There's a quickly growing subset of DeFi that is seeing economic agentic swarms change how consumers interact with protocols. Fleets of specialized AI agents that sense, decide & execute faster than any human money manager or trader are driving this. What is an agentic swarm? Agents can do anything a human can, only in a predetermined way that often automates an individual task. You could consider these to be 'narrow agents'. Each of these agents has their own set of inputs focused on a single output. An agentic swarm = many narrow agents sharing a memory + negotiation layer. Individually agents are useful; as a collective, they gain intelligence. Swarm intelligence underpins emergent DeFi strategies. The whole is smarter (and safer) than any single bot, and this is where agents can become very powerful. Why DeFi? In short, the public ledger of blockchains and on-chain finance is a dream come true for an agent. They rely on open smart-contract data feeds, permissionless APIs, atomic transactions, and on-chain truth. Agents have all the data they need, they just need a wallet, gas and the ability to operate with smart contracts. Infrastructure needs to make sure that the agents actions are verifiable and the agents configuration is immutable, and this is now readilly available. So today’s DeFi has messy user experience, with isolated bots and zero coordination, and swarms can help manage this complexity. But what does this actually look like? What happens in a DeFi "bundle" handled by an agentic swarm Imagine capital sitting as USDC on Arbitrum. You want to move to a higher-yield USDC strategy on Ethereum mainnet in one orchestrated flow. A swarm decomposes the mission into discrete, independently testable agent roles. In this example there might be a number of agents coordinating to execute for the user, imagine: > YieldAgent evaluates potential venues for your capital, assessing APYs across different money markets, while assessing liquidity caps, lockup terms, and reward tokens. > Route/SwapAgent prices best path across DEX routers factoring slippage, gas, and MEV protection options. > BridgeAgent queries supported bridges and understands the cost, bridge time, and historical reliability. It then proposes route and prepares the backend blockchain stuff. > SimulationAgent models after-gas net yield and break-even time vs. staying put, and models how the pool yield might change post depositing. This all could be underpinned by a RiskAgent that assesses the route and ensures your funds are not routed through a deprecated bridge or exposed to governance issues, for example. The example above is somewhat humanized. Agents can live across different layers and can have specialized roles around individual areas of the on-chain financial environment, which can get very technically nuanced. For those comfortable with managing funds on-chain, this example probably doesn't offer a great deal of upside. But for consumers who want to access DeFi yields without human oversight, this could underpin a simple method for them to deposit stablecoins and access 5-6-7% yields. Things start to get really interesting when generative token economics powered by swarms. I will dive into this at a later date.