AI trust crisis escalates, blockchain becomes an indispensable "anti-counterfeiting layer"

Author: a16z crypto

Translation: Deep潮 TechFlow

Original Title: a16z: Why AI Urgently Needs Cryptocurrency Technology?

Deep潮 Introduction: a16z crypto points out that AI systems are breaking the internet designed at human scale, making coordination, transactions, and the generation of voices, videos, and texts increasingly indistinguishable from human activities. The issue is not the existence of AI, but that the internet lacks native methods to distinguish humans from machines while protecting privacy and usability. This is where blockchain comes into play. The article outlines five core reasons: AI can mass-fake identities, blockchain makes cheap faking of human uniqueness difficult; centralized identity systems become failure points, while decentralization reverses this dynamic; AI agents need portable universal “passports”; scalable payments for agents require new infrastructure; and privacy and security are the same problem, with zero-knowledge proofs being the core defense.

Full Text:

AI systems are breaking the internet designed at human scale, making coordination, transactions, and the generation of voices, videos, and texts increasingly indistinguishable from human activities. We’ve already been troubled by CAPTCHA verifications; now we’re starting to see agents interact and transact like humans (as we previously reported).

The problem isn’t AI’s existence; it’s that the internet lacks native methods to distinguish humans from machines while maintaining privacy and usability.

This is where blockchain comes into play. Cryptocurrency can help build better AI systems, and vice versa—this idea may be subtle; so here we summarize several reasons why AI now needs blockchain more than ever.

1. The Cost of AI Imitating Humans

AI can mass-fake voices, faces, writing styles, videos, and entire social personas: an actor can impersonate thousands of accounts, opinions, clients, or voters at decreasing costs.

These impersonation strategies are not new. Any ambitious scammer has long been able to hire voice actors, fake calls, or send phishing texts. The new part is the price: scaling these attacks is becoming increasingly affordable.

Meanwhile, most online services assume one account per person. When this assumption fails, everything downstream collapses. Detection-based methods (like CAPTCHA) will inevitably fail because AI improves faster than the tests designed to catch it.

So where does blockchain come in? Decentralized proof-of-human or personal verification systems make it easy to become a participant, but difficult to sustain multiple identities. For example, scanning your iris and obtaining a World ID may be relatively easy and affordable, but acquiring a second one is nearly impossible.

This limits ID supply and increases the marginal cost for attackers, making large-scale impersonation harder for AI.

AI can fake content, but cryptography makes cheap impersonation of human uniqueness much more difficult. By restoring scarcity at the identity layer, blockchain raises the marginal cost of impersonation without adding friction to normal human behavior.

2. Creating Decentralized Systems to Prove Human Identity

Proving you are human can be done through digital IDs, which contain all the information a person can use to verify their identity—username, PIN, password, third-party attestations (like citizenship or creditworthiness), and other credentials.

What does cryptography add? Decentralization. Any identity system centered in the internet becomes a failure point. When agents act on behalf of humans—transacting, communicating, coordinating—who controls the identity effectively controls participation. Issuers can revoke access, levy fees, or assist in surveillance.

Decentralization reverses this dynamic: users, not platform gatekeepers, control their identities, making them more secure and censorship-resistant.

Unlike traditional identity systems, decentralized proof-of-human mechanisms allow users to control and manage their identities, and verify their humanity in a privacy-preserving and trust-minimized way.

3. AI Agents Need Portable Universal “Passports”

AI agents don’t stay in one place. A single agent can appear in chat apps, email threads, calls, browser sessions, and APIs. However, there’s no reliable way to know if interactions across these contexts point to the same agent with the same state, capabilities, and authorization provided by its “owner.”

Furthermore, binding an agent’s identity to just one platform or marketplace makes it unusable across other products and important venues.

Blockchain-based identity layers enable agents to have portable, universal “passports.” These identities can carry references to capabilities, permissions, and payment endpoints, and can be resolved from anywhere, making impersonation more difficult. This also allows builders to create more useful agents and better user experiences: agents can exist across multiple ecosystems without being locked into any specific platform.

4. Supporting Machine Payments

As AI agents increasingly transact on behalf of humans, existing payment systems become bottlenecks. Large-scale agent payments require new infrastructure, such as micro-payment systems capable of handling tiny transactions from many sources.

Many existing blockchain-based tools—Rollups and Layer 2 solutions, AI-native financial institutions, and financial infrastructure protocols—show promise in solving this problem, enabling near-zero-cost transactions and finer payment granularity.

Crucially, these tracks support machine-scale transactions—micro-payments, frequent interactions, and business between agents—that traditional financial systems cannot handle.

• Nano-payments can be distributed among multiple data providers, allowing a single user interaction to trigger micro-payments to all contributors via automated smart contracts.
• Smart contracts enable traceable, executable payments triggered after a transaction, compensating information sources that aid purchasing decisions with full transparency and traceability.
• Blockchain supports complex, programmable payment splits, ensuring fair distribution of revenue through code-enforced rules rather than centralized decisions, creating trustless financial relationships between autonomous agents.

5. Strengthening Privacy in AI Systems

Many security systems face a paradox: the more data they collect to protect users (such as social graphs, biometrics), the easier it becomes for AI to impersonate them.

This is where privacy and security become the same problem. The challenge is to make personal proof systems default to privacy, and to obfuscate information at every turning point, ensuring only humans can produce proofs of their humanity.

Blockchain-based systems paired with zero-knowledge proofs allow users to prove specific facts—PINs, ID numbers, qualification standards (like drinking age at a bar)—without revealing underlying data (such as address on a driver’s license).

Applications gain the assurances they need, and AI systems are denied access to the raw materials needed for impersonation. Privacy is no longer an overlay feature; it’s core defense.

AI makes scale cheap but trust difficult. Blockchain restores trust, raises impersonation costs, protects human-scale interactions, enables decentralized identities, defaults to strong privacy, and provides native economic constraints for agents.

If we want an internet where AI agents can operate without eroding trust, blockchain is not optional infrastructure but the missing layer to make an AI-native internet a reality.