Stabledash Live · · 27 min

"Crypto Was Never Meant for Humans": Alchemy on Agentic Payments

With Chihee Kim

Key takeaways

  • Alchemy handles 1 trillion transactions every year for tens of thousands of teams on more than 100 blockchain networks, according to the figures cited on the show.

  • Chihee Kim says the things that make crypto hard for humans make it a good fit for software, and Alchemy has shipped agent payment sessions and AgentPay for merchants.

  • She says agentic payment volume is in the millions, not billions, with about $100,000,000 through x402 in roughly nine months.

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Summary

Alchemy's Chihee Kim argues that crypto's friction suits software agents better than people, while admitting agentic payment volume is still in the millions.

Alchemy processes 1 trillion transactions every year and supports more than 100 blockchain networks, host Drew Rogers said in introducing Chihee Kim, who leads strategic partnerships at the company. Kim, who joined at the end of 2025, used the conversation on Stabledash to argue that AI agents, not people, may be crypto's natural users.

Infrastructure for banks and chains

The figures Drew Rogers cited for Alchemy also include 100,000,000 humans using crypto, 1,000,000,000 gasless transactions processed, 99.99% uptime and tens of thousands of teams building on the platform. Chihee Kim pointed to two customers using different parts of the stack: for JPMorgan, she says, Alchemy is the raw infrastructure, the node layer and gas abstraction, behind its Connexus deposit token on a public chain, while World built its own L2, World Chain, with Alchemy powering it.

“Maybe crypto was never meant for humans. Maybe it was always for AI.”
Chihee Kim

Crypto built for software

Chihee Kim argues that "the things that make crypto hard for humans make it pretty perfect for software." Drew Rogers agreed, predicting there will be more agents than humans moving transactions, and said that in five or ten years most of the audience reviewing Stabledash conversations will be agents.

Kim says micropayments are the use case that stands out. A flat 30¢ card fee plus 2.9% on a 5¢ transaction makes no sense, she says, and humans do not like deciding on transactions.

What Alchemy shipped

Alchemy released tooling earlier this month that lets an AI coding agent such as Claude send payments on chain, Kim says: a developer approves a scoped, time-bound session and the agent acts within it. About a month ago the company also shipped AgentPay, which lets merchants accept payments from agents arriving through the various protocols in use today.

Still early

Chihee Kim was direct about the size of the market: "we're talking millions, right, not billions." She cited about $100,000,000 flowing through the x402 protocol in the last nine months or so. By comparison, she said B2B cross-border stablecoin payments grew over 700% in the last year.

Taken together, Alchemy is building agent payment tools on top of infrastructure that already serves banks and consumer chains, ahead of demand that Chihee Kim herself puts in the millions. Stabledash plans to launch an "Agent Hour" segment on the topic in a couple of weeks.

Alchemy, World, JPMorgan, and Finney come up most.

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