Fidelity Warns: AI Can Grow Crypto, But Not Tokens

Fidelity sees more blockchain activity from AI agents and micropayments, but warns that the economic value often stays with stablecoins, L2s, and service providers.

Key Takeaways

• Fidelity Digital Assets warns that cheaper AI development could drive more crypto activity without automatically creating more value for token holders.
• According to the report, the competitive edge may shift toward liquidity, distribution, security, trust, and regulatory integration.
• Fidelity sees extra risks in micropayments and security, because value often ends up off the main chain or with other parties.

Fidelity Digital Assets warns that cheaper AI development could flood the crypto market with new apps and transactions, without automatically leading to more value for token holders. According to the crypto arm of Fidelity Investments, the point of AI is less about how much activity it creates and more about who ultimately captures the economic value.

AI Drives Activity

AI has quickly become a major theme in crypto. The idea is that autonomous agents can independently buy data, rent computing power, and make payments without human involvement. In practice, that is already driving movement: according to an earlier Keyrock report, AI agents processed more than $73 million (€62.9 million) in the year through April across about 176 million blockchain transactions.

At the same time, major players like Coinbase, Stripe, and Visa are working on their own systems for machine-to-machine payments. That shows the race is being fought not only on public blockchains, but also in closed payment environments and existing financial networks. Coinbase is already taking its own step there with special accounts for bots that can trade and pay on users' behalf.

Value Does Not Have to Land On-Chain

Analyst Max Wadington writes in the report published Wednesday that AI lowers the barrier to building and participating, but that the competitive advantage may then shift toward liquidity, distribution, security, trust, and regulatory integration. That means broader use of blockchain technology could still end up delivering only limited benefits to the underlying tokens.

Fidelity sees that risk especially in micropayments. Those transactions can happen in large numbers, but they often generate relatively low fees and are frequently handled through Layer 2 networks or off the main chain. In that scenario, stablecoin issuers and service providers may capture more of the revenue than the base layer of a network.

The broader market already shows that AI and crypto do not automatically follow the same value pattern. The rise of AI-driven DeFi and trading bots can boost activity and speed up execution, but it can also create new pressure on liquidity and volatility. That makes it more important for investors to look at where value is actually created, not just how much traffic a protocol handles.

Security Becomes More Important

Fidelity also points to a second layer of risk: AI can spot and exploit vulnerabilities faster, including in smart contracts, key management, bridges, and oracle systems. As a result, security, identity controls, and regulatory compliance could become more important, which may give established or more closed-off platforms an edge.

For European crypto followers, that matters because the AI hype is not just a story about growth, but also about market structure. If more activity shifts to stablecoins, off-chain settlement, or permissioned systems, that could change the role of public blockchains and their tokens in ways many optimists do not expect right now.