To get a sense of the importance of AI-driven trading for crypto, ask entrepreneurs and developers involved in digital assets, especially stablecoins. They will be happy to tell you that blockchain-based money is the natural solution, an essential part of the mix, etc.
Their logic is simple. Over the past few years, stablecoins – primarily digital versions of the dollar on public blockchains like Ethereum – have begun to eat away at the global payments industry. And while they’ve proven to be faster and cheaper than traditional bank transfers, it’s in the new world of autonomous, micro-transactive AI agents that they will shine.
At least that’s the view of companies like Circle Internet (CRCL), the creator of the second-largest stablecoin, and techies at crypto exchange Coinbase (COIN), which led engineering on x402, a payment protocol designed for use by autonomous AI agents in a field increasingly known as agentic finance.
Just as 24/7 frictionless cross-border payment is a growth area for stablecoins, agent commerce has special requirements that dollar-pegged tokens must meet, according to Dante Disparte, Circle’s chief strategy officer and head of global policy. These include the ability to program coins so that they are transferred only when particular conditions are met and to serially connect, or compose, a set of actions that occur upon receipt of a token.
“First of all, you need to be able to exploit the otherwise really innocuous characteristics of stablecoins, which is programmability and composability,” Disparate said in an interview. “Second, where the stablecoin resides, the physical ledgers of the blockchain themselves are the common reference point that agents will look to.”
The crypto industry, however, is viewed, if not with suspicion, then with caution, by some AI developers. For example, Peter Steinberger, the creator of the AI agent OpenClaw, is publicly opposed to cryptography, so much so that he refuses to engage in any further commentary on the subject and declined to comment for this article.
While crypto optimism about AI is one end of the spectrum, consider the other side, said Sean Neville, co-founder of Catana Labs, an agent financial infrastructure builder that last year raised $18 million in seed funding led by a16z.
“I’ve worked with people who are more in the AI developer and engineering community who have a very low opinion of crypto,” Neville, who is also a co-founder of Circle, said in an interview. “I think stablecoins have reached some escape velocity, but the AI developer community in particular has a negative view of crypto, because of things like memecoins and Ponzi schemes and so on.”
Untouched by human hands
A key feature of agentic finance is that it involves micro-transactions, or nano-payments, some of which take place between AI agents and humans somewhere in the background.
That’s very different from using Chat GTP as an interface for a shopping cart and plugging in a credit card, although in the short term agent systems will access both crypto and cards, Neville said. Agent payments will likely be high-frequency transactions in the fractions of a cent range that credit card networks will struggle to handle.
“Over time, I think there are significant benefits to stablecoins and blockchain rails that are a much more natural fit for agent flows beyond just the retail use case,” Neville said. “If AI is doing things like operating programmable rails 24/7 to spread different types of money across the world, across borders, it’s just hard to do that with anything other than stablecoins.”
With clear regulatory guidelines for stablecoins finally arriving in the United States, AI agents are asking potentially more pressing questions about fragmentation and conflicting protocols fighting for position, Neville said.
“There are many different ways for agents to pay themselves, but if they can’t all agree on how payments should work, then it’s difficult to get the marketplaces off the ground, whether they use micropayments or not,” he said. “I would love to see something like an SSL equivalent emerge for agents, and it would be great to see a standard that no one has, so we can all rely on the same interoperable standard.
SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, is a standard technology that encrypts the connection between a web server and a browser.
The Stablecoin-compatible x402 option, which is often cited in the debate, has caused some people to get stuck on the protocol’s month-to-month trading volume, said Erik Reppel, head of engineering at Coinbase Developer Platform and founder of x402. He said he was firmly focused on the future of an entire category of commerce that would be hugely disruptive to the existing advertising market on the Internet.
“I think what people haven’t really realized is that we’re going to break the fundamental business model of the Internet, going from browsers and visiting the website of the person posting content, to consuming it through your agents and your chat interface,” Reppel said in an interview.
The few cents paid by an agent crawling a website, equivalent to the value of an advertisement displayed in front of a human’s eyes, could in theory be obtained by spinning many virtual cards, if a developer has a relationship with, say, Visa, Rappel said.
“But anyone can program stablecoins,” he said. “Anyone in the world can create as many wallets as they want, and then simply use the wallets as a way to completely isolate an agent’s funds. What we want is for agents to have isolated, programmable funds, where your agent cannot spend within your credit card limit and cannot access your credit card.”
Neville de Catena said the company is grappling with confronting regulated monetary transmissions with a sea of agents and bots that have no financial identity. The goal is to keep bad bots away, he said, while identifying and licensing the ones you want, while giving them specific guidelines and policies they can’t escape.
“The way to deal with that is to use programmable money, because we can leverage cryptography to ensure verifiability and auditability and so on,” Neville said. “These are actually identity controls and policies that enable agents to operate within the rules, regardless of the protocol or wallet or account infrastructure they use.”
