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The crypto market has grown staggeringly complex, with DeFi on-chain volumes alone exceeding $20 billion and on-chain derivatives topping $1 trillion in monthly volume. Yet information has continued to remain fragmented across countless platforms, leaving certain market makers with an edge when it comes to speed/data accrual (leaving the playing field between casual crypto traders and pros anything but level).
At the same time, AI too has woven its way into everyday financial tools be it algorithmic trading bots or even chatbots offering investment tips. As a result, the question is no longer if AI can assist in crypto trading, but how best to integrate it. And with the crypto market running 24/7, the appeal of an AI interface capable of browsing, analyzing, and even executing trades autonomously is growing.
Within this context, New York-based Donut Labs has emerged as one of the early movers betting that AI agents within traditional web browsers can empower the average crypto trader. The six-month-old startup has already secured $22 million in funding across pre-seed and seed rounds to build what it calls the first browser of this kind.
Backed by a roster of major players including BITKRAFT Ventures, Makers Fund, Sky9 Capital (alongside contributions from blockchain ecosystems like Solana and Sui), Donut has already seen 160,000 users sign up for its pre-launch waitlist. On the development, founder and CEO Chris Zhu recently opined: “Browsers haven’t really changed in 30 years. We wanted to build the largest front end on the internet – but do that for crypto”.
From the outside looking in, Donut is an AI-driven “agentic” browser that can autonomously research market data, analyze risks, and execute on-chain trades across different sites and exchanges. Instead of users juggling numerous exchange tabs, charting tools, and news feeds, Donut’s built-in AI agent monitors these for them. It’s essentially like having a personal quant trader living within a browser.
Even more crucially, Donut’s agentic framework doesn't just spit out advice but rather automates crypto trading tasks end-to-end, finding a price discrepancy or arbitrage across a myriad of DeFi exchanges (even going as far as suggesting a strategy, and executing on-chain transactions on the user’s behalf). All this happens within the familiar browser interface.
Additionally, the platform has been positioned as a continuously learning trading partner, one that adapts to a user’s behavior to tailor strategies over time. In fast-moving crypto markets, speed is paramount, so Donut’s agent is built for real-time decision making. By executing trades directly through the browser, it eliminates the latency and manual steps that can slow down human traders.
To deliver on its aforementioned promises, Donut’s team (which includes alumni of AI teams at Meta, TikTok, and Tencent) has prioritized security, using layered permissions and an innovative approach to prevent so-called prompt injection attacks where malicious website content might trick the AI.
For example, Donut processes any trade authorizations on a secure backend rather than letting the AI freely click around or access wallet keys. Not only that, the browser is integrated with a key management firm (Turnkey) so that AI agents never sees the user’s private keys or balances directly.
If that wasn’t enough, different tasks are split into “levels” of autonomy, from read-only research up to fully automated trading that still requires user confirmation for big moves. By structuring access and actions in this careful way, Donut is looking to build user trust while forging a delicate balance between empowerment and control.
Lastly, after having raised a combined $22 million in just half a year, Donut Labs is pouring these funds into bringing its product to the market. The startup plans to roll out a full suite of offerings (including a standalone browser application, a browser extension, a web app and a mobile app) in the near term.
Donut’s offering is part of a wider realization in tech, that web browsers themselves can evolve into smart, autonomous assistants. In recent months, major AI players and startups alike have started experimenting with agentic browsers with OpenAI recently unveiled ChatGPT Atlas, an AI-powered web browser built on the Chromium engine. Similarly, Perplexity too has launched its own browser called Comet, which weaves an AI assistant into its users’ web experience.
That said, the vision behind these offerings still needs to be refined but the idea that a browser can trade one’s assets can only succeed if users trust the platform. What’s clear, however, is that the line between “browser” and “trading platform” is blurring. Donut Labs’ hefty funding and long waitlist show an appetite for change in the crypto community and even the broader tech industry is hinting that tomorrow’s internet might be navigated with the help of AI copilots .
Therefore, as AI and block tech continue to converge, the humble web browser may well evolve into a cockpit where human intuition and machine intelligence trade side by side, ushering in a new era of intelligent trading.
