There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear. With apologies to Buffalo Springfield (and later Public Enemy), those lines neatly sum up the latest crypto trend: companies building tools to power stablecoin-wielding AI agents. It’s a lot to get your head around, but the basic idea is this: In the future, we will all be deploying AI agents that don’t just communicate, but engage in online commerce on our behalf—buying our concert tickets, say, or locking up a hotel reservation.
I first encountered this idea last year when Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong told me that soon our AI agents will be carrying little purses filled with crypto—an odd but vivid image that has stuck with me. Since then, companies have been galloping to make this happen.
The latest example is Cloudflare, which manages a hefty portion of the web’s traffic, and this week announced “a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin, the NET Dollar, to help propel the future of AI-driven finance on the internet.” This comes after Google released a new AI payments protocol with partners like Coinbase and Amex that will include support for stablecoins. And then there are startups like Circuit & Chisel, founded by Stripe vets, and PayPal-backed Kite, which are also designing protocols for agentic payments.
As I said, there’s something happening here. The issue, though, is what exactly these companies are building, and who—if anyone—will end up using it. Yes, it’s early days and protocols have to come before applications, but it would still be helpful to see examples of ordinary consumers deploying these cash-carrying bots for everyday activities.
The easy scenario to envision is consumers giving their agents bags of stablecoins, and sending them off to negotiate and buy a pair of sneakers or something. But would this be something most of us would need? Or would it, like so much in crypto, just be an element of blockchain friction layered on something that works pretty well already?
To be fair, companies are already teasing some more tantalizing possibilities. Those include the idea of using AI agents to carry out micropayments such as purchasing a news article behind a paywall or buying a snippet of data from LinkedIn. Likewise, the parents among us would relish the idea of an agent we can trust with personal data that could sign up our children and pay for sports teams and summer camps.
We discussed all this at Fortune Crypto and concluded that this fusing of stablecoins and AI agents is the future, but that it’s too early to say what shape that future will take. It’s like trying to predict in 2008 what applications would come to populate the iPhone’s App Store, or the parable of the blind scientists and the elephant—each touching a leg or a trunk, but unable to understand how it all fits together. It may take five years or more until we know.
And speaking of stablecoins, make sure to check out the latest edition of Crypto Playbook where Leo talks with business professor and crypto OG Austin Campbell on where it’s all going. Thanks for reading and, as always, we’d love to hear your thoughts.
Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts
DECENTRALIZED NEWS
Wen Kraken IPO? Crypto companies of all sorts are going public, including some obvious D-listers. But what about Kraken, one of the industry’s most respected brands? A new profile reveals the company has just raised $500 million en route to its 2026 IPO. (Fortune)
Leverage for all. The crypto scene is getting more speculative than ever before thanks to the arrival of perpetual futures, or “perps,” on U.S. shores that let anyone make levered, rolling bets of up to 100x. (WSJ)
“Reversible” transactions. Circle is exploring a system to reverse transactions, potentially using its Arc blockchain. The idea for the concept, which has long been heresy in crypto circles, is make the crypto experience more akin to traditional banking. (FT)
Insider trading is (still) illegal. In August, Fortune reported on suspicious share price pops at firms right before they announced crypto treasury buys. The SEC and FINRA are investigating the phenomenon. (WSJ)
Everyone got rekt this week to the tune of $300 billion—that’s how much markets shed amid a brutal sell-off that tanked Bitcoin around 5% and sent Ethereum below $4,000. (Bloomberg)
MAIN CHARACTER OF THE WEEK
The main character this week is Tether’s photo-shy chairman Giancarlo Devasini who, per Bloomberg, is poised to have a net worth of $224 billion thanks to an impending deal to sell 3% of the company for $15 billion to $20 billion. That would be good enough to make Devasini the fifth richest person in the world, ahead of Binance’s CZ, and behind some guys named Musk and Zuckerberg.
MEME O' THE MOMENT
This tongue-in-cheek meme of crypto people having no idea something is illegal comes as the SEC investigates insider trading at DATs—a reminder that, even in the Trump era of regulation, there may still be such a thing as white-collar crime.
