Forbes Special Report: The Embrace of AI Agents in the Cryptocurrency Industry

Author: Nina Bambysheva

Compiled by: Jiahua, ChainCatcher

For the past 15 years, the cryptocurrency industry has almost universally required ordinary people to endure absurdly cumbersome processes to transfer funds. For example, remembering a 12-word mnemonic phrase, understanding gas fees, or simply accepting the reality of permanently losing funds just because the wrong address was pasted into an input box.

But it has finally found an explanation for why it was designed this way. This perspective argues that cryptocurrency was never truly designed for humans. It was tailored for machines—those tireless programs that don’t care about interface aesthetics, won’t lose mnemonic phrases, and don’t need someone to explain the differences between Base, Polygon, and Optimism step by step.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has become one of the loudest advocates of this idea. "Soon, the number of AI agents conducting transactions will surpass that of humans," he wrote on X earlier this month. "They can’t open bank accounts, but they can have crypto wallets."

"We are shifting to an 'AI-first' mindset across the company," Armstrong added in a recent podcast.

For an industry that has long promised to reshape finance but has mostly succeeded only in reshaping speculation, this is just a convenient new narrative. But it may also be the first vision in years that feels intuitively reasonable. Despite the chaos in the crypto space, it offers a capability that traditional finance still lacks: the ability to transfer funds globally at any time, without permission, and almost instantaneously.

McKinsey predicts that by 2030, AI agents could mediate between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in consumer commerce—more than the current total value of the entire crypto market (around $2.4 trillion).

"This greatly changes our view of the investment landscape and product building," said Matt Huang, managing partner at Paradigm, the largest venture capital firm in the crypto space. "Now you have to think in terms of 'agent-first' and assume that most of your customers will be agents, not humans."

Countless cryptocurrency companies, including Huang's newly established payment-focused startup Tempo, are now racing to invent or reshape themselves for this emerging user group. Justin Sun, the billionaire founder of the Tron blockchain and a major investor in Trump's crypto project, has already dubbed it Web 4.0 (as if Web 3.0 has truly been fully built!).

MoonPay is a company that helps people—now increasingly helping software—buy and sell cryptocurrencies using regular payment methods. A few months ago, after the open-source AI assistant OpenClaw, which can interact directly with user files and applications, became a hit, MoonPay completely revamped its AI strategy.

"MoonPay is betting that we don’t need to double down on building beautiful UX (user experience) because agents will become the interface itself," said Kevin Arifin, the company’s head of product.

For those who still cannot or simply do not want to care about the underlying workings of cryptocurrency, this could be great news. You just need to tell your AI what you want to do—buy some Bitcoin, find a lending service with a good interest rate, get your assets working—and it will handle everything.

However, everything is still not at any meaningful scale.

Today, many crypto payments made by AI agents flow through x402. x402 is an open standard developed by Coinbase that provides a way for online service providers to charge agents directly.

Until recently, even simple tasks like getting a weather forecast or renting computing power required developers to register services one by one, enter credit card information, and generate an API key (a password that allows software to access another service). If building any project with even a bit of ambition, the setup process could easily turn into a chaotic mess of accounts, subscriptions, and keys.

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 automatically pay with cryptocurrency from the wallet allocated to it by the developer. This is important not only because it enables usage-based pricing but also because it begins to replace the sprawling API keys. Today, most companies have over 600 independent APIs.

"If you’ve set up OpenClaw, you might remember that it made you set up 10 API keys before you even got started," said Erik Reppel, the creator of x402 and head of engineering for the Coinbase developer platform. "With x402, your wallet becomes a universal API key, allowing you to access any service that supports x402."

In any case, agents are currently mainly used by developers. According to data provider Artemis, since x402 launched in May 2025, AI assistants have conducted about 107 million transactions through this standard, with a total legitimate transaction volume of about $30 million. Most of these are microtransactions—amounts between 20 and 40 cents.

"It’s clear we are still in the early stages," said Lucas Shin, an analyst at Artemis. He believes that current transaction volumes are almost secondary. A better indicator is which ecosystems are genuinely being built and how many merchants are willing to sell via x402. This number is currently around 3,900, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), blockchain development platform Alchemy, and data provider Messari.

The excitement in the crypto industry about agent commerce is understandable. "Almost any engineering team you see, including our own, is using AI tools," said Rishin Sharma, head of AI products and growth at the Solana Foundation. He noted that everyone on his team is using AI, which generates over 70% of the code they write. Sharma stated that service providers that once built businesses around traditional APIs are beginning to think about a different question: no longer how to win the next 100 developers, but how to position themselves for the next 100 AI agents.

Last week, Paradigm and Stripe launched Tempo—a blockchain focused on payments, which raised $500 million in Series A funding last year at a valuation of $5 billion. At the same time, they also introduced their own agent trading standard, which supports fiat payments through a partnership with Visa.

However, most in the crypto space believe stablecoins (programmable digital dollars) are a more natural payment track for AI agents. At levels below one dollar, the economics of card payments become less reasonable: processors typically charge not only a fixed percentage fee but also a fixed fee per transaction, usually around 30 cents. This means that payments calculated in cents could be completely consumed by processing costs.

That’s why companies like Circle, the second-largest stablecoin issuer, are also building payment systems tailored specifically for machine commerce. Earlier this month, the company launched nanopayments, allowing agents to send tiny, fee-free USDC payments on its new Arc blockchain and a few other blockchains in testing mode—amounts can even be as small as a fraction of a cent. However, the threat to oligopolistic networks like Visa and Mastercard is not limited to micropayments: AI using stablecoins could impose significant fee pressure on transactions of any size.

If software agents are about to become the next massive customer group, then the question is no longer just how they pay, but what kind of network is being built for them. Jesse Pollak, founder of Base (the blockchain that has so far supported most agent payment activities in the crypto space), said, "We are indeed thinking comprehensively about the entire tech stack—from the core foundational layer in terms of scalability and decentralization, to the tools and account models built on top of it, all the way to the interface that agents actually use to interact with products—we are asking: how do we make all of this 'agent-native'?"

He pointed to agents that are already operating like micro-businesses. For example, an agent named Felix, created by entrepreneur Nat Eliason, earned $163,686 in the past 30 days by running an app store for other AI agents and selling a self-published PDF guide titled "How to Hire AI." Of course, it also has a crypto token, although its market cap is only $1.5 million.

Not everyone is as enthusiastic about the potential of agent AI and cryptocurrency. Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at crypto venture firm Dragonfly, stated, "Many people are overhyping the extent to which this is happening. The reality is that everything here is basically still a toy." He added that agents are likely to continue generating a large number of microtransactions for data, computing power, and other services, but it would take an extremely large volume to make an impact on a macro scale. After all, humans still control money and remain the primary source of demand.

Qureshi worries that the industry is repeating past mistakes: mistaking a new trend for a revolution. "Many people in the crypto space are terrible investors because they always immediately buy into the hype they’re promoting," he said. "This is how the crypto industry always is." He pointed to past frenzies around the Internet of Things and the metaverse, when believers convinced themselves that everything would happen overnight and that cryptocurrency would be at the center of it all. "Cryptocurrency will have an impact; it will be involved. But that’s not the whole story, and it won’t happen overnight."

Outside the crypto space, the view that agent commerce will help cryptocurrency leave traditional finance (TradFi) giants behind is not widely accepted.

Trace Cohen, general partner at Six Point Ventures, which supports vertical AI and software companies, stated that a common view on X is that in the age of AI agents, Visa, Mastercard, and other legacy companies will become irrelevant, which he finds absurd. "That’s not going to happen," he said. "No matter how old they are, their technology is effective." Issuing networks still control payment rails, and history shows that they are more likely to acquire or absorb promising new businesses rather than be replaced by them. However, he added that stablecoins might still serve overseas markets better, where many banks are smaller, lack trust, and are less integrated.

A larger barrier lies in rebuilding the trust layer that traditional payment companies have spent decades establishing. Olivia Chow, director at Zero Knowledge Consulting and a payments company advisor, said, "What Visa and Mastercard do best is set the rules: all the unhappy paths, who is responsible when and where, and what the requirements are for participants to get protection on their networks. Stablecoins still need to figure out how to build an equivalent layer: managing fraud, managing risk, and determining what to do when an ordinary person who doesn’t just say 'I care more about self-custody, I’m willing to take risks' encounters misfortune. Until then, you won’t see mainstream adoption."

Moreover, as issuing networks have already been working to support agent transactions, Chow believes the threat of AI commerce to their businesses may not be as significant as the expansion it brings. "If they do it right, it won’t cannibalize what they’re already doing. If there’s any impact, it’s that it enhances their power and solidifies their control over the market, because now they’re not just payment processors; they’re also at the discovery end."

But payments are just part of the story. As more traditional assets migrate to the blockchain—early examples include BlackRock's $2 billion treasury fund BUIDL and Franklin Templeton's $1 billion government money market fund FOBXX—a new cornerstone of portfolio management is quietly being put in place. After all, stock indices are merely a basket of assets based on rules. Once stocks, bonds, and funds exist in tokenized form, it’s not hard to imagine AI agents not only making payments but also holding assets, rebalancing portfolios, and transferring funds across various markets, all without ever touching traditional brokerage accounts.

This prospect coincides with one of the largest wealth transfers in history. Over the next twenty years, about $84 trillion in wealth is expected to be passed from the baby boomer generation to their heirs—many of whom are investors who grew up with Robinhood, already have crypto wallets, and are eager to place bets on anything from elections to where Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce will get married.

Meanwhile, the consulting business itself is also facing aging. There are about 330,000 financial advisors in the U.S., with an average age of 56. According to Cerulli Associates, nearly 40% of them are expected to retire in the next decade, leaving a significant gap in the management of everyday investors' funds.

Cryptocurrency companies are already positioning themselves for this possibility. On Tuesday, MoonPay, which is reportedly negotiating with the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange to raise new funding at a $5 billion valuation, launched an "Open Wallet Standard" aimed at helping AI agents manage funds and execute transactions across multiple blockchains.

"I don’t think this will be like other crypto hype cycles," said Joseph Chalom, CEO of Sharplink, an Ethereum asset management company and former head of digital asset strategy at BlackRock. He believes that crypto innovations (including stablecoins, tokenized assets, and ubiquitous wallet infrastructure), combined with AI that understands user preferences and goals, along with intergenerational wealth transfer, will create an incredibly powerful force. "Once investors see what they’ve missed, I think it will be hard for them to turn back."