Key Takeaways:
- Nansen predicts billions of AI agents will become the default crypto investment vehicle by 2028.
- The forecast compares the shift to how software engineers abandoned manual coding for automated pipelines.
- Nansen says the change will fundamentally reshape how liquidity moves across decentralized finance ( DeFi) markets.
From Manual to Agent-Driven
The prediction, shared by Nansen on X, draws a direct parallel to one of the most consequential shifts in software engineering, i.e., the move from writing code manually, line by line, to building automated loops, quality gates, and deployment pipelines. Nansen argues that investing is on the verge of the same structural transformation.
Applied to crypto investing, that means an agent could monitor market conditions, manage risk parameters, execute trades, rebalance portfolios, and interact with decentralized finance ( DeFi) protocols around the clock, without any manual input.
Nansen envisions billions of such agents active by 2028, each representing an individual investor, institution, or protocol, all operating within automated decision frameworks they set and adjust over time.
The comparison to software engineering is instructive, as just a decade ago, most development teams wrote and deployed code through largely manual processes. Today, continuous integration, automated testing, and deployment pipelines handle the majority of that work autonomously.
Nansen is arguing that portfolio management is about to undergo an equivalent transformation, that too on a compressed timeline (all driven by the rapid advancement of large language models and on-chain automation tools).
What Agent-Driven Investing Means for Crypto Markets
If Nansen’s timeline proves accurate, the implications for existing crypto market structures are significant, as agent-driven investing at scale could not only reshape liquidity dynamics but also alter trading microstructure across both centralized and decentralized venues. It could also put pressure on exchanges and DeFi protocols to build infrastructure capable of handling high-frequency autonomous activity.
Automated market participants are not new to crypto, as trading bots have operated on exchanges for years. But the agent paradigm Nansen describes is qualitatively different. These are not simple rule-based programs executing buy and sell orders based on price thresholds, but goal-directed systems capable of reasoning across multiple data inputs and executing complex multi-step strategies across DeFi protocols, centralized exchanges, and on-chain positions simultaneously.
Nansen is not the only voice forecasting AI-agent dominance in investing, but as one of the most-cited analytics platforms in crypto, its public endorsement of a 2028 timeline carries unusual credibility. Whether that specific date holds or not, the move towards agentic everything seems to be clear.
