VeChain CEO Says AI Agents Need Blockchain Passports to Earn Trust

Sunny Lu thinks AI agents will be the thing that finally drags blockchain into the mainstream — not as a buzzword, but as plumbing. The VeChain co-founder and CEO says round-the-clock autonomous agents will need a way for people to check who they are and whether they can be trusted. His answer, delivered Wednesday on Cointelegraph's Chain Reaction show: put them on a blockchain.

In Lu's pitch, every agent gets a digital passport. Those agents operate inside what he calls a decentralized credibility system, where reputation is tracked for both the agent and whoever built it. Smart contracts handle the actual transactions — agent to agent, or agent to human. Trust, in other words, becomes something you can verify rather than something you have to assume.

Lu made the argument while talking up VeWorld.ai, an agent-building platform running on VeChain's blockchain. It's not the network's first swing at real-world adoption: VeChain has spent years pushing supply-chain tracking, including projects that trace food from source to shelf.

The bigger prize, per Lu, is who gets to build. Agent-building tools could let people without any coding background spin their expertise into a product, much the way app stores let individual developers ship and monetize software. That opens the door to specialists, people with deep local knowledge, and hobbyists alike. Lu has been testing it himself — an educational agent for his daughter, a helper for his mother's daily routine and recovery, and a virtual employee handling purchasing, inventory, sales and operations for an acquaintance's shop in Milan.

Not everyone is sold on handing the keys over. Animoca Brands chairman Yat Siu told Cointelegraph in an October interview that crypto traders could keep AI agents working around the clock, but warned that users risk building trading strategies on services they don't control. Lu's bet is that blockchain fixes exactly that gap.