There’s a strong case for AI and crypto—but you have to squint to see it

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?........

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