May 31, 2026
The blockchain industry has lost sight of the vision for why we all got into the space in the first place.
Blockchain and crypto was born out of the 2008 financial crisis. It exists to democratise something as important as personal finance and put sovereignty back in the hands of individuals.
Freedom should mean freedom to decide how and where to store our money. How to spend it and what risk to take with it. Society's assumption of guilt upon civilisation is inherently a violation of our rights.
Blockchain was born to circumvent this. Scams overtook the industry as an attempt to destabilise this mission. Aweh remains fully committed to this vision. We believe in a decentralised future and freedom of finances for all around the world. No more corrupt institutions selling us on false promises while we only serve to lose by banking with them. Access to finance and investments should be a basic human right.
Big banks using blockchain for payments defeats this purpose.
JPMorgan runs Kinexys, formerly JPM Coin, on a permissioned ledger where JPMorgan controls access and validation. Citi Token Services operates inside Citi's closed infrastructure. HSBC Orion settles tokenised assets between institutions. Fnality is building interbank settlement on a chain where the participating banks are the validators.
None of them are decentralised. They are private databases with faster settlement and a communications team fluent in blockchain vocabulary.
Banks capture the cost savings rather than pass them on to the consumer. They operate the rails. They keep the margin. The customer gets a cleaner app and faster confirmations, which is not what the white paper described.
Payments and transacting should be free and cheap. Both locally and globally. Exorbitant fees charged by institutions are borderline extortionary.
There is no technical justification for payment fees at scale in 2025. The marginal cost of updating a ledger entry is near zero. Banks charge because they own the rails. Blockchain was built to remove that toll.
A cross-border payment through a major UK high-street bank takes two to three business days and costs 3-5% combined fee and FX spread. On a public blockchain it settles in minutes at a fraction of a penny. The technology has existed for years. The gap is not about capability. It is about who controls the infrastructure.
When banks talk about "blockchain innovation," they mean reducing their own costs. Their customers are not the beneficiaries. Their shareholders are.
The introduction of AI agents changes this entirely.
AI agents will become the new operating layer of the decentralised financial ecosystem. Not because they are impressive technology. Because they replace the human middle layer banks have built their entire business model around.
Bank operations teams do relationship management, compliance checking, account opening, KYC verification, order routing, reconciliation, and dispute resolution. These are processes, not wisdom. Rules applied to data, repeatedly, at scale. AI agents do all of this. Faster, cheaper, and without the branches, call centres, and six-figure managers in between.
The bank manager, the relationship manager, the entire ops desk, compressed into agent software. Anyone with a wallet and an internet connection gets the same service tier as a private banking client. No minimum balance. No approval gate. No human intermediary deciding whether you meet the criteria for access to your own money.
This is not a distant prospect. DeFi already automates yield, lending, and liquidity. Bittensor, Fetch.ai, and Olas are building agent infrastructure now. Across and UniswapX route execution through solver networks. The agent handles the mechanics. The user specifies the outcome.
What AI agents add is the intelligence layer: interpreting intent, routing optimally, managing risk dynamically, interacting with permissionless infrastructure without a human at any point in the chain. The bank's value proposition was always access and trust. AI agents deliver both. Without the institution in the middle.
An institution sees a technology threatening its position. It builds its own version. It markets the result as progress while keeping the existing power structure intact.
Public blockchains resist this. No corporation seizes the Bitcoin network. No regulator shuts down Ethereum. The open infrastructure grows regardless of whether incumbents want it to. The only question is how many people choose to use it over the alternative being offered to them.
The answer gets clearer every time a bank sends a fee notification for a transfer worth nothing to process.
Be your own bank. Have control over your finances. And you have the freedom to do what you want with your money. That is a basic human right. No exceptions.
Interested in learning more about our research and investment strategies?
Contact Us