Nansen CEO bets on AI agents to overtake human traders within two years

Quick Take

• Nansen CEO Alex Svanevik expects AI trading agents to overtake human traders within about two years, and is rebuilding the analytics platform around execution to get there.
• Of the top 15 perpetual futures traded on Nansen, roughly 10 are non-crypto --- SpaceX, the S&P 500, gold and oil among them, Svanevik said.

Alex Svanevik expects AI trading agents to overtake human traders within roughly two years, and he is rebuilding Nansen around that wager.

The onchain analytics firm, which Svanevik co-founded and runs as CEO, has moved from surfacing data to letting users trade directly, a shift he described on The Block's daily show, The Starting Block. The company has done a little over $500 million in trading volume since launching the feature, he said.

"I would be very surprised if we don't have more trading agents than humans, you know, within two years," Svanevik said. The product vision reduces to a single line, in his telling: trade everything on chain with agents.

Getting there requires three shifts at once, from analytics to execution, from crypto-only to every asset class, and from humans picking tokens to agents picking them, Svanevik told The Block.

Why agents beat humans

Svanevik's case for why agents win rests on their behavior, not just their speed. Human retail traders are "quite sheep-like," he said, prone to piling into the same trades.

Agents draw on more varied inputs, models and tooling, which he argued makes them more diverse than the humans they would replace. That flexibility cuts both ways. Because the agents run on inference rather than fixed rules, their inputs can be contaminated or poisoned to steer their behavior, Svanevik said, a risk he said Nansen has to close off before putting the product in users' hands.

The research is unglamorous in the interim. One of Nansen's trading agents turned $23 in profit while burning $700 in inference costs, Svanevik said, an imbalance he shared to illustrate how early the economics still are.

Nansen's edge, in his account, comes from more than 500 million labeled blockchain addresses accumulated over six years, data he said lets agents see activity on-chain that would otherwise be invisible.

Everything is going onchain

The clearest sign of where markets are heading sits in what Nansen users already trade. Of the top 15 perpetual futures on the platform, about 10 are non-crypto, spanning SpaceX, the S&P 500, gold, silver, crude oil and Brent, Svanevik said.

Nansen added Robinhood to the platform this week, with trading on Robinhood set to switch on within days, he said.

Centralized exchanges will struggle to follow, in his view, held back by licensed businesses that constrain what they can do with agentic trading and by lucrative legacy operations that the technology disrupts.

For now, the tooling isn't ready. Svanevik said Nansen is holding its autonomous agents back rather than shipping what he called slop, running them through backtesting and paper trading before they touch real funds. He put the genuine advantage still months away, against a flippening he expects inside two years.