AgentFi
Since AI agents emerged, the crypto industry has been at the frontier of innovation by creating agents that deploy capital, execute multiple-step strategies, and adapt in real time without gatekeepers or jurisdictional barriers.
DeFi has become the perfect breeding ground for agentic experiments. And all the work that has been done in the last couple of years (standards, smart accounts, etc.) has been compounding. We can now provide humanity with an open source laboratory where next‑generation money legos can be stitched together into smarter financial agents.
DeFAI vs AgentFi
Historically, naming has served as humanity's primary tool for categorizing and understanding new phenomena. As autonomous agents began participating in finance, managing crypto portfolios, and executing strategies, the crypto community started proposing new terms to categorize this emerging field.
DeFAI (Decentralized Finance + AI) emerged first as people sought to capture the fusion of DeFi and AI. However, pronunciation difficulties led community members to propose a new term, AiFi (AI Finance), as a more accessible alternative.
Most recently, Agentic Finance (AgentFi) gained traction as the tech has evolved toward truly autonomous agents capable of independent financial decision-making.
Why AgentFi?
AgentFi captures the core innovation: agency itself.
It is not just combining AI and DeFi, it is finance performed by autonomous agents capable of independent decision-making.
AgentFi, as a term, encompasses a spectrum of implementations far broader than that. Some projects leverage LLMs for natural language understanding and complex reasoning. Others deploy traditional machine learning models for pattern recognition and predictive analytics. Still others use hard-coded rule sets that execute predetermined strategies. What unites them is not the underlying technology, but the autonomous behavior they enable. Their agentic capabilities.
"Agentic finance refers to the emerging market segment with products using AI or machine learning to actively manage user funds or provide financial advice... some of these products utilize LLMs, while others employ hard-coded rules or traditional machine learning. Regardless of the underlying tech, many of them describe themselves as 'agentic.'" - Agentic Finance Landscape
DeFAI, while descriptive, constrains our vision. It anchors the conversation to AI specifically, when the real transformation is about autonomous economic actors.
AgentFi gives us the linguistic framework to describe what's already emerging: a financial system where agents execute most onchain activities, occupy expanding market share, and operate with increasing sophistication. We are entering an era where humans become orchestrators, delegating to specialized agents that execute strategies, manage risk, and generate returns on our behalf.
The name we choose shapes how we think about the future. AgentFi points toward the right horizon.
Agentic Zero
AI is unlocking new forms of intelligence. Crypto is unlocking new forms of coordination, value creation, and ownership. Together, they enable something we've never had before: autonomous systems that can act, transact, and collaborate without gatekeepers.
Agentic Zero is a one-day conference, during Devconnect Buenos Aires, about shaping the rails that will carry the most powerful technology of our time. Ensuring agents have open, permissionless foundations, designed for human benefit. The opportunity isn't just technological, it's economic, creative, and societal.