What will be the next trillion-dollar currency? The answer, according to crypto executives interviewed by CoinDesk, might be: not a stablecoin, and it may not even have a name yet.
As AI agents become autonomous economic actors, they will need to pay one another. Juniper Research forecasts that agentic commerce could reach $1.5 trillion by 2030. But the core question remains: what will agents pay with? Traditional payment systems require human identity verification—an AI cannot open a bank account.
Yat Siu, chairman of Animoca Brands, argues that crypto wallets are the “perfect machine banking system.” He predicts that 50–100 billion AI agents will be transacting in the coming years, and they will use crypto tokens—without any need to converge on a single token, as agents can autonomously handle thousands of different tokens in the background.
Erald Ghoos, CEO of OKX Europe, agrees on the urgency but offers a different perspective: “There will be an AI currency that emerges. It’s not fiat. It’s going to be a stablecoin or some crypto token, and it will be the biggest currency the world has ever seen.” However, he acknowledges geopolitical hurdles: U.S. agents might use USD-pegged stablecoins, but Chinese AI systems are unlikely to accept a payment standard tied to the U.S. dollar. The solution could be a “neutral super-currency” unattached to any national economy.
Debo Sen (Citi) and Keith Grose (Coinbase) raise questions about infrastructure: who will own the payment rails? Will they be shared rails or permissionless rails? It is still too early to tell.
This debate goes far beyond a technical puzzle: it calls into question the very nature of money in the age of AI. The next trillion-dollar currency may not be something we are familiar with—and it could be born from the needs of machines, not humans.