Charles Hoskinson said AI agents will become more relevant than humans on the Internet within the next decade, a change that is already forcing Google, Facebook and Amazon to respond.
In his keynote speech at Consensus Miami 2026 on Wednesday, Hoskinson also said that “by 2035, the majority of search, commerce and activity on the Internet will be AI agents rather than people.”
He said that this change threatens the existing business model. “Amazon, Google, Facebook, they’re scared of the agentic revolution,” Hoskinson said, adding that companies are investing heavily because “all of their business models are going to be disrupted.”
AI agents don’t click on ads or have brand preferences, Hoskinson explained, this “jeopardizes the advertising-driven model of platforms like Google, Amazon, and Facebook.”
“Why do you think Google is interested in x402?”. He asked his audience about the Coinbase-backed protocol that enables AI agents and applications to make direct, programmatic payments over the internet using stable coins and Crypto Rails.
Hoskinson said this shift will change the way crypto is used, adding that artificial intelligence (AI) will increasingly handle tasks like due diligence, transaction execution and interactions with decentralized finance.
Hoskinson’s AI agent forecast echoes that of Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who said that “very soon there will be more AI agents than humans doing transactions” and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who predicted that they will “pay a million times more than humans.”
On the other hand, Hoskinson said that AI agents are “the best thing ever to happen to cryptocurrency” because it simplifies the user experience.
Cardano’s founder warned crypto users against relying on intermediaries instead of maintaining direct control over their assets, which, he said, is the principle on which crypto was built.
“You have to keep your own data. You have to keep your own identity. You have to keep your own money,” he said, adding that users are outsourcing it to “custodial wallets,” “permissionless networks,” and “third parties that they regret trusting when their account gets locked out.”
He described fragmentation in the blockchain ecosystem as a hindrance to progress, saying it has slowed down development. “There have been 11 million tokens issued over the last few years. We have enough of those,” Hoskinson said. “What I want is cooperation. What I want is to achieve the mission.”
User experience remains a major issue limiting user adoption, said Hoskinson, who described current crypto onboarding processes as complex and error-prone. “This is user experience in 2026,” he said. “Does this sound like a product you want to use?”
He said technologies like account abstraction and chain abstraction can simplify the way users interact with crypto systems while maintaining control over assets and identities.
Hoskinson highlighted the changing attitudes among financial institutions, noting that JPMorgan has moved from restricting crypto-related activity to developing blockchain-based products. “When we started JPMorgan was closing people’s bank accounts and now they have a blockchain product,” he said.