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Key Takeaways
- Yat Siu expects 50-100 billion autonomous AI agents to begin transacting online, needing crypto wallets instead of bank accounts.
- Executives agree agents need crypto rails but disagree on whether one “super currency” or thousands of tokens will dominate.
- Trust, identity and authorization infrastructure remain unsolved before agent-to-agent payments can scale, Citi’s Debo Sen says.
Animoca Brands Chairman Yat Siu expects between 50 billion and 100 billion autonomous AI agents to begin transacting online in the coming years. Siu and other crypto executives agree those agents will need crypto-based payment tools rather than traditional bank accounts. They disagree sharply on whether agents will settle in a single dominant currency or spread transactions across thousands of tokens.
Animoca Bets Its Business on an Agent-Driven Internet
Siu’s forecast is not a side comment. Animoca pivoted its business from virtual worlds to an AI-driven metaverse in May and has since committed up to $10 million to an investment program for developers building on Minds, its AI agent platform, according to the company’s website.
Siu argues the metaverse may stop being a place people visit and instead become a background layer where agents handle bookings, payments and scheduling on a person’s behalf.
That shift raises a practical question for Animoca and the broader industry: what currency will agents use to pay each other. Siu said the answer is not conventional banking. Siu said in a video interview:
“The future of the web is heavily agentic. Everything will be done by agents.”
Executives Agree Agents Need Wallets, Not Bank Accounts
Siu said traditional financial institutions are not equipped to serve autonomous software. Banks require human identity verification to open an account, a step no AI agent can currently complete. He argued that a crypto wallet solves that problem directly, letting an agent hold and move funds without a human intermediary.
Erald Ghoos, chief executive of OKX Europe, reached a similar conclusion from a different starting point. Ghoos predicted agent-to-agent payments will eventually be handled by what he called a single “super currency” built specifically for machines, rather than by existing fiat money. In a video interview, Ghoos said:
“There will be an AI currency coming. This is not going to be fiat, for sure.”
Animoca and OKX Disagree on Whether One Currency Wins
Where the two executives split is on concentration. Siu does not expect a single settlement currency to dominate. He said agents could transact across thousands of tokens while shielding their human owners from that complexity, since the agent itself decides which token to use for a given transaction without requiring the person to track each one.
Ghoos takes the opposite view, arguing that a fragmented system of thousands of tokens is less likely than convergence around one widely used currency, though he said it remains unclear whether that currency will be a stablecoin or something else entirely.
A Dollar-Pegged Standard Faces Geopolitical Resistance
Ghoos said a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin makes sense for agents operating on behalf of American individuals and businesses, but he questioned whether that logic extends globally.
He raised the possibility that AI agents operating in China would resist using a dollar-linked token, just as the United States would likely resist a yuan-denominated stablecoin becoming the default settlement currency for global AI commerce.
Ghoos said geopolitical and economic concerns tied to any single national currency point toward something more abstract: a neutral machine currency not controlled by one government’s monetary policy.
Trust and Infrastructure Remain Unsolved Before Agents Can Pay at Scale
Debo Sen, Citi’s head of payments, said the currency question is secondary to a more immediate one: whether the infrastructure exists for agents to transact without a human approving each purchase.
Sen said industry protocols still need to establish trust, identity verification and authorization standards before autonomous agent-to-agent payments can run without oversight. She said this kind of activity is more likely to appear first in small merchant transactions, with higher-value business-to-business payments coming later.
Juniper Research has forecast that agentic commerce could generate $1.5 trillion globally by 2030, though that forecast does not specify which currency or currencies agents will use to transact.
Keith Grose, Coinbase’s senior managing director for international, said the more consequential fight may be over who controls the payment infrastructure agents rely on, rather than which currency they settle in.
According to him, it remains too early to tell whether that infrastructure will be built on shared, permissionless rails or controlled by a smaller set of providers.
