The race to determine what currency AI agents will use to pay each other is heating up, and the answer may not be a stablecoin at all — it could be something that hasn't been invented yet. Industry leaders are grappling with how billions of autonomous AI actors will handle financial transactions in an increasingly machine-driven economy, with Juniper Research projecting agentic commerce could generate $1.5 trillion globally by 2030.

Market Context

The emergence of AI agents as economic actors represents a fundamental shift in how digital commerce may function. Traditional payment systems require human identity verification, making them unsuitable for autonomous machine-to-machine transactions. Crypto wallets have emerged as the leading candidate to serve as 'machine bank accounts,' according to industry executives interviewed by CoinDesk.

Animoca Brands pivoted from virtual worlds to an AI-driven metaverse in May and announced an investment program of up to $10 million for developers building applications on its AI agent platform, called Minds. The move underscores how traditional crypto companies are repositioning for an agentic future where AI handles bookings, payments, scheduling and commerce without human intervention.

Analysis

"The future of the web is heavily agentic," said Yat Siu, co-founder and chairman of Animoca Brands, in a video interview. "Everything will be done by agents." He expects 50 billion to 100 billion autonomous AI agents to transact on the internet over the coming years.

Siu's vision centers on crypto wallets replacing traditional bank accounts for machine actors. "Crypto is the perfect machine banking system," he said, arguing that stablecoins or other crypto tokens — not conventional fiat currency — will power agentic commerce because AI cannot yet open bank accounts requiring human identity verification.

Erald Ghoos, CEO of OKX Europe, takes a different view on structure but agrees on the urgency. "There will be an AI currency coming," he said in a video interview. "This is not going to be fiat, for sure. It will be a stablecoin or some other crypto token, whatever this is going to be, that is going to be by far, by far the largest currency that this world has ever seen."

Ghoos predicts convergence on one "super currency" specifically designed for AI agents — though he acknowledges geopolitical complications. A USD-denominated stablecoin might work for American-linked agents, but Chinese AI systems may not adopt a dollar-pegged settlement standard. "It might be something more abstract," Ghoos said, describing a neutral machine currency untethered from any single nation's economy.

Siu, by contrast, does not see convergence on one dominant token. He believes agents could transact across thousands of tokens while handling complexity in the background for human owners. "The agent knows what to do," he said. "The human never has to focus his attention on a thousand tokens."

Key Numbers

- 50 billion to 100 billion: Yat Siu's projected count of autonomous AI agents transacting online in coming years

- $1.5 trillion: Juniper Research forecast for global agentic commerce revenue by 2030

- Up to $10 million: Animoca Brands' investment program for developers building on its Minds AI platform

What to Watch

Before autonomous payments can operate at scale, industry protocols must address trust, identity and authorization safeguards, according to Debo Sen, Citi's head of payments. She indicated such activity may first emerge in small merchant transactions before moving to higher-stakes business-to-business payments.

"To make an agent truly autonomous, you need a way for them to use and own money," Siu said. The infrastructure battle remains unresolved — Coinbase's senior managing director for international, Keith Grose, noted the industry is still competing over who builds and controls those payment rails. "The question is: who's going to own those rails, or will they be shared rails or permissionless rails?" he asked. "It's too early to tell."

The outcome will determine how agents pay across borders and which networks handle the projected $1.5 trillion in agentic commerce by 2030.