The promise sounds almost too simple: Tell an artificial intelligence what you want from your crypto portfolio, in your own words, and watch it trade. No Python scripts. No flowcharts mapping out conditional logic. Just conversation.
That's the pitch Walbi unveiled on March 9, 2026, stepping into a market where automation has long been synonymous with either steep learning curves or cookie-cutter templates. The Dubai-based fintech—though "Dubai-based" turns out to be something of a misnomer, more on that shortly—says its AI trading agents respond to plain-English instructions: risk tolerance, timeframes, entry and exit thresholds. Adjustments happen through chat. The agents monitor portfolio positions, technical indicators, an economic calendar, the Fear & Greed Index, even liquidation data, then execute trades accordingly.
"Retail traders are familiar with automation, but most existing tools require coding or rigid rule configuration," Anthony Cerullo, Walbi's Chief Communications Officer, said in the announcement. "Our goal with AI agents is to make strategy automation accessible through dialogue."
It's an appealing vision, particularly for the slice of retail traders who understand what they want but lack the technical chops—or patience—to build it themselves. Whether Walbi can deliver on that vision, and whether it can do so transparently, is another matter entirely.
The Mechanics: Agents, Marketplaces, and OpenAI's Plumbing
Walbi's platform runs on OpenAI's API, which powers what the company calls an "AI Agent Strategy Development" workflow. Users describe strategies in conversational language; the system translates that into executable trades. Alongside the development tool sits an agent marketplace—a social layer where pre-built strategies are displayed with performance histories, risk metrics, follower counts, and strategy types laid bare.
Deploy someone else's agent, and its creator earns a share of your profits. At least, that's how Walbi describes the arrangement on its website. The marketplace went live at launch, the company says, and as of March 9 the platform claimed 2.9 million registered users. That's up from "surpassed two million" cited in a September 2025 review by BitDegree, an education platform—so growth, if the figures hold, has been brisk.
A 14-week closed beta ran from October 2025 through January 2026. More than 1,000 participants created over 9,500 agents and executed 187,000 autonomous trades during that window. Walbi reported mixed outcomes—majority positive, though not across the board—with momentum-based configurations that leaned on Fear & Greed data and liquidation insights performing most consistently when volatility spiked.
That's a fair amount of real-world testing, at least in volume terms. But volume isn't the same as transparency, and Walbi's disclosures elsewhere leave plenty of room for questions.
A Crowded Field, and Everyone's Adding AI
The retail crypto automation space has never been short on competition. Platforms like 3Commas, Coinrule, Pionex, and Bitsgap have offered DCA bots, grid trading, and copy-trading for years, mostly built on rule-based logic or templated strategies that span multiple exchanges.
Walbi's differentiator, in theory, is the conversational interface. Instead of constructing "if-then" logic chains or picking from preset bot menus, users type what they want. The agents then adapt—news, social sentiment, market shifts—in real time, according to the company's materials.
But the field is moving. Pionex recently added AI-driven slippage control to its grid bots. Coinbase launched an AI agent wallet with built-in guardrails last month. Nansen rolled out "Nansen AI," a mobile agent, back in October. The broader crypto ecosystem is in a race to embed AI into trading infrastructure, and Walbi is one runner among many, not the only one with conversational ambitions.
The Fee Fog
Here's where things get murky, and where a retail trader might reasonably hesitate.
Walbi's homepage declares: "No Hidden Fees: No commissions for creating agents." That sounds reassuring. But what about the actual trades those agents execute?
The company's fee structure is... opaque. A September BitDegree review claimed Walbi "doesn't charge any market maker/taker fees." Yet an Intercom Help Center article from mid-2025 references "fee rebate vouchers" that return part of commissions—which implies commissions exist in the first place. A Reddit post from June 2025 alleged a 10% effective fee on a leveraged gold position, though that claim is anecdotal, disputed in replies, and hard to verify.
As of March 12, no official, dated fee schedule appears on Walbi's website. Does "no hidden fees" apply only to agent creation, or to trading activity as well? The company hasn't clarified. For retail traders weighing the platform, this kind of opacity is more than an inconvenience—it's a red flag.
Dubai Dateline, Caribbean Registry
Walbi's launch materials carry a Dubai dateline, which lends a certain gleam of legitimacy. Dubai has positioned itself as a crypto hub, complete with the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) to oversee the industry.
But scratch the surface, and the legal picture shifts. According to Walbi's Terms of Use, effective July 1, 2023, the entity behind the platform is Walbi LLC, registered in St. Vincent and the Grenadines under registration number 3001 LLC 2023. The registered address: Euro House, Richmond Hill Road, Kingstown. Business address: Ginger Village, Belmont.
St. Vincent and the Grenadines is a familiar domicile for offshore financial services, crypto platforms among them. The terms also list a sprawling set of restricted jurisdictions: the United States, Canada (including British Columbia), the United Kingdom, the European Union and European Economic Area, Australia, Japan, Russia. In other words, the service isn't offered to users in most major Western markets.
No public record confirms that Walbi holds a VARA license. The company's Terms of Use and Privacy Policy make no mention of VARA licensure. For a platform using a Dubai dateline and claiming nearly 3 million users, that absence is notable. Perhaps the company operates from Dubai in some operational sense, or markets itself there. But the regulatory footing remains unclear.
Trustpilot Grumbles and Third-Party Skepticism
Walbi's Trustpilot page carries mixed reviews. Complaints from March and April 2025, and again in January 2026, describe deposit delays—users waiting on funds, struggling to get timely responses from support. Company representatives have replied, asking for transaction IDs and support contacts, which suggests at least some effort at resolution. Still, these are anecdotal, but they surface a theme: customer support can be sluggish when things go wrong.
Third-party review aggregators like Sitejabber flagged "suspicious review activity" on Walbi's page, per a snapshot from three weeks ago. Scam-checking tools assign the platform a "medium trust score," though such tools vary wildly in methodology and shouldn't be taken as gospel.
None of this proves malfeasance. But it does suggest Walbi has credibility work ahead, particularly with retail traders unfamiliar with offshore-registered platforms or wary of customer service gaps.
The Bigger Picture
Walbi has planted itself at the intersection of AI and retail crypto trading—a space that's growing fast, fragmented, and largely unregulated outside a handful of jurisdictions. The natural language interface genuinely sets it apart from rule-based competitors, and the agent marketplace adds a social dimension that could appeal to traders who'd rather follow proven strategies than build from scratch.
But the questions pile up. The fee structure is opaque. The regulatory status is ambiguous at best. User complaints, while anecdotal, hint at operational growing pains. And the market is filling up with AI-powered trading tools from better-known brands—Coinbase, Pionex, Nansen—whose disclosures, for all their faults, tend to be clearer.
For retail traders, the pitch is compelling in theory. A conversational AI that handles the drudgery of execution, a marketplace where strategies can be shared and monetized—it's easy to see the appeal. In practice, though, the lack of transparency around fees and licensing may give them pause. And perhaps it should.
