The CEO of blockchain analytics firm Elliptic is sounding an alarm about artificial intelligence. Simone Maini warned this week that AI agents and automated payment systems could soon move money at a speed and volume that existing crypto monitoring tools simply weren't built to handle.
The scale problem
Maini's concern centers on pace. Today's surveillance systems — the ones exchanges, regulators, and law enforcement rely on — were designed for a world where humans initiate and review transactions. AI agents don't wait. They can execute thousands of micro-payments per second, shift funds across chains, and adapt routing in real time. Monitoring tools built for human-paced markets, Maini argued, risk falling behind almost immediately.
What's at stake
If the monitoring gap widens, bad actors could exploit the lag. Money laundering, sanctions evasion, and fraud could slip through while compliance teams scramble to catch up. The warning comes as the crypto industry pushes deeper into automated payments — from trading bots to AI-powered DeFi strategies. Elliptic itself builds analytics software, so Maini isn't just raising a theoretical flag; she's pointing at a business problem the sector will have to solve.
No fix yet
Maini didn't offer a specific solution during her remarks. The question hanging over the room is whether monitoring firms can retool fast enough — and whether exchanges and regulators will demand those upgrades before the next wave of AI-driven abuse hits.
