Onchain Agents: Building an Economy for Autonomous AI
Ethereum Korea One: Genesis · Day 2 · 2026-09-29 · 41:39 · In English
What will it take for people to trust AI agents with real money? At Ethereum Korea One: Genesis, Virtuals, Base, and MetaMask discuss building an onchain economy for autonomous AI agents.
Speakers
- Jansen Teng, Co-Founder, Virtuals
- David Park, APAC Ecosystem Lead, Base
- Francesco Andreoli, Director of DevRel, MetaMask
- Junhyeok Yoo, Researcher, Four Pillars (moderator)
About this session
Moderated by Junhyeok Yoo, Researcher at Four Pillars, this panel looks at what blockchains can offer AI agents that other technologies cannot. Jansen Teng, David Park, and Francesco Andreoli cover agent wallets, trading as the first product-market fit, the guardrails needed before people hand agents their funds, and how the agent ecosystem is expanding in APAC.
Key takeaways
- Jansen Teng (Virtuals) separated payments from commerce. Getting agents to transact over crypto rails is simple enough, but a real business transaction requires knowing the goods were delivered, which is where smart contracts come in. David Park (Base) added that permissionless financial infrastructure lets agents manage funds under a user's policy, and that agents can abstract away hurdles like signing transactions or reading BaseScan and Etherscan.
- Francesco Andreoli (MetaMask) introduced the MetaMask agent wallet, released in early access in June: a CLI for perpetuals and spot trading that plugs into Hermes or Grok bots or any custom orchestrator and applies the same malicious address and token checks as the mobile app and extension. Most current users are advanced traders running strategies from DCA to sentiment analysis and arbitrage between stablecoins.
- Andreoli also described the MetaMask Money account, which earns on idle funds and switches easily with a trading account, and shared how one builder used the agent wallet with x402 to book flights through the agent booking APIs launched by Skyscanner and lastminute.
- Teng said Virtuals has shifted from building infrastructure to adoption, because perfect infrastructure is useless if nobody uses it. Its example is chat-native agents that act on ticker mentions in group chats or selected Twitter accounts. His advice to builders: start with trading, where a 1% fee on trades can sustain a team.
- On trust, Teng said the starting point is getting people comfortable trusting an agent with $1,000 to $10,000, possibly with protection like Binance's SAFU fund. Park called for paper trading and emergency controls consolidated into one service such as CDP. Andreoli cited trading CLIs hacked through prompt engineering and noted that x402 and ERC-8004 are guidelines, not enforced, so enforcement may need to come from those with distribution, like Google; otherwise agents stay stuck at "a hundred bucks, a virtual card."
- Park said Base focuses on three pillars: trading, financing, and payments. A month before the event, Coinbase tokenized stocks (CB Stocks) launched, and Base announced a partnership with Aave to use them as collateral. In APAC, where Japan and Indonesia are moving on stablecoins and Korea is preparing its Digital Asset Basic Act, financial institutions and tech companies are focused on agentic payments, and Base is testing use cases with credit card companies and IT platforms. Teng's next goal is getting 10,000 users to each put $1,000 with an agent next quarter.