San Francisco, CA – Crypto has a behavior of declaring the longer term early. In current months, that intuition has fixated on autonomous AI brokers, self-driving wallets and buying and selling techniques 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 may be trusted with actual cash.
The core disagreement wasn’t about whether or not brokers will ultimately handle capital; each imagine they’ll, 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 ample. “It’s plenty of nothing, nothing, nothing… then one thing, after which the whole lot. And proper now, we’re nonetheless within the nothing section.”
Qureshi instructed the business could also be overstating how prepared the know-how is. He cautioned in opposition to extrapolating from viral demos on social media, pointing to examples of autonomous techniques malfunctioning. “You wish to be very cautious of attempting to ingest your worldview of know-how by studying Twitter hype individuals and watching Twitter demos,” he stated.
For Qureshi, spectacular demonstrations should not the identical as techniques strong sufficient to handle significant capital. For main shopper platforms, he added bluntly, “You can not try this sh**.”
Sethi, in contrast, 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 purchasers “weeks and months away — not years away.”
The place Qureshi sees a steep reliability threshold earlier than widespread deployment, Sethi sees speedy 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 proportion of his personal portfolio an AI may handle higher at this time, Qureshi answered cautiously: “5 %.”
Sethi’s response: “100.”
Pressed additional on if he would put all of his crypto into an autonomous agent inside a yr, Sethi didn’t hesitate.
“Every thing,” he stated. “Within the subsequent six to 12 months.”
The trade underscored a broader cut 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 business is keen to tolerate find out.
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