Why the crypto market is obsessed with AI agents
Crypto payments have always been a headache for everyday people. 12-word recovery phrases, gas fees, wrong addresses that make your money vanish forever… it almost feels like the system was designed to frustrate anyone who tries to use it. Anyone who has ever attempted a simple transfer knows exactly what we are talking about: the experience is, at the very least, intimidating. And that has pushed away a lot of people who could have benefited from the technology over the past 15 years.
But what if the problem was never crypto itself, but the fact that it was built for the wrong user? That question might sound simple, but it is shaking the foundations of how the industry thinks about adoption, usability, and the future of digital transactions.
The new narrative that gained momentum in 2025 is straightforward: crypto was not made for humans, it was made for machines. And the machines in question are AI agents, autonomous software that executes tasks, makes decisions, and increasingly moves money without any human intervention along the way. These systems can interpret context, execute complex logic, and act in fractions of a second, something no human can replicate with the same consistency or scale. They are tireless bots that do not care about ugly interfaces, never lose seed phrases, and do not need anyone to explain the difference between Base, Polygon, and Optimism.
Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, has been one of the loudest voices championing this idea. According to him, there will soon be more AI agents than humans making transactions on the internet. As he wrote on X: these agents cannot open a bank account, but they can have a crypto wallet without the slightest problem 🤖. Armstrong says Coinbase has adopted an AI-first mindset across the entire company. This is not science fiction: it is a paradigm shift already happening in real production environments, with companies building infrastructure specifically for this scenario.
McKinsey projects that AI agents could intermediate between 3 and 5 trillion dollars in consumer commerce by 2030. To put that in perspective: the total crypto market cap today sits around 2.4 trillion. In other words, the potential volume moved by agents could surpass everything the sector has built in over a decade. There is a lot at stake, and everyone is racing to position themselves 🚀.
Matt Huang, managing partner at Paradigm, the largest crypto-focused venture capital firm, sums up the shift in mindset well: you now need to think agent-first and assume that most of your customers will be agents, not people. Paradigm has already put this idea into practice with the launch of Tempo, a payments startup that raised a $500 million Series A round at a $5 billion valuation. Tempo was created in partnership with Stripe and has backing from Visa to process fiat currency payments as well.
Why blockchain is the ideal infrastructure for AI agents
When an AI agent needs to move value, it cannot wait two business days for a bank transfer to clear. It cannot call bank support to unlock an account. And it definitely cannot go through a KYC process that requires physical documents and selfies. The traditional financial system was architected for humans, with all the friction, bureaucracy, and intermediaries that entails.
Blockchain, on the other hand, operates differently: it is programmable, permissionless, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and settles transactions in seconds or minutes depending on the network. This set of characteristics is not just convenient for autonomous agents, it is essential for them to actually function.
The logic is pretty clear when you stop to think about it. An AI agent that needs to pay for computing power, hire another agent to perform a subtask, or settle an outcome-based contract needs a system that responds to logic, not bureaucracy. Smart contracts on the blockchain do exactly that: they execute automatically when pre-defined conditions are met, without needing human approval, without the risk of a bank declining the transaction based on some opaque criteria. It is like giving an AI agent a programmable vault instead of a checking account with a branch manager and business hours.
Another point that is rarely discussed with the depth it deserves is the question of identity and custody. AI agents can have their own crypto wallets, sign transactions with cryptographic keys, and interact with decentralized protocols in a fully autonomous way. This means an agent can be, at the same time, the executor of a task and the financially responsible party for it, without depending on a human as a legal or operational intermediary. This financial autonomy is something the banking system simply was not designed to support, and that is where blockchain shows up not as an alternative, but as the only viable solution.
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What is being built right now: the x402 standard and the emerging ecosystem
The ecosystem being assembled around this idea is vast and evolving fast. A large portion of crypto payments made by AI agents today goes through x402, an open standard developed by Coinbase that gives online service providers a way to charge agents directly.
Until recently, even simple tasks like fetching a weather forecast or renting computing power required developers to sign up for services one by one, enter a credit card, and generate an API key, a kind of password that lets one piece of software access another service. Build anything even slightly ambitious and the setup quickly becomes a mess of accounts, subscriptions, and keys. Most companies today have more than 600 individual APIs.
x402 offers a simpler pay-per-use model. When an agent requests a service, the server can respond with a price, and the agent can pay it automatically in crypto from a wallet assigned by its developer. This matters not only because it enables per-use pricing, but because it starts to replace all that API key mess. As Erik Reppel, creator of x402 and head of engineering at Coinbase Developer Platform, explains: with x402, your wallet becomes the universal API key that lets you access any service enabled by the standard.
Since x402 launched in May 2025, AI assistants have already completed around 107 million transactions through the standard, totaling roughly $30 million in legitimate volume, according to data from analytics provider Artemis. Most of these transactions are tiny, between 20 and 40 cents. Lucas Shin, an analyst at Artemis, acknowledges that we are still in the early days. Transaction volume, he argues, is almost irrelevant at this point. The more revealing indicator is which ecosystems are actually building and how many merchants are willing to sell through x402. That number is already around 3,900, including Amazon Web Services, blockchain development platform Alchemy, and data provider Messari.
Who is racing to position themselves
Countless crypto companies are reinventing themselves for this new class of users. MoonPay, which helps people and now increasingly software buy and sell crypto using traditional payment methods, completely overhauled its AI strategy after OpenClaw, the open-source AI assistant that interacts directly with user files and applications, took off in recent months.
Kevin Arifin, head of product at MoonPay, summed up the company bet well: you do not need to double down on a beautiful user interface because agents become the interface. Recently, MoonPay, which is in talks to raise capital from the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange at a $5 billion valuation, launched the Open Wallet Standard, designed to help AI agents manage funds and execute transactions across multiple blockchains.
On the Solana side, Rishin Sharma, head of product and AI growth at the Solana Foundation, says that practically every engineering team today, including his own, uses AI tools daily. On his team, AI generates more than 70% of the code they write. Service providers that once built their businesses around traditional APIs are starting to ask a different question: not how to win the next hundred developers, but how to position themselves for the next hundred agents.
Justin Sun, the billionaire founder of the Tron blockchain and a major investor in Trump-linked crypto projects, is already calling all of this Web 4.0, as if Web 3.0 had actually been built 😅.
Stablecoins as the native payment rail for machines
There is an interesting way to look at all of this that goes beyond the investment or speculation narrative. Crypto, especially stablecoins like USDC and USDT, is positioning itself as the native monetary layer of the intelligent internet.
Most players in crypto see stablecoins, programmable digital dollars, as the most natural payment rail for AI agents. The credit card economy simply does not make sense for transactions under a dollar: processors typically charge not only a percentage fee but also a fixed per-transaction fee, often around 30 cents. That means a payment measured in cents can be completely eaten up by processing costs.
That is why companies like Circle, the second-largest stablecoin issuer, are also building payment systems tailor-made for machine-to-machine commerce. Earlier this month, the company launched what it called nanopayments, allowing agents to send tiny, fee-free USDC payments, as small as a fraction of a cent, through its new Arc blockchain and a few others in test mode. But the threat to oligopolistic networks like Visa and Mastercard goes beyond micropayments: AI agents using stablecoins could put immense pressure on the fees charged for transactions of any size 💰.
Stablecoins eliminate the volatility problem that has always haunted crypto in everyday use cases. An agent that needs to pay for a service cannot risk the payment value dropping 15% while the transaction is being processed. With stablecoins pegged to the dollar or other stable fiat currencies, that problem disappears, and what remains is all the advantage of blockchain infrastructure: speed, programmability, permissionless access, and no borders.
Agents already operating as mini-businesses
Jesse Pollak, creator of Base, the blockchain incubated by Coinbase that has supported most of the agentic payment activity in crypto so far, says the team is thinking holistically about the entire stack, from the core foundation in terms of scale and decentralization, through the tools and account models that sit on top, all the way to the interface that agents are actually using to interact with products.
And there are already concrete examples of this working in practice. Pollak points to agents that already operate as mini-businesses. An agent called Felix, created by entrepreneur Nat Eliason, generated over $163,000 in the last 30 days by running an app store for other AI agents and selling a self-authored PDF guide called How to Hire an AI. Of course it also has a crypto token, though its market cap is only $1.5 million. It is a small example, but it illustrates well the kind of economy that is forming when autonomous agents can transact freely 🔗.
The skeptics and the risks of hype
Not everyone is convinced this narrative will materialize as quickly as enthusiasts would like. Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at crypto venture capital firm Dragonfly, is one of the most vocal voices calling for caution.
For him, a lot of people are overstating the degree to which this is already happening. The reality, according to Qureshi, is that everything here is basically a toy right now. Agents may generate a new stream of small, steady payments for data, compute, and other services, but it would take an enormous number of them to be relevant at a macro scale. Humans, after all, still control the money and remain the primary source of demand.
Qureshi is concerned that the sector is doing what it usually does: confusing a new trend with a revolution. A lot of people in crypto are terrible investors because they immediately buy into their own narrative, he says. He points to past manias around the internet of things and the metaverse, when enthusiasts convinced themselves that everything would happen overnight and that crypto would be at the center of it all. Crypto will matter, he acknowledges. It will be part of the story. But it is not the whole story, and it is not going to happen instantly.
The traditional financial system is not going to sit still
Outside the crypto universe, the idea that agentic commerce will help crypto leave the incumbents of the traditional financial system in the dust is not exactly a consensus view.
Trace Cohen, managing partner at Six Point Ventures, which invests in vertical AI and software companies, says the common notion on X that Visa, Mastercard, and the rest of the old guard will not matter in the age of AI agents is absurd. That is not how it is going to play out, he says. No matter how old it is, their technology works. Card networks still control the rails, and history suggests they are far more likely to acquire or absorb promising new businesses than to be replaced by them. Stablecoins, however, may serve overseas markets better, where many banks are smaller, less reliable, and less integrated.
Olivia Chow, director at Zero Knowledge Consulting and advisor to payments companies, goes further. According to her, what Visa and Mastercard do very well is set the rules: all the paths that can go wrong, who is responsible in each situation, and what the requirements are to participate in their networks and have that coverage. Stablecoins still need to solve the equivalent of that layer: fraud management, risk management, and what happens when something goes wrong for an ordinary person who is not simply saying they care more about self-custody and accept the risks. Until then, we will not see mainstream adoption.
And since card networks are already working to support agentic transactions, AI-powered commerce may not threaten their businesses as much as expand their operations. If they get it right, according to Chow, it does not cannibalize what they already do. If anything changes, it increases the power of those networks and strengthens their market position, because now they would not just be payment processors but would also be on the discovery side.
Asset tokenization and the great wealth transfer
Payments are only part of the story. As more traditional assets migrate to blockchains, like BlackRock’s $2 billion BUIDL Treasury fund and Franklin Templeton’s $1 billion FOBXX government bond fund, the pieces for a new kind of portfolio management are quietly falling into place.
A stock index, at the end of the day, is just a rules-based basket. Once stocks, bonds, and funds exist in tokenized form, it becomes easier to imagine AI agents not only making payments but holding assets, rebalancing portfolios, and moving money across markets without ever touching a traditional brokerage account.
This perspective arrives just as we are heading into one of the largest wealth transfers in history. An estimated $84 trillion is expected to pass from Baby Boomers to their heirs over the next two decades. Many of those heirs are investors who grew up with Robinhood, already own crypto wallets, and are willing to bet on practically anything, from elections to where Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce will get married.
At the same time, the financial advisory industry itself is aging. There are roughly 330,000 financial advisors in the United States, with an average age of 56. Nearly 40% of them are expected to retire in the next decade, according to Cerulli Associates, which will open a significant gap in managing money for everyday investors. It is a window of opportunity that fits perfectly with AI agents capable of managing portfolios autonomously.
What this means in practice
For those following the sector, the most significant shift is not technical, it is conceptual. For years, the dominant narrative was that crypto needed to become simpler so the average user could adopt it at scale. More intuitive wallets, easier onboarding, less jargon. All of that still matters, but the horizon opening up now suggests that adoption at scale may come through a completely different path: not through humans learning to use crypto, but through AI agents using crypto invisibly, in the background, while humans simply reap the results.
Think about how it works today when you use a streaming service that runs on cloud servers. You do not see the transactions between the service and the infrastructure provider, you do not approve each charge individually, you do not need to understand anything about the per-hour computing pricing model. You simply use the service. That is exactly the future being designed for crypto in the age of agents: payments happening behind the scenes, settled on blockchain, without the end user needing to know or care about the technical details.
This does not eliminate the importance of understanding the technology, especially for those building on top of it or making business decisions based on it. But it radically changes where the friction lies and who needs to manage it. If agents absorb the technical complexity of blockchain transactions, what is left for the human is the outcome: faster, cheaper, more automated services.
Joseph Chalom, CEO of Sharplink, an Ethereum treasury company, and former head of digital asset strategy at BlackRock, believes this cycle is different from previous ones. For him, the combination of crypto innovations like stablecoins, tokenized assets, and pervasive wallet infrastructure with an AI that knows users preferences and goals and the generational transfer of wealth is extremely powerful. Once investors realize what they are missing out on, it will be hard to go back.
Maybe this was crypto’s destiny all along: not to replace the bank in the consumer’s life, but to become the invisible base infrastructure for the digital economy that is on its way 🌐.
