Crypto Companies Bet AI Agents, Not Humans, Will Be Their Next Customers

After more than a decade spent trying to convince ordinary Americans that Bitcoin is money and blockchains are better than Visa, crypto's biggest firms have a new target customer: software.

Coinbase, Kraken and stablecoin issuer Circle are all building products aimed at AI agents, the autonomous programs that can browse, negotiate and execute tasks without a human approving every step, according to CNBC. The idea is that if agents are going to transact on the internet around the clock, they need money that moves around the clock too, without relying on banks or card networks.

Coinbase has launched a product called Coinbase for Agents, which lets AI systems like ChatGPT or Claude execute crypto trades using plain-language instructions instead of code. Lincoln Murr, Coinbase's AI product lead, told CNBC the goal is to let anyone spin up an isolated account inside the main Coinbase app and hand control to an agent. He said that could mean the agent rebalances a portfolio, pays for premium market data like access to S1 funds, or performs other financial tasks on a user's behalf.

Kraken is taking a similar approach, rebuilding its app this year to give users access to AI agents that continuously monitor markets, identify opportunities and execute trades in real time, per CNBC's reporting. Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin, announced in May a strategic expansion of its Arc blockchain, which it is positioning as infrastructure specifically built for what the industry calls the "agentic economy."

Why stablecoins, not Bitcoin, are the real story here

Bitcoin's price swings make it a poor fit for anything resembling commerce. Stablecoins, which are designed to maintain a fixed value, are the part of the crypto stack actually being pitched as payment rails. Because stablecoins can move around the clock and be programmed directly into software, backers argue they're a more natural fit for machine-to-machine payments than traditional rails tied to banks or card networks.

Joseph Chalom, CEO of ether treasury firm Sharplink, told CNBC that "conventional banking systems are really poorly suited to real-time agent-to-agent, machine-to-machine commerce." He added that the crypto angle isn't that crypto itself is what's being exchanged, but that "stablecoins and smart contracts allow AI agents to send payments and settle transactions ... automatically, without requiring human oversight."

Circle's CEO, Jeremy Allaire, told CNBC that adoption of Arc for agentic activity "drives the adoption of our stablecoin network [and] will continue to expand the network effects we have," which he said would grow both the amount of USDC in circulation and the transactional activity tied to it. He also noted banks building tokenized deposits could build on top of Arc, using USDC as an interoperable rail.

The skeptical case CNBC's reporting doesn't fully resolve

CNBC's own reporting notes that whether new agent demand for crypto actually materializes "remains to be seen." The industry's argument is that agents represent a technical requirement rather than a behavioral shift, since they operate online constantly. But that's still framed by the industry itself as a bet, not a settled fact.

There's also a basic trust question the reporting doesn't dig into: who is liable when an autonomous agent makes a bad trade or gets defrauded by a malicious counterparty agent? Coinbase's Murr describes handing agents "financial independence," but independence cuts both ways. An agent with wallet access and no human in the loop is also an agent that can lose money at machine speed, with no pause button.

What's actually new versus what's marketing

Crypto has floated "real world use cases" before, and most of them, from remittances to gaming to NFTs, never scaled the way the industry promised. AI agents are a genuinely different pitch because the demand, if it materializes, comes from software rather than consumer adoption, which has been crypto's chronic weak point.

That said, the idea that agents "may be the first users that naturally need what crypto was built to provide," as CNBC frames the industry's thinking, is still a hypothesis, not a proven market. CNBC's reporting notes this shift is unfolding in the middle of a crypto bear market, with bitcoin's price sitting more than 40% off its prior peak and speculative money chasing other opportunities like tech IPOs, prediction markets and perpetual futures. The reporting also notes the stablecoin race has been heating up since the GENIUS Act regulatory framework passed a year earlier, with traditional financial firms increasingly wanting to issue their own stablecoins rather than relying on third-party issuers like Circle.

Until agents are actually moving meaningful volume on these new products, and until it's clear whether traditional financial infrastructure can match what stablecoins offer without the crypto label, this remains an industry placing a bet on its own most convenient story.