To understand how much impact AI-based commerce will have on cryptocurrencies, ask the entrepreneurs and developers involved in digital assets, especially stablecoins. They will happily tell you that blockchain-based currencies are the natural choice, an important element in the mix, and so on.
Their logic is simple. Over the past few years, stablecoins—primarily digital versions of the U.S. dollar on public blockchains like Ethereum—have begun to encroach on the global payments industry. While they have proven to be faster and cheaper than traditional bank transfers, they will shine in the new world of autonomous micro-transaction AI agents.
At least, that’s the view from companies like Circle Internet (CRCL), the creator of the second-largest stablecoin, and technologists at cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase (COIN), which led the engineering of x402, a payments protocol intended for use by autonomous artificial intelligence agents in a field known as agent finance.
Dante Disparte, chief strategy officer and head of global policy at Circle, said that just as 24/7, frictionless cross-border payments have been a growth area for stablecoins, agent commerce also has special requirements for U.S. dollar-pegged tokens. These include the ability to program coins so that they are transferred only when specific conditions are met, as well as daisy-chaining or forming a set of actions that occur when a token is received.
“First, you have to be able to take advantage of the otherwise innocuous properties of stablecoins, which is programmability and composability,” Disparate said in an interview. “Secondly, where the stablecoin resides, the physical blockchain ledger itself is the common reference point that agents will turn to.”
However, some AI developers view the crypto industry with caution, if not skepticism. For example, Peter Steinberger, the creator of AI agency OpenClaw, has been openly anti-cryptocurrency, so much so that he declined to comment any further on the subject and declined to comment for this article.
Sean Neville, co-founder of Catana Labs, said that while cryptocurrencies are optimistic about artificial intelligence on one side, there is another side to consider. Catana Labs, an agency financial infrastructure builder, raised $18 million in seed funding last year, led by a16z.
“I’ve worked with some people in the AI developer and engineering community who have a very negative view of crypto,” Circle co-founder Neville said in an interview. “I think stablecoins have reached a certain escape velocity, but the AI developer community in particular has a negative view of crypto because of things like meme coins and Ponzi schemes.”
untouched by human hands
A key feature of agent finance is that it involves microtransactions or nanopayments, some of which occur between an AI agent and a human somewhere in the background.
Neville said this is very different from using Chat GTP as a shopping cart front-end and plugging a credit card into it, but in the short term, agent systems will have access to both cryptocurrencies and bank cards. Agent payments are likely to be high-frequency transactions in the fractions of a cent range that credit card networks will struggle to process.
“Over time, I do think there are significant advantages to stablecoins and blockchain rails that lend themselves more naturally to agent flows rather than just retail commerce use cases,” Neville said. “If AI is doing something like moving different kinds of money across borders around the world using 24/7, programmable rails, it’s going to be very difficult to do that with anything other than stablecoins.”
Neville said that as clear regulatory guidance on stablecoins finally emerges in the United States, AI agents may face more pressing issues such as fragmentation and conflicting protocols vying for status.
“There are many different payment methods among agents, but if they can’t agree on a payment method, whether they use micropayments or not, it’s difficult to guide the market,” he said. “I’m excited to see something like SSL equivalent coming out of proxies, and it’s nice to see a standard that no one has so we can build on the same interoperable standard.”
SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, is a standard technology for encrypting connections between Web servers and browsers.
Erik Reppel, director of developer platform engineering at Coinbase and founder of x402, said x402, the stablecoin-friendly option often cited in the debate, has led to some people being troubled by the protocol’s transaction volume month after month. He said his focus is firmly on envisioning the future of an entire commerce category that will significantly disrupt the internet’s existing advertising market.
“I don’t think people fully realize yet that we’re going to break the basic economic model of the internet from a browser and you visit the website of the person who posted the content, to consuming stuff through your agent and chat interface,” Rempel said in an interview.
If a developer partners with a company like Visa, the few cents an agent pays to crawl the site would theoretically be equivalent to the value of an ad flashing before people’s eyes, which could be achieved by issuing a large number of virtual cards, Lapel said.
“But anyone can program stablecoins,” he said. “Anyone in the world can create as many wallets as they want and then use the wallets as a way to completely isolate agent funds. We want agents to have independent, programmable funds so that your agents can’t use your credit card limit and have no access to your credit card.”
Catena’s Neville said the company is grappling with the problem of regulated money transfers coupled with a large number of agents and bots without financial identities. The goal, he said, is to keep bad bots out while identifying and allowing the bots you want, while giving them specific guidelines and policies from which they can’t escape.
“The solution to this problem is programmable money because we can use cryptography to ensure verifiability and auditability and so on,” Neville said. “This is effective identity and policy control so agents can operate within the rules regardless of which protocol or wallet or account infrastructure they happen to be using.”
