Korea Blockchain Week asks whether blockchains are ready for AI agents

Blockchains were built to move money between people. The next wave of users may not be people at all.

That tension sat at the center of Korea Blockchain Week 2026 in Seoul. Speakers there argued that conventional, transaction-oriented blockchains may not be equipped to support an economy run by autonomous AI agents.

The loudest version of that argument came from Michael Heinrich, CEO of 0G Labs. His view: legacy chain designs handle payments well, but AI agents need a lot more than payments.

What happened in Seoul

KBW2026 ran from September 29 to October 1 at Walkerhill Hotels & Resorts in Seoul. FactBlock hosted the event, and Upbit served as presenting partner.

The organizing theme was the so-called agentic economy. The term describes a world where software agents act on their own, buying services, paying for data and settling bills with other machines.

Heinrich delivered a keynote titled “The Trillion-Dollar Agentic Economy” on September 30. His core point was that most Layer 1 blockchains are designed primarily for financial transactions. Layer 1 refers to a base network, the foundational chain that everything else is built on top of.

AI agents, the argument goes, need several things a payment-focused chain does not natively provide:

• Machine-native identity: a way to prove which agent is which, and who stands behind it.
• Verifiable computing: proof that an agent actually ran the computation it claims to have run.
• Data handling at massive scale: storage and throughput far beyond what typical on-chain systems manage.
• Programmatic, high-volume settlement: payments between machines that happen constantly, automatically and in large numbers.

The proposed fixes

The discussions in Seoul pointed toward a bundle of integrated tools rather than a single upgrade. Among them: Agentic ID standards, verifiable computing through Trusted Execution Environments, high-throughput decentralized storage and new protocols such as x402.

Trusted Execution Environments, or TEEs, are secure zones inside a processor. Code running there is isolated, so outsiders can check that the output came from the intended program without tampering.

0G Labs has built its own version of this stack. The company describes three layers: verifiable compute, Agentic ID and decentralized storage rated at 50 Gbps throughput.

The x402 payment standard drew attention as evidence that machine-to-machine payments are already happening at scale. By mid-2026, x402 had processed more than 200 million transactions.

Why banks and regulators showed up

KBW is traditionally a crypto-native crowd. This year, banks and policymakers were also in the room.

Their interest tracks a practical problem. AI agents often cannot engage effectively with traditional financial systems, which leaves blockchain and stablecoin infrastructure as a plausible settlement layer for them.

Korea’s own policy agenda featured heavily too. Conversations covered the country’s tokenized securities initiatives, the Project Hangang central bank digital currency pilot and developments around won-denominated stablecoins.

The tokenized securities framework is set to take effect in February 2027. Project Hangang is the Bank of Korea’s CBDC pilot, a test of how a digital version of the national currency might work. Won stablecoins represent the private-sector counterpart to that effort.

What this means

For builders, the message from Seoul was a challenge to general-purpose chains. If Heinrich and others are right, simply making existing blockchains faster will not be enough. Agents need identity, compute verification and storage designed in from the start, not bolted on later.

Worth noting: the people arguing that blockchains need AI-specific infrastructure are, in several cases, the people selling AI-specific infrastructure. That does not make the argument wrong. It does make independent adoption data, like x402’s transaction count, more useful than keynote titles.

Korea combines a large retail crypto base, an active exchange sector represented by Upbit, a live CBDC pilot, a tokenized securities framework taking effect in February 2027, and an ongoing debate over won stablecoins.

The key things to track from here: whether Agentic ID standards gain adoption beyond individual projects, whether x402 volumes keep climbing, and how Korean regulators treat stablecoins as the February 2027 tokenized securities start date approaches.