OKX DABBLES WITH AI AGENTS: OKX rolled out an AI-focused upgrade to OnchainOS, its developer platform, pitching it as infrastructure for autonomous crypto trading agents. The AI layer builds on familiar components such as wallet infrastructure, liquidity routing and onchain data feeds, combining them into a unified execution framework aimed at AI agents operating across chains. Rather than wiring price feeds, token approvals, gas estimation and swap routing manually, developers can connect an agent and issue a high-level instruction, such as swapping ETH for USDC below a certain price. OnchainOS handles the workflow behind the scenes, from monitoring markets to sourcing liquidity and confirming settlement. The intersection between crypto and AI has grown exponentially in the past 12 months — the blockchain AI market projected to rise from $6 billion in 2024 to $50 billion by 2030 — and traders are using the technology to their advantage. One recent example occurred when a group of retail traders used AI to find "glitches" on platforms like Polymarket before instructing AI to trade on its behalf. — Sam Reynolds Read more.
NEAR FOUNDER ON THE FUTURE USERS OF BLOCKCHAIN: For years, the crypto industry has searched for its next breakout moment — something on the scale of DeFi summer or the NFT boom. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) has quietly become embedded in daily life. Developers use ChatGPT as a co-pilot. Consumers rely on AI assistants to draft emails, plan travel and, increasingly, manage workflows. Crypto, by comparison, still feels infrastructural. Illia Polosukhin, a co-founder of NEAR, believes the divide is about to collapse, but not in the way many expect. "The users of blockchain will be AI agents," Polosukhin said in an interview. "AI is going to be on the front end, and blockchain is going to be the back end." His framing cuts against much of crypto's recent experimentation with AI, which has centered on speculative tokens, memecoins and agent-themed trading bots. Instead, Polosukhin argues that AI will become the primary interface layer for everything online, including crypto, abstracting away wallets, explorers and transaction hashes. "The goal is to make your AI hide all the blockchain," he said. "The fact that we have [blockchain] explorers is effectively a failure, because we don't abstract the technology." In this view, blockchain doesn't disappear, it recedes. AI agents interact with protocols directly, executing payments, managing assets, coordinating services and even voting in governance systems. Humans, meanwhile, interact with the AI. — Margaux Nijkerk Read more.
BITCOIN LATEST GOVERNANCE CLASH: Bitcoin's latest governance clash escalated as the first block signaling support for a temporary soft fork designed to restrict arbitrary, non-monetary data in the blockchain's transactions was produced by mining pool Ocean. The proposal, formally assigned BIP-110 after evolving from earlier drafts, aims to reinstate strict limits on transaction output sizes and arbitrary data fields for about a year. The idea is to curb what proponents see as "spam" uses of block space for non-financial data. They argue that unchecked data, including large inscriptions and so-called OP_RETURN payloads, threaten the original blockchain's role as sound monetary infrastructure and burden node operators. The community remains deeply divided. Prominent critics, including Blockstream CEO Adam Back, have warned that consensus-level intervention could harm Bitcoin's credibility and lead to preferential treatment of some transactions in violation of the principle of neutral transaction capacity. He also questioned the level of support for the proposal, which, he said, increased the risk of the blockchain being split. — Jamie Crawley Read more.
