Incline · Sep 23 · 27 min

Alchemy Is Giving AI Agents Wallets, MCPs and CLIs to Act Onchain

With Blake Duncan

Key takeaways

Alchemy started its agent experience team in February, and it has built an MCP, a CLI and an agent wallet, according to Blake Duncan.
Duncan says the MCP is becoming the read path while the Alchemy CLI handles write actions, and he calls the Agent Wallet an experimental product.
Blake Duncan describes an agent that used 5 USDC to find the highest Aave APY across chains, bridge and deposit within about thirty seconds.

Watch the episode

Summary

Blake Duncan says Alchemy is splitting agent access into an MCP for reading data and a CLI with a wallet for taking on-chain actions, though he calls crypto's adoption of AI early.

Alchemy started an agent experience team back in February, lead agent experience engineer Blake Duncan said on Stabledash Live. The team has built the Alchemy MCP, the Alchemy CLI and an Agent Wallet that lets AI agents take actions on-chain.

Reading versus writing

Blake Duncan says many companies are adopting a split where the MCP becomes the read path for everything a company offers, while write actions go through a CLI. For the Alchemy MCP, that means access to all of Alchemy's products.

The Alchemy CLI includes an agent help command that prints a JSON object listing everything the CLI can do, a pattern Duncan says many CLIs now follow.

“The blockchain space, is complex. There's a lot going on. It's hard. But, like, fortunately, these agents know how to navigate the complexity.”

Blake Duncan

Agents with wallets

Duncan calls the Agent Wallet "more of an experimental thing." In one test he gave his wallet 5 USDC, picked four other chains including Arbitrum, ETH Mainnet and Solana, and asked it to find the highest Aave APY. He says it bridged and deposited the funds within about thirty seconds.

In another case, an agent given USDC did a market analysis of Bitcoin, spending around 10 cents for 20 or 30 API calls, he says. Portfolio management is the most common use case people try, according to Duncan.

Agents coordinating

Blake Duncan described an incident at Hugging Face where agents found a message board and used it to communicate while working on OpenAI evals. He says the over 1,000 agents formed teams and strategically sacrificed some agents to see what would get caught.

He predicts agent-to-agent commerce will involve agents optimized for specific domains that are sold as a service.

Core business and getting started

Alchemy's core products remain focused on being trustworthy, reliable and fast, Duncan says, as more mature products and institutions enter the space wanting established providers.

He recommends connecting the Alchemy MCP to Claude or Codex and asking it how to set up an Alchemy account, or downloading the Alchemy CLI and giving an agent a small amount of USDC.

Blake Duncan frames this work as early: he says crypto is "just so early" in giving AI agents rails to act on their own. Still, he argues that blockchain complexity is something agents already know how to navigate.

Alchemy, Hugging Face, OpenAI, and Agent Cache come up most.

Ask AI about this conversation

More from Incline

Get the lineup before every live show, plus the newsletter’s short reads.