Crypto’s AI Pivot: Hype, Infrastructure and a Two-Year Countdown

Artificial intelligence dominated Consensus Hong Kong 2026, with voices ranging from government officials endorsing a nascent machine economy to venture capitalists declaring the crypto AI hype cycle over. Byteplus said multiple major exchanges are already running its AI agent products for intelligent customer service, multi-agent research and AML workflow automation, and described a safety architecture that can kill agents that breach set boundaries.

The company predicted that within two years every exchange employee will have an enterprise-grade AI assistant and onboarding will become far simpler. Ben Goertzel gave a provocative timeline, suggesting humans have roughly two years before AI surpasses them in strategic thinking, while his Quantium project already predicts short-term Bitcoin volatility with high accuracy.

Bitget CEO Gracy Chen likened current AI trading bots to supervised interns and warned human intervention remains essential in novel market events, though she saw many roles migrating to AI within three to five years.

crypto ai, consensus hong, byteplus, ai agents, aml automation, ai assistants, ben goertzel, bitcoin volatility, bitget, machine economy