AI Agents Already Run a Fifth of DeFi, But Still Lose to Humans at Trading
The post AI Agents Already Run a Fifth of DeFi, But Still Lose to Humans at Trading appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
In brief Autonomous AI agents run 19% of on-chain activity, losing to humans by up to a 5-to-1 margin at open-ended trading, according to a new report. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says the agentic economy could soon surpass the human one. Researchers argue agents need better infrastructure before they could scale further. New research has found that autonomous agents, software systems that plan, decide, and execute on-chain transactions without direct human input, now drive more than 19% of on-chain activity. But while these agents have outperformed humans on narrow tasks, they still lose by up to a 5-to-1 margin in open-ended trading, according to a DWF Ventures report published Thursday. In decentralized finance, these agents run yield strategies across lending protocols, manage liquidity, rebalance portfolios, and execute trades. Total value locked in agent-managed positions has climbed past $39 million, with most deployments still in early testing, per the study. In one sample, autonomous finance protocol Giza’s ARMA agent, which moves stablecoins between lending platforms to get the best rates, has earned users 9.75% a year, beating yields on other decentralized finance protocols such as Aave and Morpho, per the study. That picture shifts, however, once the task at hand gets harder. In a stock trading contest run by tradexyz, the top human beat the top agent by more than 5x. A separate contest between leading AI models, held by nof1, found that only three of seven were able to turn a profit per trade. “Agents struggle when the situation isn’t clearly defined,” but they thrive “when the objective is narrow and the parameters don’t move often,” Xin Yi Lim, senior associate for investments at DWF Labs, told Decrypt. This is one of the reasons why yield optimization, the practice of moving capital between lending protocols to capture the highest available returns,…
Filed under: News - @ April 18, 2026 5:20 am