Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire (제레미 얼레어) stressed that there is no practical alternative to stablecoins for artificial intelligence agents to carry out economic activity in the future.

At the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, he said billions of AI agents would emerge within 3 to 5 years and take part in real economic activity. He forecast that the combination of AI and stablecoins would become an important pillar of the global financial system.

Cointelegraph reported on Jan. 23 that Allaire pointed to the need for a payment structure that existing financial infrastructure cannot handle for AI agents to operate autonomously on the internet. He said AI cannot open bank accounts or get credit cards like humans, and that legacy financial systems bound by country-by-country regulation and business hours cannot keep up with AI speed and scalability. He added that, in effect, stablecoins are the only means that operate at internet speed, cross borders instantly and enable 24-hour automated payments.

According to Allaire, AI rather than people is likely to become the main customer in the future payments market. He said only payment methods that are fast, automated and stable will survive in that market. He also forecast that stablecoins would sit at the center of such change.

This view is gaining broader support across the crypto industry. Binance co-founder and former CEO Changpeng Zhao (창펑 자오), known as CZ, also said in a recent interview that the base currency for AI agents would ultimately be cryptocurrency. He said AI cannot use bank cards or traditional payment networks and that a structure in which it pays and settles directly through blockchain is the most natural. CZ stressed that decentralised payment infrastructure is essential in an era when software entities, not humans, carry out economic activity.

Global big tech companies and major crypto firms are also accelerating moves to lead the AI payments market. Coinbase, the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, is developing an online payment protocol for AI agents called x402. It is designed to allow AI to automatically pay for services on the web or conduct transactions with other AI. Coinbase sees machine-to-machine commerce among AI agents becoming fully fledged through it.

Google has also entered efforts to build an AI payments ecosystem. Google recently unveiled the Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP, and began standardisation work so AI can make payments across various platforms and services. This is seen as a move based on an environment in which AI goes beyond a simple information-processing tool and acts as an economic agent.

The industry sees this trend as an opportunity to expand stablecoin use beyond personal remittances or exchange payments into core infrastructure for an AI-based economic system. Dollar-pegged stablecoins are being assessed as suitable for AI agents to use for automated contract execution, service purchases and data-usage fee payments, given their low price volatility.

⚡️NEW: Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire says stablecoins are the only system that can support billions of AI agents transacting at scale. pic.twitter.com/Evt5PWY3Le