AI agents are now handling a growing range of tasks once reserved for crypto developers, market analysts, and financial engineers.
Natural-language AI agents are launching tokens and executing smart contracts autonomously, enabling non-coders to deploy on-chain strategies with thousands of transactions already executed. AI wallet agents let users trade, stake, and manage crypto by chat, eliminating seed phrases and driving global adoption through passkey-based access. Game-derived AI agents are powering real-time DeFi strategies across chains, with autonomous execution of swaps, staking, and rebalancing driven entirely by in-game logic and player intent.
Given these examples and others like them, the advantages of AI are clear. But as these systems become more autonomous, they also introduce new challenges for blockchain infrastructure, particularly at the wallet layer.
The reason? Most crypto wallet infrastructure wasn’t designed with autonomous agents in mind. Agentic AI’s ability to act quickly, intelligently, and without direct user input raises new questions around security, control, and execution.
Today’s builders must choose wallet infrastructure that meets this shift in capability. This article offers insights on how to do that.
The evolution of crypto wallets
When Bitcoin launched in 2009, wallets served a single purpose: to store private keys and enable basic transactions. They functioned like digital safes, proving ownership and authorizing transfers. This minimal design worked well in a system where users manually initiated each action.
Over time, though, expectations changed. As crypto applications became more sophisticated, wallets absorbed new features like staking, swapping, and cross-chain bridging, but these were layered atop the same basic model, a secure key vault waiting for user input.
Today, that model is being tested. The rise of autonomous AI agents, systems capable of initiating and executing transactions without human input, introduces entirely new demands.
These agents operate quickly, continuously, and independently. And while they aren’t wallets themselves, they rely on wallet infrastructure to act onchain, specifically at the signing layer, where every transaction must be authorized and validated.
Wallet infrastructure now needs to support not only secure key storage, but also the logic and safeguards required for these AI agent’s autonomous execution. Unfortunately, many wallet providers are not yet keeping up.
Designing wallet architecture for autonomous AI agents
Building wallets that can safely support AI agents requires a shift from traditional user-centric models to systems that account for their autonomy and speed.
The goal now isn’t just securing private keys. It’s governing how, when, and under what conditions those keys are used.
Here are the architectural principles shaping this new class of wallets:
Wallets must enforce transaction policies at the signing layer. These include rate limits, asset whitelists, geofencing, role-based permissions, and conditional logic that determines whether an agent can sign or submit a transaction, all enforced without requiring human intervention.
Rather than permanently delegating signing authority, wallets should support ephemeral signing sessions. These sessions allow agents to execute predefined actions over short windows, reducing long-term exposure if credentials are compromised or behaviors change.
To validate agent logic and enforce execution boundaries, wallets should integrate with trusted execution environments (TEEs) or similar secure enclaves. These allow policies and signing operations to run in isolated, tamper-resistant environments, critical when decisions are machine-driven.
Every action initiated by an agent and authorized by a wallet should be transparently logged. Deterministic audit trails and metadata tagging allow developers and regulators to reconstruct and verify agent behavior over time, building trust in systems that are increasingly automated.
These architectural choices mark a shift in wallet infrastructure, from passive to programmable, and from user-driven to agent-aware. In doing so, they lay the groundwork for secure, autonomous interaction across the crypto ecosystem.
Security protocols and the expanding attack surface
When wallets act on behalf of humans, security is about access control, protecting keys and authenticating users. But when wallets begin acting on behalf of autonomous agents, the core security question changes. It’s no longer just who has access, but what decisions are being made and why.
AI agents introduce a faster, more unpredictable threat model. Their decisions are shaped not by passwords or signatures, but by data, some of it unverified, adversarial, or incomplete. They can be manipulated subtly, not by breaking in, but by shaping the inputs they rely on. A malicious price feed, a corrupted prompt, a forged onchain signal all become vectors of influence.
This creates new design tensions. How do you build a wallet that moves fast enough for agents to operate autonomously, but cautious enough to resist invisible manipulation? How do you let agents execute without friction, while still surfacing enough context for meaningful oversight?
The role of wallet security in this new paradigm isn’t to eliminate risk entirely, but to make risk observable, bounded, and recoverable.
That’s why wallets that have granular policy controls and secure, auditable sessions are so important. They don’t just limit what an agent can do. They define how it can act, under what conditions, and with what visibility.
These controls create an environment where intelligent agents can operate freely, but never opaquely, where autonomy is permitted, but always bounded by clear, verifiable rules. In an ecosystem driven by machine logic, the wallet becomes both a security checkpoint and the final layer of human intent.
Redefining trust and verification in AI-powered wallets
Trust has always been the foundation of wallet adoption. Users don’t inspect cryptographic algorithms, they rely on the guarantees those algorithms provide. But as AI agents begin to drive transaction logic, the trust model shifts.
It’s no longer enough for a wallet to prove that a transaction was signed securely. It must also justify why that transaction was initiated in the first place. That’s a harder problem.
AI agents operate in probabilistic spaces. They weigh inputs, calculate likelihoods, and produce outputs that may vary. This creates a verification gap: users and developers can see what the agent did, but not always why. And in high-speed environments like DeFi or gaming, post-hoc explanations aren’t enough. By the time you notice something’s off, the damage may be done.
To rebuild confidence, wallets must move beyond silent execution toward transparent autonomy. That means designing systems that don’t just act, but show their work. In the same way, AI agents should expose rationale, not just results.
Even highly capable agents should operate within bounded trust zones, defined by policy, permission, or context. Verification then becomes less about analyzing each action, and more about ensuring that actions stay within a known, auditable range.
This could in the future open the door for new forms of collaborative control. Agents could submit proposed transactions with embedded reasoning. Wallets could simulate outcomes and require approvals for actions outside policy norms. Users could review agent behavior over time, building confidence not just in the outputs, but in the decision-making process itself.
In this world, trust becomes composable. It’s built from transparent models, observable logic, and clear boundaries. And it turns the wallet into more than a signer, it becomes a real-time interpreter of intent.
When agents act, wallets must decide
Crypto wallets have always been central to Web3. But with the rise of autonomous AI agents, their role is fundamentally changing. No longer just containers for private keys, wallets are evolving into execution platforms, governing how, when, and why transactions occur.
This shift introduces powerful new capabilities, but autonomy comes with complexity.
As agents make decisions based on dynamic inputs, wallet infrastructure must adapt. It needs to support not just programmable controls, but intent verification, contextual awareness, and new trust models.
Traditional security measures fall short in a world where agents act independently, and where the line between user action and agent behavior begins to blur. This evolution necessitates a rethinking of everything from key access and session control to explainability and policy enforcement. And it’s happening fast.
Bryce Ferguson is the co-founder and CEO of Turnkey, a crypto wallet infrastructure company recognized as one of the 2025 CNBC World’s Top Fintech Companies.
