[Recap] How Blockchain Infrastructure is Powering the AI Agent Economy

On September 9th, 2025, The Tie hosted an Innovator Series webinar exploring the convergence of artificial intelligence and blockchain technology from an institutional perspective, moderated by Sacha Ghebali, Chief Strategy Officer at The Tie. The panel featured Matt Kummell, SVP Institutional & Enterprise at NEAR Foundation; Stefano Bury, Head of the US at Virtuals Protocol; and Ben Snyder, Head of Marketing at Eliza Labs. The discussion centered on how blockchain infrastructure is enabling the emerging AI agent economy, which market research suggests could reach $50 billion by 2030, and examined the positioning strategies and technical innovations of three key infrastructure platforms.

Watch the full Webinar here:

The panelists emphasized a fundamental shift toward specialized AI agents rather than universal solutions. Ben explained that immediate applications focus on "finding the signal through the noise" through customized information filtering, while the future lies in "agents that are baked into their own tokenomics" for enhanced capital efficiency.

This specialization extends to multi-agent collaboration in institutional settings. Stefano outlined how hedge fund operations could deploy different agents across origination, risk assessment, and execution phases, representing maturation from early experimental approaches attempting single-agent solutions.

Infrastructure development has accelerated to support this ecosystem evolution. Matt highlighted NEAR's technical achievements, with blocks finishing in 600 milliseconds and targeting 200 milliseconds by year-end while scaling toward one million transactions per second. "AI obviously needs intelligence but beyond intelligence they need bandwidth," he noted.

Eliza Labs transitioned from experimental frameworks to practical applications with their V2 release. Ben described this as "more than just the next iteration of the framework. It's kind of the next stage of what we are trying to accomplish." The update includes improved CLI interfaces, graphical user interfaces for agent creation, and better plugin categorization to make agent development more accessible to non-technical users. 

Virtuals Protocol evolved from Web3 gaming origins to comprehensive AI agent infrastructure through their three-product approach covering tokenized agent launchpads, generalized frameworks, and agent commerce protocols.

These infrastructure improvements enable applications that distinguish AI agents from traditional systems through flexibility. Matt contrasted this with rigid frameworks: "Being able to replace rules with judgment I think is the biggest promise here." This creates opportunities to make DeFi accessible through simplified interfaces, moving beyond current "super messy screens" that intimidate newcomers.

Innovative funding models support this evolution across platforms. Virtuals Protocol implements trading fee structures where creators receive 70% of transaction fees, helping bootstrap ideas before traditional venture funding. Simultaneously, Eliza Labs secured long-term academic partnerships with Stanford University. Ben emphasized their focus on diversity in partnerships, balancing "5-year horizon of research" projects with immediate practical applications that enable community builders and provide exposure to emerging projects.

Looking forward to 2026, agent-to-agent payments emerge as critical catalysts requiring crypto infrastructure. Stefano argued this "has to be done on crypto rails" due to speed requirements for billions of agents operating faster than humans. This connects to institutional integration needs bridging traditional trading infrastructure with digital finance.

For bold predictions, panelists anticipated "the first transaction of significant value managed end to end by more than two agents," infrastructure development around escrow and reputation scoring, and fundamental changes in capital markets where agents orchestrate investment decisions.

The webinar demonstrated a maturing ecosystem moving beyond experimental phases toward sustainable business models. The three platforms represent complementary approaches: NEAR's high-performance blockchain rails, Virtuals Protocol's tokenized collaboration, and Eliza Labs' open-source frameworks. As specialized agent networks evolve, blockchain integration appears essential for transparent interactions, with institutional investment convergence and innovative funding suggesting significant acceleration in AI agent adoption across crypto-native and traditional financial applications.