Crypto’s infrastructure era arrives, with AI agents poised to reshape

For years, the crypto industry’s biggest challenge has been finding users beyond traders. Now, some of its largest companies think they’ve found them in AI agents.

Although speculation still underpins much of crypto’s business, companies are trying to build a second growth engine by turning agents into users of crypto wallets, stablecoins and payment networks.

For example, this summer, Kraken said it’s rebuilding its app to be able to give users access to AI agents capable of continuously monitoring markets, identifying investing opportunities and executing trades in real time. Coinbase launched a new tool that will allow agents like ChatGPT or Claude to execute crypto trades using natural language instructions. And in May, Circle announced a strategic expansion with its home-grown Arc blockchain, which is designed to be infrastructure for the agentic economy, where AI agents handle more of the operational and contractual work currently managed by humans.

The bet marks a big shift for an industry that has spent much of the past decade trying to convince consumers that crypto would be a better form of money than traditional currencies, or a more efficient way to move it than traditional transaction rails. AI agents may be the first users that naturally need what crypto was built to provide, the thinking goes. Unlike humans, agents are built to operate online, which makes digital wallets, programmable money and always-on payment networks more of a technical requirement than a behavioral shift.

“Anyone [can] have an isolated account inside their main Coinbase app that they can just give to an agent,” Lincoln Murr, AI product lead at Coinbase, told CNBC of the new Coinbase for Agents experience. “You can imagine this doing all sorts of things on your behalf — whether it’s trading or rebalancing a portfolio to your specifications, whether it’s paying for premium information like access to S1 funds to help you make trading decisions. The whole idea is to give agents access to money, and through that financial independence, improve their set of capabilities to pretty much anything on the internet.”

Crypto’s bridge to AI

The overlap between crypto and AI has pushed stablecoins, the more practical back-office players that have historically kept the crypto casino running, to the front of the conversation.

Unlike bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, which have fluctuating prices, stablecoins are designed to maintain a fixed value and are thus widely viewed as more practical for payments. And because they can move around the clock and be programmed directly into software, they offer infrastructure that AI agents can use without relying on banks or card networks.

“Conventional banking systems are really poorly suited to real-time agent-to-agent, machine-to-machine commerce,” said Joseph Chalom, CEO of the ether treasury firm Sharplink. “The reason why this is becoming a bit of a crypto story is not that the primary thing that’s going to be exchanged is crypto….