Dragonfly Exec Warns: Agentic Payments Aren’t Ready, Adoption May Take Years

Dragonfly’s Haseeb says agentic payments are coming but years away. Here’s why crypto may be moving too fast on timelines.

Dragonfly Managing Partner Haseeb Qureshi is pumping the brakes on agentic payments hype.

He shared his thoughts in response to a Forbes reporter’s piece on crypto and the agentic economy.

The article featured several crypto leaders and payments experts. Haseeb described his take as the most bearish in the piece. He took to X to explain his reasoning in detail.

Why Agentic Payments in Crypto Are Not Ready Yet

Haseeb drew a historical comparison to make his point. He pointed to the computer mouse, first invented in 1964.

Despite its promise, mainstream adoption took decades. He argued that agents are in a similar early stage right now.

He acknowledged the excitement around tools like OpenClaw. But he was direct about its current state.

According to Haseeb, OpenClaw is buggy, complicated, and unreliable for managing money. He noted it regularly makes poor financial decisions during tasks.

The core issue, he explained, is that current models handle tasks outside their training data. That gap is what makes the experience feel broken.

The underlying technology simply has not caught up to the vision yet.

_Read also: _****Solana Now Supports MPP for AI Agent Payments

What It Will Take for Agents to Handle Payments Reliably

Haseeb pointed to reinforcement learning as the missing piece. No major AI lab has yet trained models directly on OpenClaw interaction data.

But he noted that data is now abundant across every leading lab. Once labs begin training on those traces, performance should improve sharply.

He expects a next-generation model release within months.

That shift, he said, would mark the end of the tinkerer phase. Early adopters would then start to follow. But he was clear that the early majority is still years away.

Volume data backs up his position.

Haseeb cited x402 processing roughly one million dollars in daily volume. The MPP protocol is doing even less. He used that data to show that agentic payments remain firmly in the experimental stage.

Agentic payments will be a huge trend. But it’s not here yet. I had the most bearish take in this article, and I want to explain why, because crypto has a bad habit of getting high on its own supply and giving unrealistic timelines about technology.

Take the mouse. This is what… https://t.co/Q6pElYnrv4 pic.twitter.com/vl0u1bLVKq

— Haseeb ＞|＜ (@hosseeb) March 25, 2026

Crypto’s Long-Term Bet on the Agentic Economy

Haseeb did not dismiss the long-term case.

He was firm that agents will eventually reshape how money moves globally.

The trajectory, he said, follows a familiar adoption curve. Early adopters come first, then the early majority, then the rest.

He referenced a quote from investor Chris Dixon to close his argument. The idea is that what today’s early users explore on evenings and weekends becomes mainstream within a decade.

Haseeb sees agentic payments fitting that pattern exactly.

His broader warning was about crypto’s tendency to inflate timelines. He urged the industry to stay grounded. The technology is real and the direction is right.

But getting there will take patience, not hype.