MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — Crypto wallets are being rebuilt for AI agents, said executives from Trust Wallet and Mesh on Thursday, with companies racing to give autonomous software a way to hold value, prove identity and transact on-chain.
Appearing at CoinDesk Miami, Arjun Mukherjee, chief technology officer at Mesh, said the shift is driven by what he called the cold-start problem for AI agents.
“An agent can’t do anything until it has a wallet funded,” he said. “It’s very difficult for the agent to act until it has a wallet to do something, and it has value to transact with. And suddenly, enter crypto. Crypto has found its kind of niche, its killer app.”
Mesh, which builds a connectivity layer across exchanges, wallets, smart contracts and decentralized exchanges, has launched a product called Smart Funding that routes payments across chains, networks, accounts and tokens for both human and agent users.
Felix Fan, CEO of Trust Wallet, said the company is taking a deliberately bifurcated approach to agent integration. On its consumer crypto app, where users hold the keys, agents act as a copilot to simplify navigation and reduce friction without taking custodial control.
“Users always hold the keys and all these permissions. Every single step, they need to give consent,” Fan said. The agent’s role on the consumer side is to “speed up the process and also help them to better understand how to navigate on-chain.”
On the developer side, Trust Wallet has taken a more aggressive posture. The company recently launched an agent kit that lets agents autonomously make trades, transfers and other on-chain actions, and it is implementing EIP-8004, an Ethereum proposal that provides agents with on-chain identity and credit-style scores.
“On the crypto app side, we’re enabling humans to have superpowers with AI, whereas on the developer side, we are enabling agents to do something like humans,” Fan said.
On where liability sits, Mukherjee said Mesh is wary of importing traditional finance’s friction into agent payments.
“AI should augment human judgment, not replace human responsibility or accountability,” he said, adding that responsibility for an agent’s actions sits with the institution that deploys it.
Both panelists said they expect AI labs to launch their own wallets. X has already been vocal about X Money, Fan noted, and “Grok will very likely have a wallet within.”
“Claude and all these players, they can run on-chain maybe just tomorrow,” Fan said. “So we are open for that challenge.”
Mukherjee said Mesh’s strategy is to remain agnostic across wallets, networks and tokens.
“If there’s Web3-based e-commerce on any network, on any token, and any connected funds, we all win,” he said.