Artificial intelligence brings to light a problem that until now did not exist in the digital economy: how to give a software agent the ability to autonomously purchase the services of another software agent?
A few years ago, the question would have been a laughing matter, but today it could nevertheless become one of the most strategic issues of the next decade. As autonomous agents gain execution capacity, they no longer simply search for information, write documents, or analyze data, they begin to make decisions, select suppliers, consume services, and, gradually, complete transactions.
This development gives rise to the need for a monetary infrastructure adapted to machines.
For several years, stablecoins have been primarily associated with crypto markets, but thanks to AI, could soon find much wider use. For a growing number of players in the technological ecosystem, they now appear to be the most credible candidate to become the native currency of the agent economy.
Payment remains the missing link in the agent economy
The system now reaches its limits when an artificial intelligence agent must make a purchase. Software now knows how to perform complex actions, but when it comes to paying for a service, data or a computing resource, human intervention often remains essential. This constraint raises a new question for the digital economy: how to allow software to purchase the services of other software?
The global payments infrastructure was designed for humans, credit cards, transfers or direct debits assume the existence of an account holder, explicit validation and a relatively limited volume of transactions.
Except the agent economy operates according to a radically different logic, tomorrow, an agent could buy a few seconds of computing from a GPU supplier, temporarily access a specialized database, pay another agent for a specific task or acquire a financial report for a few cents. He could repeat these operations several hundred or several thousand times a day.
In this context, the cost of the transaction sometimes becomes higher than the value of the service purchased. The problem is no longer technological, but becomes economic.
The unexpected return of micropayments
Since the dawn of the Internet, micropayments have been an unrealized promise. The idea was simple: allow a user to pay a few cents to access an article, a video, data or a specific functionality, despite numerous experiments and deployments, the model never found its market.
Fees associated with traditional payment networks made these transactions unprofitable. Above all, users were not willing to manually validate dozens of daily purchases of a few cents; the arrival of agents completely changes this equation.
Unlike people, software does not suffer from any decision fatigue; it can instantly arbitrate between several offers, optimize its spending in real time and carry out a large number of microtransactions without generating friction.
For the first time since the appearance of the web, micropayments have a natural user, artificial intelligence.
Stablecoins meet precisely this need
If stablecoins are now attracting the attention of the technology industry, it is not mainly for their financial characteristics, but for their architecture.
They allow very small amounts to be transferred at low cost, on a global scale and in a programmable manner. They operate continuously, regardless of banking hours or national borders. They can be integrated directly into applications and automatically controlled by software.
This convergence explains why several major technology players are starting to view stablecoins as an essential component of AI infrastructure.
OpenAI, Anthropic and Stripe converge on the same problem
However, the companies concerned do not have the same professions. OpenAI develops assistants capable of carrying out increasingly complex tasks. Anthropic is building an ecosystem of agents capable of interacting with external tools. Stripe and Paypal are interested in how these agents can make payments.
But all gradually converge towards the same question, how to allow software to exchange value with other software? Because payment ceases to be a separate stage of reasoning but becomes a component of the decision-making process itself. This development heralds the emergence of an economy in which agents negotiate, buy and sell digital services autonomously.
A new generation of fintechs is getting ready
Everyone will understand that this transformation opens up a considerable market. While fintechs of the last decade have built services aimed at individuals and businesses, a new category of players is beginning to appear: financial infrastructures for agents.
Companies like Skyfire are developing financial identities and payment systems specifically designed for autonomous software. Others work on budget management, expenditure authorizations or the control mechanisms necessary for the use of funds by agents.
In Europe, companies like Fipto or AllUnity are already building payment infrastructures based on stablecoins which could become essential building blocks of this future economy.
If the market is still embryonic, its direction nevertheless seems increasingly clear.
A strategic battle for control of the AI economy
Stablecoins could become for the agent economy what Visa and Mastercard were for e-commerce or what AWS became for the cloud.
The challenge is to control the transactional layer of an economy potentially composed of millions of software agents carrying out billions of daily exchanges.
This perspective explains the growing interest of Stripe, Coinbase, Circle, Visa, Mastercard but also of many regulators.
Europe is also watching this development carefully. After letting the United States dominate artificial intelligence models, the cloud and computing infrastructures, it could hardly accept the emergence of additional dependence on the monetary layer of the digital economy.
One of the next big battles in AI could therefore not only be played out in data centers or research laboratories, but in payment systems that will allow machines to exchange value with each other.
To be continued tomorrow, our article on how China is building the financial infrastructure of the post-dollar world
