Forbes Feature: The Crypto Industry's Embrace of AI Agents

Original Author: Nina Bambysheva

Original Compilation: Jiahuan, ChainCatcher

For the past 15 years, the cryptocurrency industry has largely demanded that ordinary people endure absurdly cumbersome processes just to transfer funds. This includes memorizing 12-word seed phrases, understanding gas fees, or accepting the permanent loss of funds simply for pasting the wrong address into a field.

But it has finally found an explanation for why it was designed this way. The argument is that cryptocurrency was never truly designed for humans. It was tailor-made for machines—those tireless programs that don't care about ugly interfaces, won't lose their seed phrases, and don't need someone to explain the differences between Base, Polygon, and Optimism.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has become one of the loudest evangelists for this idea. "Soon there will be more AI agents transacting than humans," he wrote on X earlier this month. "They can't open bank accounts, but they can have crypto wallets."

"We're starting to shift the whole company to an 'AI-first' mentality," Armstrong added in a recent podcast.

For an industry that has promised to reshape finance for years but mostly succeeded only in reshaping speculation, this is a conveniently new narrative. But it might also be the first vision in years that intuitively feels plausible. Despite its chaos, the crypto space offers capabilities that traditional finance still lacks: the ability to move money globally, permissionlessly, and nearly instantly, at any time.

McKinsey predicts that by 2030, AI agents could mediate $3 trillion to $5 trillion in consumer commerce—exceeding the current value of the entire crypto market (approximately $2.4 trillion).

"This dramatically changes how we think about the investment landscape and product building," said Matt Huang, managing partner of Paradigm, the largest crypto venture capital firm. "Now you have to really think 'agent-first' and assume that most of your customers will be agents, not humans."

Countless crypto companies, including Huang's newly launched payments-focused startup Tempo, are now racing to invent or reinvent themselves for this emerging user base. 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 were ever fully built!).

MoonPay, a company that helps people—and increasingly, software—buy and sell crypto using regular payment methods, completely overhauled its AI strategy a few months ago after the open-source AI assistant OpenClaw, which can directly interact with users' files and apps, went viral.

"What MoonPay is betting on is that we don't need to double down on building beautiful UX because the agent will be the interface itself," said Kevin Arifin, the company's head of product.

For those who still can't, or simply don't want to, care about the underlying workings of cryptocurrency, this could be great news. You just tell your AI what you want to do—buy some Bitcoin, find a lending service with good rates, put assets to work—and it handles everything.

Except, none of this is happening at any meaningful scale yet.

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 fetching a weather forecast or renting compute power required developers to individually sign up for services, input credit cards, and generate an API key (a password that lets software access another service). Building anything remotely ambitious easily turned setup into a mess of accounts, subscriptions, and keys.

x402 offers a simpler pay-per-use model. When an agent requests a service, the server can reply with a price, and the agent can automatically pay in crypto from a wallet assigned to it by the developer. This matters not only because it enables usage-based pricing but also because it begins to replace the sprawl of API keys. Today, most companies have over 600 separate APIs.

"If you've set up OpenClaw, you probably remember it had you set up 10 API keys before you even got started," said Erik Reppel, creator of x402 and head of engineering for Coinbase's developer platform. "With x402, your wallet becomes the universal API key that lets you access any service that supports x402."

For now, however, agents are still primarily used by developers. According to data provider Artemis, since x402 launched in May 2025, AI assistants have conducted roughly 107 million transactions via the standard, with legitimate transaction volume totaling about $30 million. Most of these are micropayments—amounts between 20 and 40 cents.

"It's clear we're still early," said Lucas Shin, an analyst at Artemis. He believes the transaction volume is almost secondary right now. A better indicator is which ecosystems are actually building and how many merchants are willing to sell via x402. That number is currently around 3,900, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), blockchain development platform Alchemy, and data provider Messari.

The crypto industry's excitement about agent commerce is understandable. "Almost any engineering team you see, including our own, is using AI tools," said Rishin Sharma, head of AI product and growth at the Solana Foundation. He said everyone on his team uses AI, which generates over 70% of the code they write. Sharma noted that service providers who once built businesses around traditional APIs are starting to think about a different question: not 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 payments-focused blockchain for which the company raised a $500 million Series A last year at a $5 billion valuation. They also launched their own agent transaction standard, which, through a partnership with Visa, also supports fiat payments.

However, most in crypto see stablecoins (programmable digital dollars) as a more natural payment rail for AI agents. At sub-dollar levels, the economics of card payments break down: processors typically charge not only a percentage fee but also a fixed fee per transaction, often around 30 cents. This means payments in cents could be completely eaten by processing costs.

This is why companies like Circle, the second-largest stablecoin issuer, are also building payment systems tailored for machine commerce. Earlier this month, the company launched nanopayments, allowing agents to send tiny, feeless USDC payments—as small as a fraction of a cent—on its new Arc blockchain and a handful of others in test mode. But the threat to oligopolistic networks like Visa and Mastercard isn't limited to micropayments: agent AI using stablecoins could exert massive fee pressure on transactions of any size.

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

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

Not everyone is as enthusiastic about the potential of agent AI and crypto. "A lot of people are overhyping the degree to which this is already happening. The reality is, everything here is basically a toy right now," said Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at crypto VC firm Dragonfly. He added that agents will likely generate a massive volume of micropayments for data, compute, and other services, but it would take an astronomically large number to matter on a macro scale. After all, humans still control the money and remain the primary source of demand.

Qureshi worries the industry is repeating its mistakes: mistaking a new trend for a revolution. "A lot of people in crypto are bad investors because they immediately buy into their own hype," he said. "Crypto does this every time." He pointed to past frenzies around IoT and the metaverse, where believers convinced themselves everything would happen overnight with crypto at the center. "Crypto will have an impact, it will be involved. But it's not the whole story, and it won't happen overnight."

Outside of crypto, the idea that agent commerce will help crypto leapfrog existing TradFi giants isn't widely shared.

Trace Cohen, general partner at Six Point Ventures, which backs vertical AI and software companies, said the prevalent view on X that Visa, Mastercard, and other incumbents will be irrelevant in the age of AI agents is absurd. "That's not going to happen," he said. "Their tech works, no matter how old it is." Card networks still control the payment rails, and history suggests they are more likely to acquire or absorb promising new businesses than be replaced by them. But he added that stablecoins might still serve overseas markets better, where many banks are smaller, less trusted, and less integrated.

A bigger hurdle is rebuilding the layers of trust that traditional payment companies spent decades establishing. "What Visa and Mastercard are best at is setting the rules: all the unhappy paths, who is responsible when and where, and what the requirements are for participants to get protection on their network," said Olivia Chow, director at Zero Knowledge Consulting and an advisor to payments companies. "Stablecoins still need to figure out how to build the equivalent of that layer: managing fraud, managing risk, and determining what happens when an ordinary person who isn't just saying 'I care more about self-custody, I'm willing to take on risk' has something bad happen. Until then, you won't see mainstream adoption."

And since card networks are already working to support agent transactions, Chow believes the threat of AI commerce to their business might be less about cannibalization and more about expansion. "If they get it right, this doesn't cannibalize what they're doing at all. If anything, it enhances their power and cements their market hold because now they're not just the payment processor, they're also on the discovery side."

But payments are only part of the story. As more traditional assets migrate onto blockchains—early examples include BlackRock's $2 billion treasury fund BUIDL and Franklin Templeton's $1 billion government money fund FOBXX—the groundwork is being laid for a new kind of portfolio management. After all, a stock index is just a rules-based basket of assets. Once stocks, bonds, and funds exist in tokenized form, it's not hard to imagine AI agents not just making payments but holding assets, rebalancing portfolios, and moving money across markets, all without ever touching a traditional brokerage account.

This prospect coincides with us entering one of the largest wealth transfers in history. Over the next two decades, roughly $84 trillion in wealth is expected to pass from Baby Boomers to their heirs—many of whom are investors raised on Robinhood, already have crypto wallets, and are happy to place bets on everything from elections to where Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce will get married.

Meanwhile, the advisory business itself is aging. There are about 330,000 financial advisors in the US, with an average age of 56. Nearly 40% of them are expected to retire in the next decade, according to Cerulli Associates, leaving a massive gap in the day-to-day management of everyday investors' money.

Crypto companies are already positioning for this possibility. On Tuesday, MoonPay—reportedly in talks 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 Ethereum treasury management firm Sharplink and former head of digital asset strategy at BlackRock. He believes the combination of crypto innovation (including stablecoins, tokenized assets, and ubiquitous wallet infrastructure), AI that understands user preferences and goals, and generational wealth transfer is incredibly powerful. "Once investors see what they've been missing, I think it will be very hard for them to go back."