Copyright forbes
Decentralized finance agents can do everything on-chain – trade, lend, borrow, earn – without asking anyone's permission. But the moment they need to interact with the real economy, they're stuck. Traditional banks can't process AI agents as customers. They require human or corporate entities behind every account. The banking system simply has no framework for software-as-customer. The ideal deployment for AI agents is highly specialized, which means thousands of them, each optimized for specific tasks. Imagine needing to give 1,000 agents access to traditional payment rails. What are your options? Route everything through a single corporate account? That creates massive bottlenecks and compliance nightmares. Have humans open accounts that agents could use? That's a massive security risk and likely violates terms of service. Try to register each agent as a business entity? Legally impossible, because agents aren't legal persons. Agents can't provide driver's licenses or utility bills because they're software. Meanwhile, corporations and professional investors are ready to deploy thousands of agents to analyze markets, execute trades, and coordinate operations. They want in on DeFi yields. But they can't even open basic bank accounts for their agents. Stablecoins fix this. Transacting on public blockchains provides payment rails and value storage that translate to the real world. While cryptocurrencies swing 20% daily, stablecoins maintain dollar parity on those same blockchain rails. Agents can onboard instantly and don’t require bank approval. Powered by stablecoins, they get crypto's technical advantages (instant settlement, programmable money, global reach) without the speculation that makes automation impossible. Fireblocks’ survey of payments leaders found 49% of institutions already use stablecoins for payments. Critically, the top driver cited wasn’t cost but speed of settlement, which is exactly what agents need. Cross-border merchants are bypassing legacy rails by routing value via stablecoins on public blockchains because settlement can happen in minutes instead of days. MORE FOR YOU Among stablecoins, USD Coin and Tether USD are the clear leaders. USDC is widely viewed by enterprises as the favorable choice thanks to its audited reserves and regulatory compliance. USDT offers deep global liquidity and broad reach, especially in emerging markets. The Paperwork Problem Current know-your-customer regulations require a legal person with a birth certificate, social security number, and physical address behind every account. Even if you tried to open accounts under a corporate umbrella, most banks limit sub-accounts and require individual authorization for each. Want to deploy specialized agents for treasury management, risk analysis, and execution? Each would need its own budget controls, audit trails, and operational independence. The math doesn't work. After the Coinbase breach in May exposed millions of users' data, we saw what happens when you centralize identity information. French authorities have arrested dozens of criminals involved in kidnapping schemes targeting crypto holders identified through leaked KYC data this year alone. The more accounts you create, the more attack surface you expose. Banks know how to deal with humans and corporations. They have no framework for software that needs to move money but has no physical address, no board of directors, no human representative. The system wasn't built for this. Volatility Kills Automation Try running a business when your treasury swings 20% daily. Every transaction would need hedging strategies. An agent might calculate a profitable arbitrage opportunity, but by execution time, price movements could flip profit to loss. The computational overhead of constantly recalculating for volatility consumes resources that should focus on actual strategy. No CFO will approve agent operations when the budget looks like a roller coaster. “Volatility isn’t a bug in crypto, it’s the cost of having a free market for value discovery. The challenge is designing systems that can operate around that volatility, not avoid it,” said Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana. This volatility isn't going away, because it's what traders want. These are speculative assets, after all. Agents need boring, predictable values to function. They need to know budgets stay valid, contracts remain fulfillable, operations can proceed without constant recalibration. Instant Economic Actors Crypto wallets solve the identity problem through mathematics. Generate a keypair, get an address, and that's your economic identity. But identity without money is useless. This is where stablecoins complete the equation. An agent can generate its own wallet, receive stablecoins to that address without KYC, transact immediately with predictable value, and build an on-chain reputation through its transaction history. A company can deploy 10,000 agents in minutes. Each gets a unique wallet address, receives its stablecoin budget, and starts operating. The agents become economic actors the moment they're deployed. Standards Make It Work Coinbase's x402 standard embeds stablecoin payments directly into HTTP requests. When an agent hits a paywall, it doesn't need special wallet software or authentication. It simply attaches a signed USDC payment to its request header and continues. AWS, Anthropic, and Circle collaborated on the x402 standard, which Coinbase introduced in May 2025 as part of its initiative to make stablecoin payments a native layer of the web. The protocol re-uses the long-dormant HTTP 402 “Payment Required” code to let agents, apps, and APIs send USDC as part of ordinary web traffic. This unlocks instant monetization for APIs, automatic resource procurement, and true agent-to-agent commerce. An AI agent can now autonomously purchase compute power, access premium data feeds, or hire specialized services, all within standard web interactions. This also means agents can hire other agents. A treasury management agent brings in specialists for analysis, risk assessment, execution, all transacting directly. The friction that made complex operations expensive just disappears. Small businesses can deploy automation previously reserved for enterprises. A five-person team can run operations that once required hundreds of employees. The moats protecting incumbent businesses are draining. New Economics Emerging On-chain reputation systems let agents build trust through performance. Every transaction creates an immutable record. Good agents attract more opportunities. Bad ones get filtered out. In 2026, every major bank will look into offering stablecoin services. Bank of America and Goldman Sachs are exploring joint stablecoin operations, The Block reported. Companies using agent automation will dominate their industries. Those still processing paperwork will wonder what happened. By 2030, agent-to-agent commerce may dwarf human-initiated transactions. Markets could operate primarily between software entities, with humans setting goals but not touching execution. Traditional payment rails will seem as antiquated as paper checks. Crypto is going to become less about crypto and more about AI infrastructure powered by stablecoins. Every business will need agents. Every agent will need stablecoins. Editorial StandardsReprints & Permissions
