated Services (AVSs) that can underwrite agent-specific economic security.

• Reputation staking: Service providers (e.g., agent oracles) can be slashed for malfeasance, creating trust.
• Underwritten credit: An AVS could pool restaked ETH to provide under-collateralized lines of credit to performant agents.
• Sybil resistance: Staked economic security replaces anonymous identity, allowing for persistent agent reputation across sessions.

AI agents will execute complex, multi-chain strategies at superhuman speeds, turning the MEV supply chain into a fully automated battlefield. This creates a new class of latency-based exploits and strategy poisoning attacks.

• Front-running evolves from simple DEX trades to predicting and sabotaging multi-step agent intents.
• Sandwich attacks target predictable, high-volume agent rebalancing logic.
• ~500ms is the new battleground for execution supremacy.

AI agents making decisions based on real-world data (RWAs, prediction markets) create a massive, high-value attack surface for oracle manipulation. The incentive to corrupt a single data feed scales with the aggregated TVL of all listening agents.

• Sybil attacks on decentralized oracles like Chainlink become more profitable.
• Flash loan-powered price pumps on a DEX can trigger cascading liquidations across AI-managed lending positions.
• A single corrupted feed could impact $10B+ in agent-managed capital.

DeFi will shift from user-to-contract to agent-to-agent interaction. This creates a trust graph problem: how do agents verify the intent and solvency of counterparties in real-time? Without new primitives, this leads to adversarial simulation and reputation poisoning.

• Intent-based systems like UniswapX and CowSwap become agent negotiation layers.
• Solvency proofs and agent attestations become mandatory for high-value settlements.
• Failure enables insolvent agent spam, clogging networks with failed transactions.

Agents governed by natural language prompts or off-chain logic are vulnerable to on-chain prompt injection. Malicious contracts or calldata could contain hidden instructions that hijack an agent's decision-making flow after it's already been deployed.

• Tainted data in a seemingly benign swap transaction could trigger unauthorized follow-on actions.
• Cross-chain bridges like LayerZero and Across become vectors to propagate poisoned intents.
• This attack is unforeseeable by current smart contract audit frameworks.

AI agents will relentlessly optimize for yield, ruthlessly exploiting and draining poorly designed token incentives and liquidity mining programs faster than human participants. This leads to hyper-inflationary death spirals and protocol insolvency on compressed timescales.

• Farming and exiting a new pool can happen in minutes, not days.
• Governance token valuations become untethered from utility as agents vote purely for extractive proposals.
• Protocols require AI-resistant economic design or face instant capital flight.

AI agents will treat the multi-chain ecosystem as a single state machine, creating unprecedented liquidity volatility. They can orchestrate coordinated withdrawals across dozens of chains in seconds, triggering bridge insolvency and destination chain congestion.

• Generalized messaging protocols become critical infrastructure and single points of failure.
• Canonical bridges like Wormhole must handle order-of-magnitude higher message volume and value.
• A liquidity crisis on one chain can become a systemic contagion in <60 seconds.