AI agents will become more relevant than humans on the internet within the next decade, a shift already already forcing Google, Facebook and Amazon to react, said Charles Hoskinson.
In his keynote at Consensus Miami 2026 on Wednesday, Hoskinson also said that “by 2035, the majority of searches, commerce and activity on the internet will be AI agents instead of people.”
He said the change threatens existing business models. “Amazon, Google, Facebook, they’re terrified of the agentic revolution,” Hoskinson said, adding that companies are investing heavily because “all of their business models are going to be disrupted.”
AI Agents do not click ads or have brand preferences, Hoskinson explained, saying this “threatens the advertising-driven models of platforms like Google, Amazon and Facebook.”
“Why do you think Google is interested in x402?” he asked his audience of the Coinbase-backed protocol that enables AI agents and applications to make direct, programmatic payments over the internet using stablecoins and crypto rails.
Hoskinson noted this shift will change how crypto is used, adding that artificial intelligence (AI) will increasingly handle tasks such as due diligence, transaction execution and interaction with decentralized finance.
Hoskinson AI agent forecast echoes that of Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who said “very soon there are going to be more AI agents than humans making transactions” and Binance Founder Changpeng Zhao, who predicted they “will make one million times more payments than humans.”
On the flipside, Hoskinson said AI agents are the “single best thing to ever happen to cryptocurrencies” because it simplifies user experience.
The Cardano founder warned crypto users against relying on intermediaries rather than maintaining direct control of their assets, which is the principle, he said, crypto was built on.
“You have to own your data. You have to own your identity. You have to own your money,” he said, adding that users are “outsourcing that to custodial wallets,” “permissioned networks,” and “third parties that they come to regret trusting when they get their account shut down.”
He also pointed to fragmentation across blockchain ecosystems as a barrier to progress, saying it has slowed down development. “There’s been 11 million tokens issued over the years. We have enough of them,” Hoskinson said. “What I want is cooperation. What I want is the mission to be achieved.”
User experience remains a key issue limiting user adoption, said Hoskinson, who described the current crypto onboarding processes as complex and prone to error. “That is the user experience in 2026,” he said. “Is this like a product you want to use?”
He said technologies such as account abstraction and chain abstraction could simplify how users interact with crypto systems, while maintaining control over assets and identity.
Hoskinson highlighted changing attitudes among financial institutions, noting that JPMorgan has moved from restricting crypto-related activity to developing blockchain-based products. “Back when we started JPMorgan was turning people’s bank accounts off and now they have a blockchain product,” he said.