Author: blocmates.(@blocmates)
Compiled by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News
If you're like us and have been tied to this industry for the past few years, you can clearly feel that the atmosphere has changed.
Things feel less exciting, and the only thing that seems to capture attention is something with two words—AI and Agent.
The mainstream consensus is that the industry is being heavily optimized to serve AI Agents, causing products still struggling with direct human interaction or the "human layer" to be marginalized.
Therefore, from a human perspective, the industry might seem a bit stagnant, but the on-chain environment remains active and vibrant on a new layer (the Agentic layer), which humans cannot directly intervene in technically.
Efficiency is driving more users towards AI-led interactions. Platforms originally designed for human clicks and operations are now being optimized for "non-human" service.
Major players like Uniswap Labs already launched 7 open-source "Skills" for AI Agents in February. These tools enable autonomous AI coding Agents (e.g., within Claude, Cursor, or other Agent frameworks) to directly and reliably interact on-chain with the Uniswap protocol.
However, contrary to the "AI Agents will eat everything" narrative flying around the timeline, a closer look reveals a slightly different story—the growth in Agent activity is more sector-specific, not industry-wide.
We decided to dig deeper to see which sectors have already been "eaten" and which ones are yet to be consumed.
Our goal: understand if the human layer in crypto is truly dying, and explore solutions built on top of crypto's new layers to ensure control isn't lost.
Crypto Sectors Already Dominated by AI Agents
In specific sectors, we observe that AI Agent-driven activity is very active, while direct human interaction is declining. Here are some examples:
Derivatives Trading (Perpetuals)
The perpetuals market is crypto's most explicitly bot-dominated liquid market. Speed, pattern recognition, and 24/7 execution are things machines do better than humans. No one would argue that humans should manually do trading pre-flops.
The top 10 perpetual protocols generated about $592 billion in trading volume over the past 30 days, with Hyperliquid alone accounting for $248.8 billion, followed by Aster ($61.6 billion).
Aster's real-time "Human vs AI" trading competition over two weeks under highly volatile conditions is a clear example: 43% of human participants were liquidated, while all 30 AI Agents finished the competition with zero liquidations, a 100% survival rate.
The overall ROI for human trading teams was -32.22%, while AI Agents limited total losses to about $13,000, with an overall ROI of -4.48%.
Arbitrage Trading (MEV)
This is the most absolute case of bot domination in crypto, as there is simply no scalable profitable human MEV operator.
The MEV ecosystem across networks has evolved into a highly competitive automated trading industry, with specialized bots and infrastructure tools scanning blockchain mempools.
In 2025, sandwich attacks accounted for 51.56% of total MEV transaction volume ($289.76 million). On Solana, sandwich bots captured between 1.7% and 5.4% (avg. 2.9%) of total daily volume, executing $3.85 billion in sandwich trades across over 3.9 million bundles.
A single bot accounted for 42% of all sandwich trading volume, executing over $1.6 billion in trades in the past 30 days.
This extends to DeFi protocols as well. The entire liquidation lifecycle—monitoring, triggering, and execution—is handled by permissionless bots.
While this existed before the AI Agent hype, the entire process is now significantly automated by Agents as the DeFAI category continues to grow.
Yield Optimization
This category is Agent-first by default. Data shows that 68% of new DeFi protocols launched in Q1 2026 included at least one autonomous AI Agent for trading, liquidity management, and risk monitoring.
Compared to data from 12 months ago, we see a 15% increase in AI Agent adoption in the yield space.
On platforms like Giza and ZyFAI, AI Agents consistently outperform—the latter achieving +73.42% excess yield compared to static strategies.
Giza recorded over 800,000 autonomous trades, with assets under management peaking at $40 million.
Besides Giza and ZyFAI, there are many more projects in this category. We've covered some, and others we'd be happy to dive into based on requests and further review—including:
Arrakis, Reflect, AFI, Lulo, Sail, Almanak, Surf, Infinit, AXAL, Superform, DeFi Saver, Kamino, Mamo, HeyAnon, etc.
Updates from leading projects like Pendle (including deploying MCP connectors and building Skills to make Pendle easily integrable with crypto-native and non-native AI Agents) also prove that the yield industry is rapidly tilting towards Agent-first interaction.
Spot Trading & Portfolio Optimization
Automated trading bots are currently estimated to account for 65% of global crypto trading volume. In early 2026, on-chain daily active AI Agents reached 250,000, a growth of over 400% from 2025.
Particularly on Solana, AI Agents generated $31 billion in DEX volume in 2025, accounting for roughly 2% of total DEX volume ($1.5 trillion).
We see an increase in Agent-driven spot trading, including meme coin trading across networks.
Users increasingly rely on Agent-first infrastructure for token launches, trading, and portfolio management, driving the popularity of platforms like Virtuals, Bankr, Glider, Surf, Symphony.
Battleground Sectors (Agent + Human Activity Coexist)
Prediction Markets
Polymarket is crypto's most granular testing ground for AI vs Humans, and the data is hard to refute. We've all seen those posts bragging about making millions with Agents on prediction markets.
However, on a base of 10,582 active traders, 880 bots (8.3% of accounts) averaged a profit of $119,156, while humans averaged $12,671—a per capita gap of 9.4x.
Agents achieved a 66.4% win rate, while humans achieved 45.3%. Arbitrage windows compressed from 12.3 seconds in 2024 to 2.7 seconds in 2026, with bots executing in sub-100 milliseconds capturing 73% of all arbitrage profits.
AI-powered Agents now account for approximately 18% of total prediction market trading volume, with over 30% of Polymarket wallets already using AI Agents.
However, the nuance is: For markets lasting weeks or months, the gap shrinks significantly—in some categories, humans actually perform better.
Bots have proven poor at handling change, so they get confused when fundamental dynamics shift. In contrast, humans adapt.
Therefore, what we see is: Short-term arbitrage games have been taken over by Agents, while long-term judgment games still belong to humans.
This infers that, for the foreseeable future, Agent activity and human interaction on prediction markets will remain balanced, until we potentially have more sentient models capable of the nuanced decision-making humans still dominate.
DeFi Lending
Lending is another clear example of layered automation. As mentioned in the Agent-dominated sectors, liquidation bots are entrenched; however, the vast majority of deposit and borrowing decisions are still made by humans.
Aave leads with $12.4 billion TVL, followed by Morpho ($6.9 billion).
DeFAI Agents have redeployed over $2 billion TVL across lending and yield protocols—impressive in absolute terms but less than 2% of total DeFi TVL ($130-140 billion).
This clearly indicates that deposit decisions, collateral choices, and risk appetite remain primarily a human call. While AI Agents handle the plumbing at the edges, the core is still held by humans.
Human-Dominated Sectors
Stablecoins & Card Payments
As of March 2026, the total stablecoin market cap is approximately $312 billion. Adjusted transaction volume (filtering out bot activity, MEV, and wash trading) reached $28 trillion in real economic activity in 2025, growing at a 133% CAGR since 2023.
Stablecoin transfers under $250 hit a new high of 5.84 billion in August 2025. We believe these are users sending money to family, paying freelancers, or splitting bills. Over 80% of USD-backed stablecoin transactions occur outside the US, where Agent adoption leads.
Real people in emerging markets use stablecoins for dollar access and economic hedging, making them central to stablecoin market share. In February 2026 alone, volume reached $1.78 trillion.
Furthermore, the card payment category is thriving due to clearer regulation. Products let users spend crypto assets anywhere traditional cards are accepted, with funds remaining self-custodied until the moment of purchase.
This sector is roughly only 5% Agent-driven. The rest is people moving money. Unlike bot-dominated sectors, users here often don't know or care they're using crypto. That's precisely the point.
Wallets
Wallets are the final layer between humans and the blockchain, a layer that cannot be fully abstracted away.
While abstraction attempts are underway, the approval process desperately needs human oversight. Someone has to sign. Someone has to decide whether to trust what's in front of them.
Phantom has over 15 million monthly active users. The entire wallet space is investing in human-centric improvements like human-readable transaction previews, biometric security, and card-based spending.
The best wallets of 2026 have evolved from "seed phrase + string" storage containers into full-fledged financial dashboards.
Enterprise-grade Agent wallets in 2026 include budget limits, whitelists, audit logs, and emergency stops—treating Agents as operators with restricted permissions, not omnipotent signers.
The Human & Agent Verification Layer: The More Agents, The More Important This Becomes
As more Agents flood into on-chain activity, the value of proving you're human or that an Agent is acting on behalf of a human increases.
Several projects are developing along these lines, ensuring we don't get lost in the machine world's matrix.
World & AgentKit
First mention: World (formerly Worldcoin - WLD)—these guys have verified over 17 million users via iris-scanning Orb hardware.
World describes itself as a response to an AI-saturated world—building digital infrastructure so that being human actually carries weight.
It then launched AgentKit. A toolkit that lets AI Agents carry cryptographic proofs that they are backed by a unique human who has passed World ID, integrated with Coinbase and Cloudflare's x402 protocol for stablecoin micropayments.
t54
Another project we're watching is t54, building trust and safety infrastructure (often called a "trust layer") for the Agentic economy—a world where autonomous AI Agents handle real tasks like managing funds, making payments, and transacting on behalf of individuals or businesses.
Currently, AI Agents moving real money is risky (no verification, no accountability, prone to scams or compliance rule violations).
t54 tackles this with x402-secure, a dedicated trust layer that elevates the x402 protocol for secure AI Agent micropayments. x402-secure provides real-time risk scoring via its Trustline Engine and helps detect scams, including prompt injection, to ensure accountability.
t54 provides these guardrails so institutions and users can genuinely trust Agents with finances.
Self Protocol
These guys are building a decentralized zk-proof human-Agent binding layer on ERC-8004 (on-chain Agent identity).
Self Protocol uses zk technology to anchor each AI Agent to a verified human owner (proof of humanity) without doxxing or data leaks.
It prevents Sybil attacks, supports self-custody wallets, autonomous action, and commercial agreements while maintaining human accountability.
Selfclaw has integrated with ecosystems like Celo/Google Cloud, with fee cycles supporting verified Agents.
Kite AI
Kite is a foundational L1 (EVM-compatible, with Proof of AI consensus) built specifically for the Agentic internet.
It provides Agent Passport (verifiable identity, delegation, programmable spending rules or guardrails), autonomous stablecoin payments, governance, and verification so Agents can authenticate, transact, and collaborate without intermediaries.
Conclusion
Seriously, we're not anti-Agent. The data is clear in trading, MEV, and yield; bots have won those rooms and aren't giving them back.
A head-to-head competition where 43% of humans got liquidated and zero bots did tells you everything about who owns the speed game.
But the overall network data still shows humans doing most of the work in the vast majority of tasks that truly touch real life—in payments, identity, and verification.
These are the layers that actually create value, actually generate revenue. They share a common characteristic: they require judgment, trust, physical presence, or cultural context—things that currently can't be reduced to an optimization function.
We believe teams shouldn't completely abandon building for direct human interaction in these areas and sectors.
Agents currently need humans more than humans need Agents. We believe teams that understand this, and those building Agent and human-proof systems, are the ones to watch.
