AI Agents Could Put ...

AI Agents Could Put Blockchain Blockspace to the Ultimate Stress Test

By José Oramas September 18, 2026 In AI, Blockchain

Avalanche Treasury Company CEO Bart Smith stated “block space is not infinite anymore” in a 16 September interview at the Avalanche Summit in New York.
Smith argued even low-end forecasts for AI agent activity in financial markets would land on blockchains, making technical differences between Avalanche, Solana and Ethereum increasingly significant.
His Nasdaq-listed firm held about 15.3 million AVAX, worth roughly US$100 million (AU$141 million) as of 30 June, while AVAX traded at US$7.69 (AU$10.84) on Friday.

Avalanche Treasury Company chief executive Bart Smith says the spread of artificial intelligence agents through financial markets could overwhelm blockchain capacity.

He warned in an interview at the Avalanche Summit in New York that “there’s not enough block space” and that blockspace “is not infinite anymore”.

“If we hit any of the low-end expectations of what agentic activity is going to happen as AI gets into financial markets, all of that’s going to be on blockchains too”, Smith stated. Smith spent nearly 14 years at trading firm Susquehanna, where he ran its crypto unit as chief executive, before taking the helm of the treasury firm in September 2025.

Network Differences Set to Matter

Smith argued the engineering trade-offs between Avalanche (AVAX), Solana (SOL), Ethereum (ETH) and other layer 1 networks have drawn little attention while capacity stayed abundant, describing them as “nuanced differences, in a theoretical world”.

He tied the capacity call to a prediction that traditional markets will run 24 hours a day, five days a week, by mid-2027. “You’re going to have to create a new infrastructure, and you’re not going to build that infrastructure the old way. You’re gonna build it on blockchains”, he stated.

Demand-side forecasts have been stacking up across the industry, with Nansen’s chief executive betting that AI trading agents will outnumber human traders within two years and Base creator Jesse Pollak arguing autonomous agents are already pushing payments onto crypto rails, while Big Tech companies race to build rails for agentic spending.