San Francisco — At NEARCON 2026, a high-stakes debate between Dragonfly partner Haseeb Qureshi and Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi crystallized a growing fault line in crypto: when — and how safely — autonomous AI agents will be trusted to manage real money.
Both participants agreed on the endgame: AI-driven wallets and trading agents will eventually handle capital. They diverged sharply on timing and acceptable risk. Qureshi cautioned that current systems are far from production-grade for meaningful financial use. “Something that works with money 90% of the time is unusable for actual economic activity,” he said, arguing that even 95% reliability leaves room for catastrophic, rare failures. Qureshi warned against reading too much into viral demos and social-media hype, pointing to real-world malfunctions and stressing that impressive demos don’t equal robust systems. For major consumer platforms, he put it bluntly: “You cannot do that sh**.”
Sethi offered the opposite posture: rapid, exponential improvement will quickly close the gap. He said Kraken is already developing agent-like features for customers and expects practical deployments in “weeks and months — not years.” He pointed to parallel growth in defensive measures, arguing the “security surface” can scale alongside expanding attack vectors.
The clash came to a head in a rapid-fire exchange on personal risk tolerance. Qureshi said he’d currently trust an AI with about 5% of his own crypto. Sethi answered 100% — and, when pressed on a timeline, predicted he would put “everything” into an autonomous agent within six to twelve months.
The conversation highlights a broader debate across crypto: is autonomous finance an imminent inevitability, or still an experimental frontier that requires stricter reliability thresholds before widespread rollout? The outcome will shape product roadmaps, custody models and how much risk firms accept as they race to automate capital management.
Related reading: Dragonfly recently raised $650 million.
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