San Francisco, CA – Crypto has a behavior of declaring the longer term early. In current months, that intuition has fixated on autonomous AI brokers, self-driving wallets and buying and selling techniques that may transfer capital with out human oversight.
At NEARCON 2026, Dragonfly’s Haseeb Qureshi and Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi delivered a pointy debate over how quickly these brokers could be trusted with actual cash.
The core disagreement wasn’t about whether or not brokers will finally handle capital; each imagine they may, however about timing and threat tolerance.
“One thing that works with cash 90% of the time is unusable for precise financial exercise,” Qureshi stated. Even 95% reliability, he argued, isn’t adequate. “It’s a variety of nothing, nothing, nothing… then one thing, after which all the pieces. And proper now, we’re nonetheless within the nothing part.”
Qureshi prompt the business could also be overstating how prepared the know-how is. He cautioned in opposition to extrapolating from viral demos on social media, pointing to examples of autonomous techniques malfunctioning. “You wish to be very cautious of attempting to ingest your worldview of know-how by studying Twitter hype folks and watching Twitter demos,” he stated.
For Qureshi, spectacular demonstrations usually are not the identical as techniques strong sufficient to handle significant capital. For main client platforms, he added bluntly, “You can’t try this sh**.”
Sethi, against this, argued the tempo of enchancment is exponential, and already reshaping monetary infrastructure. “We predict we all know what’s going to occur,” he stated. “The velocity and the extent of innovation… is exponential.” Kraken, he famous, is already constructing agent-like capabilities for purchasers “weeks and months away — not years away.”
The place Qureshi sees a steep reliability threshold earlier than widespread deployment, Sethi sees fast iteration narrowing the hole. “The assault floor grows as a lot because the safety floor grows,” he stated, suggesting defensive capabilities will scale alongside threat.
The controversy crystallized throughout a rapid-fire spherical. Requested what share of his personal portfolio an AI might handle higher as we speak, Qureshi answered cautiously: “5 p.c.”
Sethi’s response: “100.”
Pressed additional on if he would put all of his crypto into an autonomous agent inside a yr, Sethi didn’t hesitate.
“All the things,” he stated. “Within the subsequent six to 12 months.”
The alternate underscored a broader break up rising in crypto: whether or not autonomous finance is a near-term inevitability or nonetheless a frontier experiment, and the way a lot threat the business is keen to tolerate to find out.
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