MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — Crypto wallets are being reimagined for AI agents as companies race to give autonomous software a way to hold value, prove identity and transact on-chain, Trust Wallet and Mesh executives said Thursday.
Arjun Mukherjee, chief technology officer at Mesh, who attended CoinDesk Miami, said the change is being driven by what he calls the cold start problem for AI agents.
“Agents can’t do anything until they have funds in their wallets,” he says. “Until you have a wallet to do something and it’s worth trading, it’s very difficult for an agent to act. And then all of a sudden you get into cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrency has found that kind of niche, a killer app.”
Mesh, which builds a connectivity layer across exchanges, wallets, smart contracts, and decentralized exchanges, has launched a product called Smart Funding that routes payments through chains, networks, accounts, and tokens for both human and agent users.
Trust Wallet CEO Felix Huang said the company is intentionally taking a bifurcated approach to agent integration. In consumer crypto apps where the user holds the keys, an agent acts as a co-pilot, simplifying navigation and reducing friction without custody management.
“The user always holds the key and all these permissions. At every step, the user has to consent,” Huang said. The consumer-side agent’s role is to “speed up the process and help you better understand how to move on-chain.”
On the developer side, Trust Wallet has taken a more proactive stance. The company recently launched an agent kit that allows agents to autonomously perform transactions, transfers, and other on-chain actions, and is implementing EIP-8004, an Ethereum proposal that provides agents with an on-chain identity and credit style score.
“On the crypto app side, we are enabling humans to have superpowers with AI, while on the developer side we are enabling agents to do things similar to humans,” Huang said.
On where responsibility lies, Mukherjee said Mesh is wary of traditional financial frictions being brought into agency payments.
“AI should augment human judgment, not replace human responsibility and accountability,” he said, adding that responsibility for the actions of agents lies with the institution deploying it.
Both panelists said they hope the AI Institute will launch its own wallet. X has already been vocal about X Money, and “Grok very likely has a wallet in it,” a fan noted.
“Claude and all these players will probably be able to run on-chain tomorrow,” said Huang. “So we’re open to that challenge.”
Mukherjee said Mesh’s strategy is to be wallet, network, and token agnostic.
“With Web3-based e-commerce on any network, on any token, on any connected fund, we all win,” he said.
