Why Is the Crypto Industry So Enthusiastic About AI Agents?
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
Why Is the Crypto Industry So Enthusiastic About AI Agents?
The crypto industry is betting big on the emerging agent economy, claiming that blockchain infrastructure was built for machines from the outset.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Nina Bambysheva, Forbes
Translated by Luffy, Foresight News
For the past 15 years, the crypto industry has forced ordinary users to endure extremely cumbersome processes. Just to complete a simple transfer, users must memorize a 12-word recovery phrase, understand gas fees, and accept the reality that a single copy-paste error in an address could permanently erase their assets.
Now, however, the industry has finally settled on a narrative to justify this architecture: Cryptocurrencies were never designed for humans—they were built for machines. Those tireless robots don’t mind clunky interfaces, never lose their recovery phrases, and certainly don’t need seasoned traders to explain the differences between Base, Polygon, and Optimism.
Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, is one of the most vocal proponents of this idea. Earlier this month, he wrote on X: “Soon, the number of AI agents conducting transactions will surpass the number of humans. They can’t open bank accounts—but they can hold crypto wallets.”
He added in a recent podcast: “We’re adopting an ‘AI-first’ mindset across the entire company.”
For an industry that has long promised to rebuild finance but has, for the most part, merely reshaped speculation, this is a remarkably convenient new story. Yet it may also be the first narrative in years that intuitively makes genuine sense. Despite its chaos, crypto delivers capabilities that traditional finance still lacks: permissionless, near-instantaneous, and globally available 24/7 fund transfers.
McKinsey forecasts that by 2030, AI agents will drive $3–5 trillion in consumer commerce—exceeding the current total market capitalization of the entire crypto market, which stands at roughly $2.4 trillion.
Matt Huang, managing partner at Paradigm—the largest crypto venture capital firm—said: “This fundamentally changes how we think about investment landscapes and product development. You now have to design ‘agent-first,’ assuming your primary customers will be agents—not humans.”
Countless crypto companies—including Huang’s new payments startup Tempo—are racing to adapt or even completely rebuild their products for this emerging user base. Justin Sun, founder of TRON, has already dubbed it Web4.0 (as if Web3.0 had ever truly been built).
MoonPay, originally built to help users—and increasingly software—to buy and sell crypto via conventional payment methods, overhauled its AI strategy entirely after the open-source AI assistant OpenClaw went viral. Kevin Arifin, MoonPay’s head of product, said: “MoonPay is betting that we no longer need to invest heavily in polished user interfaces—because agents will become the new interface.”
For ordinary users who simply don’t want to deal with crypto’s underlying complexities, this is undoubtedly good news: just tell an AI what you want to do—buy some Bitcoin, find a lending service with a competitive interest rate, or generate yield on your assets—and it handles everything.
That said, none of this has yet scaled meaningfully.
Today, most AI-agent crypto payments are processed using x402, an open standard developed by Coinbase that allows service providers to charge agents directly.
Not long ago, even simple tasks—like fetching a weather forecast or renting compute power—required developers to register individually with each service, bind credit cards, and generate API keys. Slightly more complex projects quickly descended into chaotic management of accounts, subscriptions, and keys.
x402 offers a simpler pay-per-use model: when an agent requests a service, the server returns a price, and the agent automatically pays in cryptocurrency from a wallet pre-funded by the developer. This not only enables true usage-based billing but also begins replacing the proliferation of API keys.
Reppel, engineering lead for Coinbase’s Developer Platform and creator of x402, said: “If you’ve used OpenClaw, you’ll recall needing to configure ten API keys before getting started. With x402, your wallet becomes a universal API key—capable of accessing any x402-enabled service.”
So far, agent users remain predominantly developers. According to data platform Artemis, since x402 launched in May 2025, AI assistants have completed approximately 107 million transactions via the standard—representing roughly $30 million in real transaction volume, with individual amounts mostly tiny, ranging between $0.20 and $0.40.
Artemis analyst Lucas Shin said: “Clearly, we’re still in the very early stages.” He believes transaction volume matters little right now; more critical metrics include which ecosystems are actively building and how many merchants are willing to offer services via x402. That number currently stands at around 3,900—including Amazon Web Services, blockchain development platform Alchemy, and data provider Messari.
The crypto industry’s enthusiasm for agent-based commerce is understandable. Rishin Sharma, Head of AI Products & Growth at the Solana Foundation, said: “Almost every engineering team you see—including ours—is using AI tools.” He noted that everyone on his team uses AI, and over 70% of their code is AI-generated. Service providers once built around traditional APIs are now asking a different question—not how to win over the next hundred developers, but how to prepare for the next hundred agents.
Recently, Paradigm and Stripe launched Tempo—a blockchain focused on payments. Last year, the project raised $500 million in Series A funding at a $5 billion valuation and introduced its own agent transaction standard while partnering with Visa to support fiat payments.
Still, most in the crypto industry believe stablecoins are the more natural payment rail for AI agents. Card payments are economically unviable for microtransactions: payment processors typically charge both a percentage fee and a flat fee per transaction—around $0.30—which means transactions worth just a few cents could be entirely consumed by fees.
That’s why Circle—the second-largest stablecoin issuer—is building systems tailored for machine payments. Earlier this month, the company launched nano-payments, enabling agents to send sub-cent USDC amounts feelessly on its new chain Arc and multiple testnets. But the threat to oligopolistic networks like Visa and Mastercard extends beyond micropayments: AI agents transacting in stablecoins could impose massive fee pressure on transactions of any size.
If software agents are indeed the next major user cohort, the question shifts from how they pay to what kind of network is being built for them. Jesse Pollak, founder of Base, said: “We’re thinking holistically—from scalability and decentralization at the foundational layer, to tooling and account models at the upper layer, to the actual interface products agents interact with. We ask ourselves: How do we make all of this natively agent-friendly?”
He pointed out that some agents already operate like micro-enterprises. For example, Felix—an agent created by entrepreneur Nat Eliason—earned $163,686 over the past 30 days by operating an AI agent app store and selling its self-published guide, *How to Hire AI*. It even issued its own crypto token—though its market cap remains just $1.5 million.
Not everyone shares such optimism about the convergence of AI agents and crypto. Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at crypto VC Dragonfly, bluntly stated: “Many people are vastly overestimating how far along things currently are. The reality is that almost everything here is still essentially a toy.”
He added that agents may indeed generate sustained micro-payment flows for services like data and compute—but achieving macro-level impact requires an enormous scale of agents. After all, humans still control the capital—and remain the primary source of demand.
Qureshi worries the industry is repeating past mistakes—mistaking hype for revolution. “Many in crypto are poor investors because they instantly believe the stories they tell themselves. Crypto always does this.”
He cited earlier frenzies around IoT and the metaverse, where believers imagined overnight transformation—with crypto at the center of it all. “Crypto will be important. It’ll be part of the story—but not the whole story, and certainly not overnight.”
Outside crypto, the notion that “agent-driven commerce will allow crypto to leapfrog traditional financial giants” finds little traction.
Trace Cohen, general partner at Six Point Ventures—a firm focused on vertical AI and software investments—called the popular social-media claim that “legacy card networks like Visa and Mastercard will become irrelevant in the AI agent era” utterly absurd. “That won’t happen. No matter how old the technology, it still works.”
He argued that card networks still control the payment rails—and history shows they’re far more likely to acquire or absorb promising new businesses than be displaced by them. Still, he acknowledged stablecoins may hold greater appeal in overseas markets, where banks are often smaller, less trusted, and poorly interconnected.
A larger obstacle lies in rebuilding the trust layer that traditional payment companies spent decades establishing. Olivia Chow, Director of Zero-Knowledge Consulting and a payments industry advisor, said: “Visa and Mastercard excel at rule-making—defining exceptions, allocating responsibilities among parties, and setting participant admission requirements.” She added, “Stablecoins still need to build comparable mechanisms: handling fraud, managing risk, and clarifying what happens when ordinary users encounter problems. These users aren’t just saying, ‘I prioritize my own security—I’ll assume the risk.’ Until then, mainstream adoption remains impossible.”
She also believes that since card networks already support agent transactions, AI commerce may not threaten their business—but instead expand it. “If they get it right, they won’t just protect existing revenue—they’ll strengthen their position and solidify market dominance—by moving beyond pure payment processing into traffic discovery.”
But payments are only part of the story. As more traditional assets go onchain—including BlackRock’s $2 billion Treasury fund BUIDL and Franklin Templeton’s $1 billion government money fund FOBXX—a new infrastructure for asset management is quietly taking shape. After all, stock indices are fundamentally rule-based portfolios. Once equities, bonds, and funds become tokenized, AI agents won’t just execute payments—they’ll hold assets, rebalance portfolios, and allocate capital across markets—entirely without traditional brokerage accounts.
This prospect coincides with one of the largest intergenerational wealth transfers in human history. Over the next 20 years, approximately $84 trillion in wealth will shift from Baby Boomers to their heirs. Many of these heirs grew up with Robinhood and already hold crypto wallets, placing bets on everything from election outcomes to the wedding venue of Taylor Swift and her boyfriend.
Meanwhile, the advisory industry itself is aging. In the U.S., there are roughly 330,000 financial advisors, with an average age of 56. According to research firm Cerulli Associates, nearly 40% will retire within the next decade—leaving a massive gap in asset management for everyday investors.
Crypto firms are already positioning themselves for this shift. On Tuesday, MoonPay—reportedly in talks to raise funding from the NYSE’s parent company at a $5 billion valuation—launched an open wallet standard designed to help AI agents manage funds and execute trades across multiple blockchains.
Joseph Chalom, former Head of Digital Asset Strategy at BlackRock and CEO of Sharplink—a treasury services firm built on Ethereum—said: “I don’t think this crypto wave will play out like previous ones.” He believes the convergence of stablecoins, tokenized assets, widely adopted wallet infrastructure, AI capable of understanding user preferences and goals, and generational wealth transfer creates an exceptionally powerful synergy. “Once investors realize what they’ve missed, it’ll be hard to turn back.”
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
Forbes
