Over the past 15 years, the crypto industry has subjected ordinary users to extremely cumbersome processes. Just to make a transfer, users need to remember 12 recovery words, understand Gas fees, and face the reality of losing assets forever due to pasting the wrong address.
But now, the industry has finally found a rhetoric for this architecture: Cryptocurrency was never designed for humans from the start; its true target audience is machines. Those tireless robots, they don't care about bad interfaces, won't lose recovery phrases, and don't need veteran traders to explain the differences between Base, Polygon, and Optimism.
Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong is one of the most enthusiastic advocates of this idea, writing earlier this month on X: "Soon, the number of AI agents conducting transactions will exceed that of humans. They cannot open a bank account, but they can have a crypto wallet."
He added in a recent podcast: "We're starting to adopt an 'AI-first' mindset across the entire company."
For an industry that has promised for years to rebuild finance but has mostly reshaped a speculative sector, this is a rather clever new narrative. However, this may also be the first story in years that truly makes intuitive sense. Despite the chaos in the crypto industry, it offers capabilities that traditional finance still lacks to this day: permissionless, nearly instant, global, round-the-clock fund transfers.
McKinsey predicts that by 2030, AI agents will drive a consumer business scale of $30 trillion to $50 trillion, surpassing the total market capitalization of the entire crypto market, which is currently around $2.4 trillion.
Matt Huang, managing partner at the top crypto venture firm Paradigm, said: "This drastically changes our thinking on investment theses and product builds. You now have to design with an 'agent-first' mentality, assuming that the majority of your customers will be agents, not humans."
Countless crypto companies, including Huang's new payments startup Tempo, are racing to adapt or reshape their products for this emerging user base. Tron founder Justin Sun has already dubbed it Web4.0 (as if Web3.0 really existed).
MoonPay, which originally helped users (now increasingly software) buy and sell cryptocurrency through ordinary payment methods, completely revamped its AI strategy following the rise to fame of the open-source AI assistant OpenClaw. MoonPay's Product Lead Kevin Arifin said: "MoonPay's bet is: we no longer need to heavily invest in a polished user interface, as the AI agent will become the new interaction gateway."
For those who have no interest in the underlying details of crypto, this is undoubtedly good news: you only need to tell the AI what you want to do, buy some Bitcoin, find a suitable lending service, let your assets earn yield, and it will take care of everything.
However, all of this is far from being a scalable application at the moment.
Today, most of the cryptocurrency payments completed by AI agents are done through Coinbase's open standard x402, which allows network service providers to charge the AI agent directly.
Not long ago, even for simple tasks like getting the weather forecast or renting computing power, developers had to individually register for services, link credit cards, generate API keys. Slightly more complex projects would get tangled up in the chaos of accounts, subscriptions, and keys.
x402 offers a simpler pay-as-you-go model: When the AI agent requests a service, the server returns a price, and the AI agent can automatically pay in cryptocurrency from the developer's assigned wallet. This not only enables usage-based billing but also begins to replace the widespread use of API keys.
Coinbase's Developer Platform Engineering Lead and x402 founder Reppel said: "Those who have used OpenClaw may remember, you needed to configure 10 API keys before you could start using it. With x402, the wallet acts as a universal API key that can connect to any service that supports x402."
As of now, developers remain the primary users of AI agents. According to the data platform Artemis, since the launch of x402 in May 2025, AI assistants have completed approximately 107 million transactions through this standard, with a total transaction volume of around $30 million. Transaction amounts are mostly very small, ranging from $0.2 to $0.4.
Artemis analyst Lucas Shin said: "It is very clear that we are still in the early stages." He believes that at this stage, transaction volume is almost irrelevant. The more critical indicator is which ecosystems are truly being built and how many merchants are willing to offer services through x402. Currently, this number is around 3,900, including Amazon Web Services, blockchain development platform Alchemy, and data provider Messari.
The excitement of the crypto industry for smart contract businesses is not hard to understand. Rishin Sharma, Solana Foundation's AI Product and Growth Lead, said: "Almost any engineering team you see, including ours, is using AI tools." He mentioned that everyone on the team is using AI, with over 70% of the code being generated by AI. Service providers that once built businesses around traditional APIs are now pondering a different question: not how to onboard the next hundred developers but how to layout for the next hundred smart contracts.
Recently, Paradigm and Stripe launched Tempo, a blockchain focused on payments. The project, valued at $5 billion last year, completed a $500 million Series A funding round and introduced its own smart contract transaction standard while also supporting fiat payments through a partnership with Visa.
However, most in the crypto industry believe that stablecoins are the more natural payment path for AI smart contracts. Card payments are not cost-effective for small-value transactions: payment service providers typically not only charge a percentage fee but also a fixed fee of about $0.3 per transaction, meaning that transactions of a few cents could be completely eaten up by fees.
This is why the second-largest stablecoin issuer, Circle, and other institutions are customizing systems for machine payments. Earlier this month, the company introduced nano payments, allowing smart contracts to send ultra-low-value, fee-free USDC on its new Arc chain and multiple testnets, for as little as under 1 cent. But the threat to oligopolistic networks like Visa and Mastercard from stablecoin-using AI smart contracts extends beyond microtransactions: AI smart contracts may exert significant fee pressure on transactions of any size.
If software agents are poised to become the next significant user group, the question is no longer just how they pay but what kind of network has been built for them. Jesse Pollak, founder of Base Chain, said: "We're thinking from a full-stack perspective: from the underlying base of scalability and decentralization, to upper-layer tools and account models, and then to the interfaces of products for smart contract interaction. We're asking: How do we make all of this natively adapt to smart contracts?"
He mentioned that some smart contracts are already operating like micro-enterprises. For example, entrepreneur Nat Eliason's smart contract Felix, in the past 30 days, generated $163,686 in revenue by operating an AI smart contract app store and selling a self-authored guide "How to Hire AI." It has also issued a cryptocurrency, but with a market capitalization of only $1.5 million.
Not everyone is as optimistic about the combination of AI smart contracts and cryptocurrency. Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at crypto venture firm Dragonfly, bluntly stated: "Many people overstate the current state of development. The reality is that pretty much everything here right now is basically just toys."
He added that while smart agents may indeed bring a continuous micro-payment flow for services such as data and computing power, achieving a macro-level impact would require an extremely large number of smart agents. After all, humans still control the funds and are the main source of demand.
Qureshi is concerned that the industry is once again repeating the same mistakes, mistaking new trends for revolutions, stating, "Many people in the crypto industry are terrible investors because they immediately believe the stories they make up for themselves. The crypto industry does this every time."
He pointed out that in the past, during the fervor around the Internet of Things and the Metaverse, believers once thought that everything would happen overnight, with cryptocurrency becoming the core of it all. "Cryptocurrency will be significant, it will be part of the story, but not all of it, and it will not happen overnight."
Outside the cryptocurrency industry, the view that "smart agent businesses will help cryptocurrency shake off traditional financial giants" has not been widely accepted.
Trace Cohen, a General Partner at Six Point Ventures focusing on vertical AI and software company investments, argued that the prevalent notion on social platforms that "Visa, Mastercard, and other old systems will be irrelevant in the AI smart agent era" is absurd. "This is not going to happen. No matter how outdated the technology is, it still works."
He believes that card networks still control the payment rails, and history shows that they are more likely to acquire or absorb promising new businesses rather than be replaced. However, he also acknowledges that stablecoins may have an advantage in overseas markets where many regions have smaller banks, lower credibility, and poor interoperability.
A bigger obstacle is rebuilding the trust layer that traditional payment companies have built over decades. Olivia Chow, Zero Knowledge Consultancy's Director and a payment industry consultant, stated, "Visa and Mastercard excel at setting rules, handling exceptions, delineating responsibilities of all parties, and participant admission requirements." She said, "Stablecoins still need to establish equivalent mechanisms: dealing with fraud, risk management, clearly defining what happens when an everyday user encounters an issue. These users are not just going to say 'I prioritize my own security, I'll take the risk.' Before that, mainstream adoption is out of the question."
She further believes that since card networks are already supporting smart agent transactions, AI businesses may not threaten their operations but rather expand their reach. "If they do it right, not only will they not erode existing business, but they will strengthen themselves, solidify their market position—because they are no longer just payment service providers, but have entered into traffic discovery as well."
But payments are just part of the story. With more and more traditional assets being put on the blockchain, early cases including BlackRock's $2 billion government bond fund BUIDL and Franklin Templeton's $1 billion government money fund FOBXX, the infrastructure for the new generation of asset management is quietly taking shape. After all, a stock index is essentially just a rule-based asset portfolio. Once stocks, bonds, and funds are tokenized, smart agents can not only facilitate payments but also hold assets, rebalance portfolios, and allocate funds across markets, all without the need for a traditional brokerage account.
This outlook coincides with one of the largest wealth transfer waves in human history. Over the next 20 years, about $84 trillion in wealth will shift from the baby boomer generation to their descendants. Many of them grew up with Robinhood, already own a crypto wallet, and are willing to bet on everything from election results to Taylor Swift and her boyfriend's wedding venue.
Meanwhile, the advisory industry itself is aging. The U.S. has about 330,000 financial advisors with an average age of 56. According to the research firm Cerulli Associates, nearly 40% are set to retire in the next decade, leaving a huge gap in asset management for ordinary investors.
Crypto companies have already positioned themselves for this. On Tuesday, MoonPay, reportedly in talks for funding with the NYSE's parent company at a $5 billion valuation, launched an open wallet standard aimed at helping AI agents manage funds across multiple blockchains and execute transactions.
Joseph Chalom, former Digital Assets Strategy Lead at BlackRock and current CEO of Ethereum treasury management company Sharplink, said, "I don't think this cryptocurrency craze will be like those in the past." He believes that stablecoins, tokenized assets, widespread wallet infrastructure, and other crypto innovations, coupled with AI understanding user preferences and goals, along with the generational wealth transfer, will create a powerful synergy. "Once investors realize what they've missed out on, it's hard to turn back."
