Do AI Agents Dream of Crypto?

Science fiction has long inspired how we imagine the future of technology. Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? asked us to consider the humanity of machines. Today, a new question emerges: Do AI agents dream of crypto? The rise of artificial intelligence agents - autonomous digital entities capable of making decisions, negotiating, and transacting on our behalf - has opened the door to a new era of agentic commerce. In this emerging economy, intelligent agents will shop, contract, and pay for services autonomously. But for this vision to become reality, the underlying payment infrastructure must evolve. And here is where crypto becomes indispensable to launching agentic commerce.

I define agentic commerce as the autonomous execution of economic transactions by AI-powered agents. Imagine your travel agent is no longer a human or even a website, but an AI system that can evaluate thousands of flight and hotel combinations in seconds, compare loyalty program benefits, and negotiate package deals, all without you lifting a finger. This agent can make decisions on your behalf, and will work with other agents to implement the decisions. The building blocks for this shift are already here. Agentic commerce will be mainstream soon, given that generative AI has advanced to the point where natural language interfaces can make agents intuitive, API-driven services allow agents to tap into e-commerce, logistics, and banking platforms, and both consumers and enterprises are pushing for frictionless transactions.

Autonomous agents are already embedded into consumer applications, enterprise procurement systems, and even healthcare scheduling. As billions of micro-decisions and transactions shift from humans to agents, the volume of agent-driven commerce will dwarf today’s e-commerce. McKinsey estimates AI could add up to $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy, and I believe agentic commerce represents one of the most powerful mechanisms for realizing this value. But for it to flourish, agents must be able to transact fast, cheaply, and globally, something today’s financial rails struggle to deliver.

Payments are the lifeblood of commerce. Yet, the existing financial system (outside of crypto) still operates like it’s the 1970s: settlement occurs in batches, cross-border transfers take days, and fees pile up at every intermediary. Making changes to this system is nearly impossible and very expensive because the underlying mainframe infrastructure and software is over 50 years old. This friction is an acceptable nuisance when humans transact, but it becomes an outright barrier when machines need to transact with machines. Agentic commerce requires real-time, low-cost, programmable settlement. An AI supply chain agent negotiating a just-in-time shipment will not tolerate a three-day ACH settlement window. Nor will a personal AI assistant accept paying $25 for a cross-border remittance.

Crypto provides the ideal solution to this friction. The best blockchain networks today can settle transactions in seconds with instant finality. Stablecoins allow agents to transact seamlessly across borders, sidestepping correspondent banking bottlenecks. Transaction fees can be measured in cents, or fractions of a cent. Smart contracts allow agents to embed business logic directly into payments, such as releasing funds upon verified delivery. In short, crypto enables agents to pay each other in real time, at scale, and without intermediaries siphoning off value. Just as the internet needed TCP/IP to become ubiquitous, agentic commerce needs crypto rails to be viable.

For agentic commerce powered by crypto to scale, several major developments must occur. First, more blockchains must meet enterprise-grade requirements. They need to scale to tens of thousands of transactions per second, never go down, and offer instant finality with robust security. Some networks have achieved this; others are making progress, but more work is needed to meet the demands of always-on, agent-driven commerce.

Second, wallets must become seamless and invisible. No consumer will want the hassle of managing private keys or struggling through on-ramps and off-ramps. Wallets must remove any crypto complexity, offering user-friendly interfaces, social key recovery mechanisms such as DeRec, fee abstraction, and integration with existing financial tools.

Third, agents need guardrails. Unchecked autonomy could lead to runaway spending or malicious exploitation. To prevent this, agents will need decentralized identities linked to human owners, allowing users to set spending rules, permissions, and limits. Agents will operate on-chain with constrained autonomy, free to transact within boundaries but always accountable to a human-defined trust model.

Finally, financial institutions will require trust, security, and fraud protection to be rebuilt natively on-chain. Chargebacks, fraud detection, and compliance systems must be reimagined with smart contracts that enforce escrow, trigger insurance payouts, and provide programmable chargebacks automatically. By embedding trust into the protocol itself, the system can achieve both security and efficiency without replicating the inefficiencies of today’s intermediated systems.

Financial institutions stand at a crossroads. On one side lies the familiar world of batch payments, walled gardens, and human-mediated processes. On the other side lies a future where autonomous agents transact continuously in real time, across global networks, using programmable money. Big merchants are already experimenting with AI agents and crypto-native payments. If banks and financial institutions fail to act, they risk being bypassed in the next wave of commerce infrastructure.

To prepare, institutions should explore stablecoins or tokenized deposits as the natural entry point for machine-to-machine payments. They should evaluate blockchain networks on throughput, finality, atomic settlement, uptime, and developer tooling. They should experiment with smart contracts to replicate services like trade finance, escrow, and insurance on-chain. They should investigate emerging standards such as MCP, x402, and Google’s A2A and AP2 protocols. And they should partner with innovators in AI and crypto to build pilot projects that test agentic commerce use cases. For executives at leading financial institutions, the mandate is clear: begin the journey now. Just as banks eventually embraced the internet, those who lead in agentic commerce will shape the financial rails of tomorrow.

AI agents are not science fiction; they are here. They will soon transact, negotiate, and execute on behalf of billions of users and enterprises. But for this economy to function, it needs crypto: fast, cheap, and programmable digital money. The question is not whether agentic commerce will happen, but whether financial institutions will embrace it or be left behind. Do AI agents dream of crypto? No, but if we want them to transact on our behalf, we must ensure they can pay with it.

The future of commerce is unfolding at machine speed. Now is the time for financial leaders to step in, experiment, and shape the rails of this new economy.

About the Author
Article authored by Marc Vanlerberghe, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, Algorand Foundation