Back in 1990's
A couple of months ago, Arthur Hayes, a well-known crypto influencer and former CEO of the BitMex crypto exchange, published an essay called Quid pro Stablecoin. In it, he described in detail his current thoughts on the future of stablecoins and how the U.S. government is involved in their development. However, one rather curious fact, mentioned briefly, caught my attention. Arthur Hayes notes that, according to rough estimates, American “Too Big To Fail” banks (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BNY Mellon and State Street) spend about 20 billion dollars a year on compliance procedures. So why is this fact so remarkable?
How does a bank actually work? Person A sends money to Person B by making a bank transfer. The button in the app is pressed, the money is sent. But Person B receives it only after a certain amount of time. Between sending and receiving the funds, both bank accounts are checked by the system. Certain “suspicious” cases are passed on for manual review. When this happens, a back-office employee checks whether the transaction is safe and reviews the sender’s bank account. If everything is fine, the transaction is approved.
In addition, new users must pass KYC/AML checks and must not appear on sanction lists. All this is also monitored by back-office employees. Banks, in turn, have to pay salaries to a whole army of workers and maintain huge offices.
And here comes the key question: why keep using 1990s technology and carry enormous OPEX, if all of this could be replaced with one simple if→then code?
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For a long time, this approach made sense, since code could be hacked, and data centers with servers could shut down due to wiring faults or even a fire in the building. However, the 2010s brought us the technology of smart contracts, and the 2020s — viable AI agents.
Today, it is entirely possible to safely and efficiently move linear compliance control processes to the blockchain and have an AI agent run them 24/7, with no weekends, no lunch breaks, and most importantly — without a salary. This would make it possible to cut up to 90% of back-office staff, keeping only a minimum number of employees for processes that require human judgment (money laundering through complex financial schemes, disputed transactions between countries with unclear status, legal conflicts). It would also reduce the human factor, lowering the chance of error. Transactions would become cheaper and faster, since even on weekends and holidays the system would not stop working, and the AI agent would operate much faster than a person. And most importantly — it would be secure.
The key advantage of smart contracts is their security. If hacker wants to change a smart contract, he has to attack not the contract itself but the entire blockchain on which it is based. Apart from a 51% attack, this cannot be done. At the same time, a 51% attack on a large blockchain (Ethereum, Solana, Binance Smart Chain) would be extremely expensive, and therefore simply unprofitable (try to buy 51% of the supply of these networks on the market, and you will see how prices go to the moon).
So why hasn’t this been implemented yet? The answer is quite simple. Banking is an incredibly conservative business. In this industry, it is crucial that someone takes responsibility for every decision. And AI agents cannot take responsibility.
There is also another factor preventing the adoption of blockchain and AI technologies in everyday banking processes — regulators. Technological progress moves much faster than the law. For now, such matters remain outside the legal framework. Banks simply cannot afford to introduce a technology that could be changed tomorrow by order from above.
So what can be done in this case? Show interest in blockchain technology, expand the crypto community, and support the growth of the entire ecosystem. The sooner cryptocurrency and blockchain reach mass adoption, the sooner we will see these technologies applied in everyday life. I do not believe in the complete displacement of banks and their replacement by cryptocurrencies, as early Bitcoin-maxis predicted, but a symbiosis is quite possible. And I would very much like to see this in the nearest future.
