AI Agents Could Make Crypto the Internet's Machine Money
Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu expects 50-100 billion AI agents transacting online within years, with crypto wallets enabling payments without bank accounts. OKX Europe CEO flags stablecoin geopolitics as a risk to universal machine-to-machine money.
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Autonomous software agents could become one of the biggest drivers of cryptocurrency adoption as they increasingly handle payments, commerce and everyday online tasks, executives across crypto and finance said this week.
Animoca Brands co-founder and chairman Yat Siu estimates that 50 billion to 100 billion AI agents could be transacting across the internet within the next few years. He expects an increasingly "agentic" web in which software independently manages activities such as bookings, payments, scheduling and shopping for users. Animoca has already positioned itself for this shift, pivoting toward an AI-powered metaverse in May and launching an investment program worth up to $10 million for developers building on Minds, its persistent AI agent platform.
The critical question is what currency these agents will use. Siu believes cryptocurrency wallets offer a natural fit because conventional banking systems generally require human identity verification. Crypto could let AI agents hold and transfer value without needing traditional bank accounts, effectively creating a machine-native financial system.
OKX Europe CEO Erald Ghoos similarly expects AI agents to rely on digital assets rather than fiat currencies. He predicts the market could eventually converge around a single "super currency," likely a stablecoin or another crypto asset designed specifically for machine-to-machine transactions. Siu sees a different path. Instead of one dominant AI currency, agents could automatically transact using thousands of cryptocurrencies and tokens, handling conversions and payment decisions without requiring users to understand the underlying assets.
Geopolitics could complicate the emergence of a universal stablecoin. Ghoos questioned whether Chinese AI systems would embrace a U.S. dollar-pegged token or whether American markets would accept a yuan-based alternative. A politically neutral digital currency may be more practical for global AI commerce, he said.
Major hurdles remain. Citi payments executive Debo Sen said standards around identity, authorization and trust must improve before autonomous payments can scale, particularly for high-value business transactions. Juniper Research forecasts global agentic commerce could reach $1.5 trillion by 2030. Coinbase international executive Keith Grose said the unresolved issue is who controls the payment rails - or whether AI transactions will operate through shared, permissionless networks.
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