San Francisco, CA – Crypto has a behavior of declaring the long run early. In latest months, that intuition has fixated on autonomous AI brokers, self-driving wallets and buying and selling methods that may transfer capital with out human oversight.
At NEARCON 2026, Dragonfly’s Haseeb Qureshi and Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi delivered a pointy debate over how quickly these brokers might be trusted with actual cash.
The core disagreement wasn’t about whether or not brokers will finally handle capital; each imagine they are going to, however about timing and danger tolerance.
“One thing that works with cash 90% of the time is unusable for precise financial exercise,” Qureshi stated. Even 95% reliability, he argued, isn’t enough. “It’s lots of nothing, nothing, nothing… then one thing, after which every thing. And proper now, we’re nonetheless within the nothing part.”
Qureshi advised the trade could also be overstating how prepared the expertise is. He cautioned in opposition to extrapolating from viral demos on social media, pointing to examples of autonomous methods malfunctioning. “You need to be very cautious of making an attempt to ingest your worldview of expertise by studying Twitter hype individuals and watching Twitter demos,” he stated.
For Qureshi, spectacular demonstrations are usually not the identical as methods strong sufficient to handle significant capital. For main client platforms, he added bluntly, “You can’t do this sh**.”
Sethi, against this, argued the tempo of enchancment is exponential, and already reshaping monetary infrastructure. “We expect we all know what’s going to occur,” he stated. “The velocity and the extent of innovation… is exponential.” Kraken, he famous, is already constructing agent-like capabilities for patrons “weeks and months away — not years away.”
The place Qureshi sees a steep reliability threshold earlier than widespread deployment, Sethi sees fast iteration narrowing the hole. “The assault floor grows as a lot because the safety floor grows,” he stated, suggesting defensive capabilities will scale alongside danger.
The controversy crystallized throughout a rapid-fire spherical. Requested what share of his personal portfolio an AI might handle higher at this time, Qureshi answered cautiously: “5 p.c.”
Sethi’s response: “100.”
Pressed additional on if he would put all of his crypto into an autonomous agent inside a 12 months, Sethi didn’t hesitate.
“All the things,” he stated. “Within the subsequent six to 12 months.”
The alternate underscored a broader break up rising in crypto: whether or not autonomous finance is a near-term inevitability or nonetheless a frontier experiment, and the way a lot danger the trade is prepared to tolerate find out.
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