To get an idea of how important AI-based trading could be for cryptocurrencies, ask entrepreneurs and developers involved in digital assets, particularly stablecoins. They will happily tell you that blockchain-based money is the natural choice, an essential element in the mix, etc.
Its logic is simple. In recent years, stablecoins (mostly digital versions of the dollar on public blockchains like Ethereum) have begun to devour the global payments industry. And while they have proven to be faster and cheaper than traditional bank transfers, it is in the new world of autonomous AI agents performing microtransactions where they will shine.
That, at least, is the opinion of companies like Circle Internet (CRCL), the creator of the second-largest stablecoin, and of the technicians at the crypto exchange Coinbase (COIN), which has led the engineering of x402, a payments protocol designed to be used by autonomous AI agents in a field known as agent finance.
Just as cross-border, frictionless, 24/7 payments have been a growth area for stablecoins, agent commerce has particular requirements that dollar-pegged tokens meet, according to Dante Disparte, chief strategy officer and head of global policy at Circle. These include the ability to program coins to transfer only when particular conditions are met and to chain or compose a set of actions that occur upon receipt of a token.
“First of all, you have to be able to exploit the otherwise really innocuous features of stablecoins, which are programmability and composability,” Disparate said in an interview. “Number two, where the stablecoin lives, the blockchain’s own physical ledgers, are the common reference point that agents will turn to.”
The crypto industry, however, is viewed with, if not suspicion, then at least caution, among some AI developers. For example, Peter Steinberger, the creator of the artificial intelligence agent OpenClaw, is publicly opposed to cryptocurrencies, to the point that he refuses to comment further on the topic 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 finance infrastructure builder that last year raised $18 million in seed funding led by a16z.
“I’ve worked with people who are more in the community of AI engineers and developers who have a very low opinion of cryptocurrencies,” Neville, who is also a co-founder of Circle, said in an interview. “I think stablecoins have achieved some escape velocity, but the AI developer community in particular has a negative view of cryptocurrencies, because of things like memecoins and Ponzi schemes and all that.”
Untouched by human hands
A key feature of agent finance is that it involves microtransactions or nanopayments, some of which take place between AI agents and humans somewhere in the background.
This is quite different from using Chat GTP as an interface to a shopping cart and connecting a credit card to it, although, in the short term, agent systems will access both cryptocurrencies and cards, Neville said. Agent payments are likely to be high-frequency transactions in the fractional-cent range that credit card networks will struggle to handle.
“Over time, I think there are significant advantages to stablecoins and blockchain rails being a much more natural fit for agent flows beyond the retail use case,” Neville said. “If AI is doing things like leveraging 24/7 programmable rails to transmit different types of money around the world, across borders, it’s hard to do that with anything other than stablecoins.”
With clear regulatory guidance for stablecoins finally coming to the US, there are potentially more pressing questions for AI agents around fragmentation and conflicting protocols vying for position, Neville said.
“There are many different ways for agents to pay each other, but if they can’t all agree on how the payments should work, then it’s difficult to drive marketplaces whether they use micropayments or not,” he said. “I’d love to see something like an SSL equivalent emerge for agents, and it would be great to see a standard that no one owns, so we can all build 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-friendly x402 option, which is often cited in the debate, has caused some people to obsess over the protocol’s month-to-month transaction volume, said Erik Reppel, head of engineering at Coinbase Developer Platform and founder of x402. He said his focus is firmly on looking toward the future, at an entire category of commerce that will greatly disrupt the existing Internet advertising market.
“I think what people haven’t realized is that we’re going to break the fundamental economic model of the Internet, moving from browsers and visiting the website of the person who publishes the content, to consuming things through their agents and their chat interface,” Reppel said in an interview.
The few cents paid by an agent crawling a website, equivalent to the value of an ad displayed before a human’s eyes, could in theory be achieved by spinning many virtual cards, if a developer has a relationship with, for example, Visa, Rappel said.
“But anyone can program stablecoins,” he said. “Anyone in the world can create as many wallets as they want and then use them as a way to completely isolate funds for an agent. What we want is for agents to have isolated, programmable funds, where their agent can’t spend within their credit card limit and can’t access their credit card.”
Neville de Catena said the company is grappling with squaring regulated money transmission with a sea of agents and robots that have no financial identity. The goal is to keep the bad robots out, he said, while identifying and allowing the ones you want, while giving them specific guidelines and policies that they can’t escape.
“The way to handle this is with programmable money, because we can leverage cryptography to ensure verifiability and auditability, etc.,” Neville said. “These are effectively identity controls and policies so that agents can operate within the rules, regardless of what protocol or what wallet or account infrastructure they are using.”
