It’s hard to think of two sectors more prone to hype than blockchain and artificial intelligence. That’s why any pitch that touts crypto and AI is likely to feel as compelling as a Mexican timeshare presentation. Still, it’s hard to shake the feeling that, in the long term, these two frontier technologies will come together, and recent initiatives by Stripe, Circle, and Coinbase point to one way this could happen. Here is how Bloomberg sums up the companies’ efforts to use stablecoins to challenge the credit card industry:
The stablecoin industry is now positioning agentic payments, high-frequency, low-value transactions between software agents, as a use case to justify the entire infrastructure buildout... [There is] a use case where the technology’s advantages over cards aren’t incremental but structural. That gap has left the industry searching for its next growth narrative, and AI agents are fast becoming a key part of that story.
To put this more plainly, the future of online shopping will involve a lot of bots carrying out small transactions, and paying each other via low cost crypto rails—a better arrangement than asking Visa and Mastercard to handle all this. Or at least that’s how the Stripes and Coinbases of the world see it.
But will this world of AI agents carrying little purses of crypto actually come to pass? Bloomberg sounds a cautious note, pointing out that the current volume of stablecoin-powered agentic commerce is barely a blip in a global e-commerce market that is growing to nearly $7 trillion a year.
The overall field of AI-driven commerce is still nascent, though, and it’s worth recalling how, in 1995, e-commerce was insignificant compared to brick-and-mortar shopping. These things have to start somewhere.
One reason that crypto-powered agentic commerce could catch on is because the internet’s current payment regime remains clunky. This reflects how, in the early days of the Internet, developers failed to build out a protocol called 402 that was intended to be a native payment layer for the web. This is why today we’re often stuck pulling out credit cards to conduct even the most basic transactions online.
Likewise, the current version of the internet still hasn’t figured out a viable system of micropayments. It is hard for coders to purchase tiny amounts of important data, or for news readers to pay a dollar or two to read an article online, without considerable friction. It would have been simple enough for Apple or Google to build digital wallets directly into their web browsers, but that never happened.
That’s why the sudden emergence of both stablecoins and AI agents offers the opportunity for a payments do-over. How exactly this might happen remains to be seen and, as Fortune has reported, crypto players and the likes of Visa are increasingly working together—meaning that, for now at least, the coming era of agentic AI commerce will rely on both legacy systems and blockchain.
The upshot is that, as with so much else involving AI, trying to predict crypto’s role in it is challenging at best. Right now, it all resembles the parable about blind men who had encountered an elephant for the first time, and tried to use their sense of touch to identify it. Each could discern a part of what they were trying to understand, but no one was sure how it all fit together.
Jeff John Roberts [email protected] @jeffjohnroberts
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