Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Agents in Decentralized Finance: Governance, Coordination, and Value Creation

Abstract

The rapid convergence of artificial intelligence and decentralized finance is creating a new class of autonomous digital actors capable of participating in market coordination, governance processes, and economic value creation with limited human intervention. This study develops a conceptual framework for examining the economic, organizational, and governance implications of autonomous artificial intelligence agents in decentralized finance. The findings reveal that artificial intelligence agents are evolving beyond simple automation tools and increasingly function as autonomous institutional actors that influence market behavior, community formation, and decentralized governance. The analysis identifies four major application domains—trading and analytics, development infrastructure, meme and sentiment formation, and entertainment and virtual influence—each characterized by distinct mechanisms of value creation and stakeholder engagement. The study further demonstrates that governance outcomes depend on the interaction between agent autonomy and the distribution of decision-making authority, creating important trade-offs among efficiency, transparency, accountability, and innovation. The findings also indicate that symbolic value, community participation, and cultural narratives have become major drivers of market capitalization, often exceeding the importance of functional utility. While autonomous agents offer opportunities to reduce coordination costs and improve information processing, they simultaneously generate new challenges related to algorithmic opacity, regulatory uncertainty, security vulnerabilities, and governance concentration. By integrating insights from transaction cost economics, principal-agent theory, bounded rationality, and socio-technical systems perspectives, this study provides a multidisciplinary framework for understanding the institutional transformation occurring at the intersection of artificial intelligence and decentralized finance. The study contributes to emerging debates on digital governance and offers directions for future research on the design, regulation, and governance of autonomous financial systems.