the more I think about AI and this recent $ZEC exploit and the aftermath, the more I think AI is bearish for crypto not only are AI companies a blackhole for liquidity but this $ZEC event clearly shows that between the two sectors, one is basically worthless and entirely dependent on the other not only did AI discover an exploit that was missed by "top security researchers and cryptographers" around the world for years AI is also being proposed as the solution moving forward to create a "failproof" design that humans are not capable of doing due to the time constraints this clearly demonstrates that crypto will heavily depend on AI moving forward much like most of the software world while crypto has very little to offer the AI industry the thesis of "agentic payments" relying on crypto sounds just like how gaming was supposed to jump on crypto rails in the past both are essentially nothing but wishful thinking and fairy tales, they have the same issues related to oversight/control which is why gaming over crypto rails was never adopted I honestly don't see the case to be made for why agents will use blockchains for payments or much of anything, why they will need immutable decentralized networks if anything I believe it will be the other way around, we humans will need AI to transact on centralized controlled environments so that there can be a control/oversight layer on top of what agents do if u think about it from this POV, it makes much more sense that agents are not allowed on blockchains to transact freely at their discretion there are much more negatives than positives, such as erroneous txs that can not be reversed it's very hard to see how anyone can have confidence in any defi protocol at the moment regardless of how much human engineers improve their security the permissionless nature of decentralized network along with the growing reliance on AI for development and security research is a net negative for the entire defi landscape and the risks have already materialized with the never-ending list of exploits/hacks we've seen occur this year it also makes a strong case for centralization and fail-switches that are human-controlled and maintained as a defensive mechanism against AI attacks the main benefit remaining for a blockchain is the transparency and openness of its data, being permissionless and decentralized is no longer something the market values highly and if anything it has become a negative with the advances in AI tldr;; "agentic payments" and everything related will be worthless in the future and never adopted agents will run on highly centralized/controlled environments with human oversight