AI Agents Could Become Crypto’s First True Mainstream Users

For much of its history, the cryptocurrency industry has struggled with a simple problem: most people who use crypto are traders.

Despite years of promises about decentralized finance, digital payments, and blockchain-powered applications, speculative trading has remained the dominant source of activity and revenue for many crypto companies.

Now, some of the industry’s largest players believe they may have found a different kind of user altogether: AI agents.

The idea is increasingly shaping strategy across major crypto exchanges, stablecoin issuers, and blockchain infrastructure companies. Rather than trying to convince billions of humans to change how they handle money, the industry is betting that autonomous software agents may naturally require the tools that crypto networks were designed to provide.

From Human Traders to Autonomous Agents

The shift is already becoming visible.

This summer, Kraken said it is rebuilding its app to support AI agents capable of continuously monitoring markets, identifying opportunities, and executing trades in real time.

Coinbase has launched Coinbase for Agents, a system designed to let AI assistants such as ChatGPT or Claude execute crypto trades and payments using natural-language instructions.

Meanwhile, Circle is expanding its Arc blockchain, which it describes as infrastructure for an “agentic economy” where AI agents handle operational and contractual tasks that are currently performed by humans.

These initiatives suggest that crypto companies are no longer viewing AI as merely a productivity tool for employees. They are increasingly treating AI agents as potential economic actors that may need wallets, payment rails, and programmable money of their own.

Why AI Agents Might Need Crypto

The logic behind the strategy is straightforward.

Humans already have access to:

bank accounts,
credit cards,
payment apps,
and established financial networks.

AI agents, however, are native to the internet. They operate continuously, communicate digitally, and may need to send payments, receive funds, pay for data, or settle transactions without human intervention.

That makes digital wallets, programmable money, and always-on settlement networks less of a behavioral change and more of a technical necessity.

Lincoln Murr, Coinbase’s AI product lead, says the goal is to allow users to create isolated accounts inside the Coinbase app that can be assigned to an AI agent.

Such an agent could potentially:

trade cryptocurrencies,
rebalance portfolios according to predefined rules,
purchase premium research or market data,
pay for APIs or cloud services,
and interact with other software systems on behalf of the user.

The broader vision is to give AI agents limited financial independence, enabling them to perform a much wider range of tasks across the internet.

Stablecoins Move to Center Stage

The growing overlap between AI and crypto has pushed stablecoins into the spotlight.

Unlike Bitcoin and other volatile cryptocurrencies, stablecoins are designed to maintain a relatively fixed value, typically pegged to the U.S. dollar. Because they can move 24/7 across blockchain networks and be programmed directly into software, they are increasingly viewed as a practical payment layer for autonomous systems.

Joseph Chalom, CEO of ether treasury firm Sharplink, argues that traditional banking infrastructure is poorly suited for machine-to-machine commerce.

Bank transfers often involve:

business-hour restrictions,
settlement delays,
geographic limitations,
compliance friction,
and human approval processes.

Stablecoins and smart contracts, by contrast, can allow AI agents to send payments and settle transactions automatically without direct human oversight.

In this framework, crypto is not necessarily valuable because AI agents want to speculate on Bitcoin. It is valuable because stablecoins provide programmable digital cash that software can use directly.

Circle’s Bet on the Agentic Economy

No company has embraced this narrative more aggressively than Circle.

The issuer of USDC is positioning its stablecoin as programmable digital dollars for internet-native payments. If AI agents begin conducting large numbers of automated transactions, that activity could create a significant new source of payment volume for Circle that is less dependent on crypto trading cycles.

CEO Jeremy Allaire says adoption of the company’s Arc blockchain for agentic applications would strengthen the network effects surrounding USDC by increasing both the amount of stablecoins in circulation and the transactional activity flowing through the network.

Importantly, Circle is also trying to position Arc as infrastructure that banks and traditional financial institutions can build on top of, allowing tokenized deposits and other digital assets to interoperate with USDC.

That reflects a broader trend: the competition in stablecoins is no longer limited to crypto-native companies. Since the passage of the Genius Act regulatory framework last year, banks and payment firms have shown growing interest in issuing their own stablecoins rather than relying entirely on third-party issuers.

A Different Kind of Crypto Adoption

If AI agents become meaningful users of stablecoins, it would represent a fundamentally different form of crypto adoption than the industry has pursued in the past.

Previous adoption narratives focused on persuading consumers that crypto was:

better money than government currencies,
cheaper payments than traditional networks,
or superior banking infrastructure for everyday users.

The AI-agent thesis avoids much of that behavioral hurdle.

Instead of asking people to abandon familiar financial systems, it assumes that new digital actors will emerge that need financial infrastructure built for software rather than for humans.

That could potentially create transaction demand that is more recurring and utility-driven than speculative trading activity.

The Timing Is Not Accidental

This strategic pivot is occurring during a period of relative weakness in crypto markets.

Bitcoin has been trading more than 40% below its October peak, and speculative capital has increasingly flowed toward:

technology IPOs,
prediction markets,
perpetual futures,
and other higher-growth opportunities.

At the same time, greater participation by institutional investors has made Bitcoin’s price behavior somewhat less extreme than in earlier crypto cycles.

Exchanges are also evolving beyond their original role as crypto-trading venues. Many are expanding into:

equities trading,
commodities trading,
payments,
banking services,
lending,
and broader financial infrastructure offerings.

The AI-agent narrative fits neatly into this transition because it emphasizes financial infrastructure and automation rather than pure speculation.

Agentic Trading Could Narrow the Gap

Executives argue that AI agents could also make sophisticated trading tools accessible to ordinary users.

Cameron Winklevoss, president of Gemini, says the barrier to building advanced trading strategies has historically been extremely high. Retail investors have lacked the resources available to high-frequency trading firms and proprietary trading desks.

Agentic trading systems could narrow that gap by allowing users to interact conversationally with AI systems that can analyze markets, generate strategies, and execute trades according to personalized instructions.

Kraken’s Kamo Asatryan says the company hopes its agentic trading platform will attract not only professional traders and institutions, but also everyday users who want help interpreting financial markets.

In that sense, AI agents may serve as a new interface layer for investing, potentially making complex financial tools more accessible through natural-language interaction.

From Crypto Casino to Financial Infrastructure?

Whether this vision succeeds remains uncertain.

Several major questions remain unanswered:

Will AI agents actually generate meaningful transaction volume?
Will enterprises trust autonomous software with financial authority?
Can stablecoin networks scale to support large-scale machine-to-machine commerce?
Will regulators permit widespread autonomous financial activity by AI systems?

Even if the broader agentic economy develops slowly, the effort itself reflects a notable maturation of the crypto industry.

The focus is shifting from:

meme coins,
speculative token launches,
and short-term trading frenzies,

toward payments, settlement infrastructure, automation, and software-driven economic activity.

As Asatryan put it, “The fun casino days of bitcoin are over.”

Volatility will likely remain part of crypto markets, but the industry is increasingly trying to build utility that exists independently of speculative price swings.

The emerging bet is that crypto’s first truly mainstream users may not be consumers at all. They may be AI agents that need wallets, stablecoins, and programmable payment networks in order to participate in the digital economy.

If that happens, the next phase of crypto adoption could look far less like a trading boom — and far more like invisible financial infrastructure powering autonomous software systems behind the scenes of the internet.

Source: CNBC interviews with Coinbase, Kraken, Circle, Sharplink, and Gemini executives, company announcements, and industry reporting

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