The Rise of Agentic Protocols (APs) — the AI trade of 2025

Crypto x AI as of today cannot scale to mainstream adoption. Most are just prompt-based assistants that help you swap, bridge, or execute an onchain action via a conversational prompt, powered by an LLM.

Instead, I envision a future where Agentic Protocols (APs) thrive.

APs are the next natural evolution of Smart Contracts and maintain the DeFi ethos — onchain, verifiable, non-custodial, trustless, permissionless, and fully autonomous.

A world where agents are the protocol, and smart contracts are simply the tools they control, with barely any human input in the loop.

It’s not about replacing buttons with prompts to simplify crypto UX. It’s about agents doing the work for you, or working together with you — at your level.

Agentic Protocols are *performance-driven* (instead of just simplifying UX), and autonomously leverage existing DeFi infrastructure, such as:

• money markets to optimize yield and rebalance across protocols and chains

• perpetual DEXs to farm funding rates on trending tokens, creating customized models adapted to any market environment

• airdrop farms with sophisticated delta-neutral positioning

• trading platforms to execute based on mindshare, exotic social signals, and virality, not just TA indicators

• direct interaction with users on platforms like X, Reddit, or TikTok, enabling headless DeFi interfaces

• dynamic money management using adaptive frameworks that evolve based on how you and the agent interact together — optimizing for your collective behavior and returns over time — you and the agent as a system

I’m bullish on teams building toward this vision, whether at the infrastructure layer or with consumer-facing products.

DeFAI was a good start.

But Agentic Protocols, in my view, are the real wave of AI that will see the early adoption that DeFi saw in 2020.