Agentic Solutions in Waiting

“And today, we can say that agentic AI has arrived, that useful AI has arrived.”

That’s what Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang told an audience on Monday. He was introducing the company’s NVIDIA RTX Spark, which, according to the company, is “a new superchip that reinvents Windows PCs for the era of personal AI agents.”

Here’s Jensen again (emphasis added):

For forty years, you launched apps. Click. Type. With RTX Spark and Microsoft Windows, you ask — and the PC does the work. RTX Spark brings everything NVIDIA has built — CUDA, RTX, our AI platform — into a single superchip. Local agents. Frontier models. Creative workflows. RTX games. All on a laptop. This is the new PC. The personal AI computer.

The technology is remarkable. And while I won’t go into all the details, there is one aspect that’s worth unpacking.

Jensen is signaling a major shift that is coming for technology. For the first time, computing platforms are not being designed with humans as the only intended users.

This is a trend that digital assets are primed and ready for. And to understand how, we need to understand what tools these agents will use.

The Protocols Are Software.

Software ‘died’ this year.

Perhaps you heard….

From January through mid-April, the State Street SPDR S&P Software &Services ETF (XSW) was down approximately 30%. The rationale for the selling (some of it reeked of panic) was straightforward.

Agentic AI solutions threaten many software business models. After all, if an AI model can code and run programs that effectively replace the (very expensive) enterprise software used by many businesses…where does that leave the companies selling that enterprise software?

That’s the question investors were wondering earlier this year. And they didn’t like the answer.

But Jensen had a different take. Here’s what he said about software companies during his presentation:

A lot of people have said, you know, Jensen, AI is coming, agentic AI is coming, therefore all the software companies are going to go out of business.

I said it’s exactly the opposite because there are going to be so many agents.

The world is no longer limited by the number of people. Therefore, those agents are going to use more tools than ever. This is actually an incredible time to be a software company. But the software has to be presented to the agent in a way that the agent can use it.

What he’s saying is software is far from dead. It’s just reinventing itself.

Today, software is designed for humans. And humans need a certain UI. They need buttons to click on, visuals to see data, boxes to input new text. And so on…

AI agents need none of that.

Let’s take a website designer as an example.

Before agentic solutions, a developer or designer might sketch out the website using a tool like Figma. They can click and drag text or images until their client is satisfied with the layout. Figma was a way for a human to produce the designs and eventually move it into production.

But an AI?

A human simply prompts a large language model (LLM). It then uses tools to present designs to the user, completely abstracting away Figma from the user. What once cost somebody thousands of dollars to build is now done in seconds. It’s understandable why Figma is down nearly 80% since its first close nearly a year ago.

But here’s the thing about this software trend…

As Jensen alluded to, this doesn’t apply to all companies.

Nor does it apply to blockchain-based protocols.

It’s Software for Machines

Software is often viewed as a program we open on our computer.

But if we peel back what that program is, it’s simply a collection of instructions and data. Those instructions and data tell the device it sits on how to operate.

The same thing applies to blockchain protocols.

They are simply a collection of instructions and data. And when a user interacts with the protocol, those instructions result in a specific outcome. Uniswap, for instance, is a set of code that allows a user to swap one asset for another.

If we stick to these literal definitions, protocols are simply software sitting on blockchain networks.

But what we know from following the digital asset industry so closely is that these systems are best viewed as tooling. It’s tooling that gives a user or an agent a way to execute a task. These tasks can be things like taking out a loan, swapping assets, or simply sending assets to a loved one.

What I’m saying is this: The market is lumping blockchain-based protocols into the same bucket as enterprise software like Figma. That’s a mistake. The latter is a tool being abstracted away by AI. The former is a tool that will be used by AI agents.

We’ve covered it before here at Chain of Thought. Blockchain-based solutions are machine readable. Not human readable. That makes them superior infrastructure for agents.

That’s in stark contrast to the systems that dominate finance today. Think of things like your JPMorgan Chase checking account, your Schwab trading account, or even peer-to-peer solutions like Venmo.

Each one of these requires the user to click buttons on a screen. These are software solutions designed for humans. And they will be replaced by agentic solutions…

Protocols can operate without a user interface. Their codebases sit within smart contracts, which are lines of code that reside on blockchains.

These are the tools that will power our financial experience tomorrow. And the market is completely blind to it. It’s mispricing one of the biggest trades of this decade.

The market will figure it out…eventually.

Once trillions of dollars’ worth of assets make their way onchain, the market will realize these protocols are agentic solutions in waiting.

Meanwhile those in the know are already incorporating the tools into their agentic solutions.

The future of finance is onchain. And it’ll be powered by agents. Not people.

This is the most exciting moment for digital assets.

Follow along…

Your Pulse on Crypto,

Ben Lilly

Editor, Chain of Thought