Charles Hoskinson Says AI Agents Will Outpace Human Relevance by 2035
Input Output CEO and Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson said Wednesday at Consensus Miami that AI agents will become more relevant than humans in decision-making contexts by 2035, and that Google, Amazon, and Meta are already “terrified” by the trajectory. Hoskinson said the shift will happen because AI agents will not behave like humans when confronted with complex problems, making them structurally better suited to certain domains.
The statement arrived as multiple cryptocurrency and AI infrastructure companies announced agent-focused products this week.
What Hoskinson Said
Hoskinson’s remarks were delivered at Consensus Miami, the annual cryptocurrency industry conference. He said Big Tech incumbents are terrified because they built their businesses on the assumption that human users generate data, click ads, and make purchasing decisions.
AI agents do none of those things in the same way.
An AI agent is an autonomous software program that can perceive its environment, make decisions, and take actions, including financial transactions, without human instruction at each step. The relevance threshold Hoskinson described is the point at which agents handle more economic and informational decisions than humans do in aggregate.
He said cryptocurrency infrastructure, specifically networks with fast, cheap, and programmable settlement, would be essential for AI agents to function autonomously at scale.
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The Cryptocurrency-AI Convergence Argument
Hoskinson’s position connects a broader industry thesis that has been building since 2024.
The argument holds that autonomous agents need three things to operate independently: compute, identity, and payment rails. Traditional finance cannot provide payment rails to agents because it requires human account holders.
Cryptocurrency networks, which are permissionless and programmable, can.
Several concrete moves this week aligned with this thesis. Google Cloud and the Solana Foundation announced a partnership enabling AI agents to pay for enterprise services using stablecoins.
Anchorage Digital launched a banking product specifically designed for agent wallets. Both announcements treat agents as first-class financial actors rather than extensions of a human user’s account.
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Background
Hoskinson founded Input Output in 2015 to build Cardano, a proof-of-stake blockchain network that uses peer-reviewed academic research as its primary development methodology.
Proof-of-stake is the consensus mechanism that secures most newer blockchains by requiring validators to lock up native tokens as collateral rather than expend computational energy.
Cardano has occupied a distinct niche in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, attracting developers who prefer formal verification methods over rapid iteration. Hoskinson has been publicly active on AI topics since at least 2023, when he began arguing that decentralized networks would need to evolve specifically to support machine-to-machine economic activity.
His 2035 timeline is more specific than most public forecasts.
For comparison, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in May 2026 that the company’s compute capacity was already strained by 80-fold revenue growth, suggesting commercial AI deployment is accelerating faster than infrastructure can scale.
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What the Claim Means for Crypto Infrastructure
If Hoskinson’s timeline is directionally correct, the cryptocurrency networks best positioned to benefit are those with the lowest transaction costs, the highest throughput, and the most mature developer tooling for programmable payments. Solana, Ethereum’s Layer-2 ecosystem, and Cardano itself are the three most commonly cited candidates.
The challenge for any single network is that agent payment volume at scale would dwarf current cryptocurrency transaction volumes by orders of magnitude.
Cardano’s development roadmap includes Hydra, an off-chain scaling solution designed to handle high-frequency micropayments without congesting the main chain.
Hoskinson’s remarks landed in the same week that the Nasdaq president told CoinDesk a friendlier SEC is allowing cryptocurrency firms to build again, adding a regulatory tailwind to the infrastructure investment argument.
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