Independent, privately owned fiduciary and investment services company
By Mark Le Page
We are looking forward to the results of the Guernsey Financial Services Commission’s consultation on Digital Finance. This is a welcome declaration of Guernsey’s intent to be in the coterie of jurisdictions offering a home to responsible Digital Finance businesses.
It also reflects a global attitude change. Regulators are providing guidance on tokenisation, welcoming cryptoasset custody and stablecoin activity within banks, and enforcement agencies are pulling away from action against large exchanges.
This article looks at where Digital Finance is going.
Agentic AI
It is well known that crypto assets and public blockchains provide a programmable, globally interoperable settlement layer. Agentic AI fits perfectly into this ecosphere. Agentic AI is a piece of software (an “agent”) that can perceive, reason, and act with minimal human supervision.
Thus, these agents can hold wallets, pay for services, execute smart contracts, and earn a return, known as staking yield. They can plan multistep tasks, invoke tools and APIs, coordinate with other agents, and execute actions toward a goal
Why is Agentic AI new?
Unlike traditional chatbots, agentic systems have control loops for perception, planning, action, and reflection, and they integrate with enterprise software or external services to complete work. Little human intervention is required.
Agents are also not Large Language Model assistants: they orchestrate workflows, not just generate text.
How have they developed?
Businesses started testing agentic AI in an initial speculative phase (late 2024) featuring “on-chain agents” and tokens designed for the task. This was somewhat of a purist approach. This year has seen a more pragmatic second wave where real software has been built, at an advanced stage, and which has safeguards around how far an agentic AI can go – known as crypto rails. This ensures funding, distribution, and monetisation of assets occur within expected parameters.
Advantages of Agentic AI
If agents can hold and allocate assets, staking on proof-of-stake (PoS) networks, then the following advantages may be reasonably assumed:
Conclusion
Agentic AI is recognised as the most promising next step in Digital Finance. However, this assumes regulatory clarity around staking, especially custodial “staking as a service”.
For this reason, we, in Guernsey, are eagerly anticipating the results of the consultation.