Crypto bulls say AI agents will make stablecoins the default payment layer

Visa and Coinbase are preparing for an internet where AI agents make payments without humans. Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong predicts there will soon be more AI agents than humans making transactions, and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao has gone further, saying agents will make one million times more payments than people, all in crypto.

The vision is machines paying machines thousands of times a second for fractions of a cent. Part of the case is technical: banks require identity verification that software cannot provide, while a crypto wallet only needs a private key—no KYC, no compliance review, no waiting.

The other half is economic: agents execute tasks by calling dozens of specialized APIs in a single session, and each call may be worth only fractions of a cent to cover GPU compute, real-time data, web scraping or hiring sub-agents.

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