TL;DR: The convergence of Crypto and AI is giving rise to a burgeoning Onchain AI economy, an ecosystem of blockchain apps and services run by autonomous AI agents. And while Decentralized AI projects have seen the lionshare of funding and growth over the last 18 months, we believe Onchain AI is gaining momentum and signaling the next phase of rapid innovation at this intersection. The importance of Onchain AI lies in expanding crypto to potentially billions of AI-powered participants. Every autonomous AI agent is like a new “user” of blockchains that can operate 24/7 and make sophisticated decisions, driving a significant increase in onchain activity and growth. Through investing in Onchain AI, Coinbase Ventures is supporting the builders of this future agent-based economy, ultimately paving the way to a new “Agentic Web”.

Coinbase Ventures portfolio companies are denoted with an asterisk (*) when first referenced in the article below.   

In Oct 2024, Coinbase Ventures published its thesis on the convergence of Crypto x AI, in which we observed that blockchains and AI have complementary strengths - blockchains offer decentralization, censorship resistance, verifiability, and user ownership, while AI brings powerful data processing, reasoning, and automation capabilities. We believe this synergy can transform the way humans and machines interact in the digital economy, ultimately leading to the emergence of an “Agentic Web,” where AI agents operate on top of crypto infrastructure rails to drive significant economic activity and growth. 

A critical distinction from that thesis is between Decentralized AI and Onchain AI. Decentralized AI (“Crypto → AI”) refers to building generic AI infrastructure that inherits the open, peer-to-peer properties of blockchain networks​. This includes efforts to democratize access to compute, data, models, and training so that AI development isn’t monopolized by a few large firms. These DeAI resources are also an enabler of Onchain AI (“AI → Crypto”) – an ecosystem of apps and services that embed AI to power new and existing blockchain use cases (e.g., trading agents, onchain portfolio managers, DeFi abstraction, etc). While Decentralized AI projects have seen the lionshare of funding and growth over the last 18 months, we believe Onchain AI is gaining momentum and signaling the next phase of rapid innovation at the intersection.