Written by: Nina Bambysheva, Forbes

Translated by: Luffy, Foresight News

For the past 15 years, the cryptocurrency industry has forced ordinary users to endure extremely tedious processes. Just to complete a transfer, users need to remember 12 mnemonic words, understand gas fees, and accept the reality of losing assets forever due to pasting incorrect addresses.

But now, the industry has finally found a narrative for this architecture: Cryptocurrency was never designed for humans; its true target is machines. Those tireless robots, who do not care about bad interfaces, will not lose mnemonic words, and do not require experienced traders to explain the differences between Base, Polygon, and Optimism.

Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong is one of the most active proponents of this idea; earlier this month, he wrote on X: "Soon, the number of AI agents conducting transactions will surpass humans. They can't open bank accounts but can have cryptocurrency wallets."

He added in a recent podcast: "We are starting to adopt an 'AI-first' mindset company-wide."

For an industry that has promised to reshape finance for years but has primarily only reshaped speculation, this is a rather clever new narrative. Yet it may also be the first story in years that intuitively makes sense. Despite the chaos in the cryptocurrency industry, it offers capabilities that traditional finance still lacks: permissionless, nearly instantaneous, global, round-the-clock movement of funds.

McKinsey predicts that by 2030, AI agents will facilitate a consumer business scale of $3 trillion to $5 trillion, surpassing the current total market value of the entire cryptocurrency market, which is about $2.4 trillion.

Matt Huang, managing partner at leading venture capital firm Paradigm, stated: "This greatly changes how we think about investment landscapes and product building. Now you must design with an 'agent-first' mindset, assuming that most of your clients will be agents rather than humans."

Countless cryptocurrency companies, including Huang's new payment startup Tempo, are rushing to adapt or reinvent their products for this emerging user group. Justin Sun, founder of TRON, has already referred to this as Web 4.0 (as if Web 3.0 had truly been built at all).

MoonPay, originally helping users (now increasingly software) buy and sell cryptocurrencies through traditional payment methods, completely restructured its AI strategy after the open-source AI assistant OpenClaw became popular. MoonPay product manager Kevin Arifin said: "MoonPay bets that we no longer need to invest heavily in beautiful user interfaces because agents will become the new point of interaction."

For ordinary users who do not want to care about the underlying details of cryptocurrency, this is undoubtedly good news: you just need to tell the AI what you want to do, buy some Bitcoin, find a borrowing service with appropriate interest rates, or let assets generate income, and it will take care of everything.

However, all of this is still far from achieving large-scale application.

Today, most cryptocurrency payments completed by AI agents are processed through the open standard x402 developed by Coinbase, which allows network service providers to charge agents directly.

Not long ago, even obtaining a weather forecast or renting computing power for simple tasks required developers to register services one by one, bind credit cards, and generate API keys. Slightly more complex projects would fall into a chaotic management of accounts, subscriptions, and keys.

x402 offers a simpler pay-as-you-go model: when an agent requests a service, the server returns a price, and the agent can automatically pay in cryptocurrency from a wallet allocated by the developer. This not only allows for usage-based billing but also starts to replace the overwhelming presence of API keys.

Reppel, head of the developer platform engineering at Coinbase and founder of x402, said: "Those who have used OpenClaw might remember that you needed to configure 10 API keys to start. With x402, the wallet acts as a universal API key that can connect to any service that supports x402."

As of now, the users of agents are still mainly developers. According to data platform Artemis, since the launch of x402 in May 2025, AI assistants have completed about 107 million transactions through this standard, with a total transaction value of about $30 million, and the average transaction amount is quite small, only between $0.20 to $0.40.

Artemis analyst Lucas Shin stated: "It is clear that we are still in the early stages." He believes that the current transaction volume is nearly irrelevant; the more critical metrics are what ecosystems are genuinely being built and how many merchants are willing to provide services through x402. Currently, that number is about 3,900, including Amazon Web Services, blockchain development platform Alchemy, and data provider Messari.

The excitement in the cryptocurrency industry about agent commerce is understandable. Rishin Sharma, head of AI products and growth at the Solana Foundation, said: "Almost every engineering team you see, including ours, is using AI tools." He stated that everyone on the team is using AI, and more than 70% of the code is generated by AI. Service providers that once built business around traditional APIs are now beginning to consider another question: not how to attract the next hundred developers, but how to prepare for the next hundred agents.

Not long ago, Paradigm and Stripe launched Tempo, a blockchain focused on payments, which completed a $500 million Series A funding round last year at a valuation of $5 billion and launched its own agent trading standard, while also collaborating with Visa to support fiat payments.

However, most in the cryptocurrency industry believe that stablecoins are a more natural payment track for AI agents. Bank card payments are not economical in small-amount scenarios: payment service providers typically not only charge a percentage fee but also a fixed fee of about $0.30 per transaction, meaning a few cents transaction could be entirely swallowed by the fees.

This is also the reason why institutions like Circle, the second-largest stablecoin issuer, are customizing systems for machine payments. Earlier this month, the company launched a nano-payment feature that allows agents to send very low amounts of USDC, fee-free, on its new chain Arc and multiple test chains, as low as less than 1 cent. But the threat posed to oligopoly networks like Visa and Mastercard is not limited to micropayments: using stablecoins, AI agents could create immense fee pressure for transactions of any scale.

If software agents are about to become the next significant user group, the question is no longer just how they will pay, but what kind of network is being built for them. Jesse Pollak, founder of the Base chain, said: "We are thinking from a full-stack perspective: from the underlying foundation of scalability and decentralization to upper-layer tools and account models, to the interface for the interactions of agents. We need to ask: how can we make all of this natively adaptable for agents?"

He mentioned that some agents are already operating like micro-businesses. For example, the agent Felix created by entrepreneur Nat Eliason has generated $163,686 in profit over the past 30 days by running an AI agent app store and selling a self-made guide titled "How to Hire AI." It has also issued a cryptocurrency token, although its market cap is only $1.5 million.

Not everyone is so optimistic about the prospects of combining AI agents with cryptocurrencies. Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at the cryptocurrency venture capital firm Dragonfly, bluntly stated, "Many people overestimate the current level of development. The reality is, everything here is basically just toys at the moment."

He added that agents may indeed bring continuous small payment flows for services such as data and computing power, but achieving macro-level impact requires an extremely large number of agents. After all, humans still control the funds and are the primary source of demand.

Qureshi worries that the industry is repeating its mistakes, mistaking new trends for revolutions: "Many in the cryptocurrency industry are poor investors because they immediately believe the stories they make up. The cryptocurrency industry does this every time."

He pointed to the past enthusiasm for the Internet of Things and the metaverse, where devotees believed everything would happen overnight, and cryptocurrencies would be at the core of it all. "Cryptocurrencies will be important and will be a part of the story, but they will not be everything, nor will it happen overnight."

Outside the cryptocurrency industry, the viewpoint that "agent commerce will help cryptocurrencies shake off traditional financial giants" has not gained widespread acceptance.

Trace Cohen, general partner at Six Point Ventures, which focuses on investing in vertical AI and software companies, stated that the popular notion on social platforms that "old systems like Visa and Mastercard will be irrelevant in the age of AI agents" is ridiculous. "That cannot happen. No matter how outdated the technology is, it still works."

He believes that card organizations still control the payment rails, and history shows that they are more likely to acquire or absorb promising new businesses than to be replaced. However, he also acknowledged that stablecoins may have an advantage in overseas markets since banks in many regions are smaller, less trustworthy, and less interconnected.

A larger barrier lies in rebuilding the trust layer established by traditional payment firms over decades. Olivia Chow, Director of Zero Knowledge Consulting and a payments industry consultant, stated: "Visa and Mastercard are best at setting the rules, handling unusual circumstances, responsibilities of all parties, and entry requirements for participants." She said, "Stablecoins still need to establish corresponding mechanisms: to handle fraud, manage risks, and clarify what to do when ordinary users encounter problems. These users are not just saying, 'I care more about my own safety, and I will take on the risks.' Until then, mainstream adoption is out of the question."

She also believes that since card organizations are already supporting agent transactions, AI commerce may not threaten their business but instead expand their territory. "If they do it right, they will not only not eat into existing businesses but will actually enhance their strength and solidify their market position — because they are no longer just payment service providers; they are also entering the traffic discovery segment."

But payments are just a part of the story. As more traditional assets are brought onto the blockchain, early cases include BlackRock's $2 billion bond fund BUIDL and Franklin Templeton's $1 billion government money fund FOBXX, a new generation of asset management infrastructure is quietly taking shape. After all, stock indices are essentially just a portfolio of assets based on rules. Once stocks, bonds, and funds achieve tokenization, AI agents can not only make payments but can also hold assets, rebalance portfolios, and route funds across markets without going through traditional brokerage accounts.

This prospect coincides with one of the largest wealth transfers in human history. In the next 20 years, about $84 trillion in wealth will be transferred from the Baby Boomer generation to their descendants. Many of them grew up with Robinhood and already have cryptocurrency wallets, willing to bet on everything from election outcomes to Taylor Swift's wedding venue with her boyfriend.

At the same time, the advisory industry itself is aging. There are about 330,000 financial advisors in the U.S., with an average age of 56. According to data from research firm Cerulli Associates, nearly 40% will retire in the next decade, leaving a massive gap in asset management for ordinary investors.

Cryptocurrency companies are already positioning themselves for this. On Tuesday, it was reported that MoonPay, currently in talks with the parent company of the NYSE for financing and with a valuation of $5 billion, launched an open wallet standard aimed at helping AI agents manage funds and conduct transactions across multiple blockchains.

Joseph Chalom, former head of digital asset strategy at BlackRock and CEO of the Ethereum treasury company Sharplink, said: "I don't think this cryptocurrency boom will be like the last ones." He believes that stablecoins, tokenized assets, widely accessible wallet infrastructure, and other crypto innovations, combined with AI that understands user preferences and goals, along with intergenerational wealth transfer, will create a very strong synergy. "Once investors realize what they have missed, it will be hard to turn back."